Rick Harvest

eading myself, and hopefully sometimes to others, to living with a greater degree of awareness and ease.

I have been practicing yoga on and off since the age of 18; my mother - who first attended yoga classes with the legendary teacher Margrit Segesman in the 1960s - took me as a teenager to classes, with the hope that yoga might help with me with the paralysing nerves that always crippled me when I  performed in public. (I was a pianist). But it wasn't until quite a few decades later and a number of major career changes that I really discovered and began to explore yoga more seriously. A really stressful job in arts administration took me to that 'edge' - which is when I looked through the yellow pages under meditation, and found Gita Yoga around the corner from the Arts Centre where I was working, and began attending classes. My background includes music, teaching, performing, marketing and arts administration. I have been privileged to work for arts organisations including Opera Australia, National Theatre London, BBC, Victorian Arts Centre & Melbourne Symphony. I left the Melbourne Symphony in 2000 to study yoga full time - initially at Gita Yoga (which turns out to have been the yoga school my mother had attended decades earlier many). 

Since then I have been incredibly fortunate to study with many wonderful yoga teachers - most notably with Donna Farhi, Paul Wooden, Judith Lasater, Richard Miller, and in Yoga Therapy with Doug Keller and with Phoenix Rising Yoga Therapy. In recent years I have developed a keen interest and have studied Somatics in the tradition of Thomas Hanna - with Martha Peterson, and have just completed her Level 2 Training.

What pulled me in the direction of Somatics in the first place was no doubt the fact that I have lived with constant daily back pain myself for most of my adult life. What keeps me studying and teaching Somatics is that so many people who I teach and who I know, live with pain themselves. Somatics is a magical and simple practice that teaches us how some control over this.

As a yoga teacher my aims are to achieve a fluid style, and to integrate the principles of body alignment and movement into the practice. It’s hard to not be passionate about yoga; my own personal experience with depression and anxiety over many years, and living with physical pain since I was very young, has proven to me the power that is open to anyone through a regular and committed practice.Rick Harvest is the founder of Harvest Yoga which began in 2003.