As part of our tenth anniversary celebrations, we’ve launched a blog series to commemorate and reflect upon the work of the LSE Faith Centre over the past decade. For the fourth blog in the series, Dimitris Thomopoulos shares the story of the Ashtanga yoga community which has been part of the Faith Centre for ten years.

For a university in the middle of a huge city, there is a lot happening on our campus. At LSE, I currently work in the department of Psychological and Behavioural Science (PBS), I’m also an EDI officer, and twice a week I teach Ashtanga yoga to LSE students and staff.

I started practicing in 2006 and completed my training in 2010, I spent about six years travelling to India for training and I became a full-time Ashtanga yoga teacher.

Ashtanga is a style of yoga which is considered more dynamic, because the movements flow together, and it focuses more on the link between breathing and movement than with precise physical alignment. It’s a well-established practice, with other more familiar types like Vinyasa or flow yoga originating out of Ashtanga.

Yoga was the first time I saw a world beyond thinking. Instead of being located in our mind it helps us listen to the body, and in some ways connect us to our instincts. We are in our heads a lot, as a society in general, but also as a social sciences university. In the PBS department, we often talk about the relationship between our bodies and minds, but it’s hard to find a space to really experience what that means for ourselves. Yoga helps us to be consistently present, and to try to find those answers within ourselves.

But I specifically love Ashtanga because everyone can do it. And that’s what I love about having regular yoga sessions here, because it means we can build a community that everyone can be a part of.

Bringing yoga to LSE

While I was working at the old Teaching and Learning Centre, now the Eden Centre, someone suggested I bring my yoga teaching on campus, so I spoke to a few people about looking for a space. The Faith Centre team thought it was a great idea and I loved the idea of having it at the Faith Centre just because is beautiful, with the stained glass, the wood, it feels like a spa, which is ideal for yoga. So we started there, and we’re still there ten years on. That wouldn’t have been possible without the continuous hospitality and welcoming attitude of the colleagues at the Faith Centre.

At first the class ran once a week on Tuesdays from 1.00pm – 2.00pm. After a year or so it became so popular we decided to add a second session on Fridays. The Tuesday yoga class has taken place at the same time and place every week for ten years – except during Covid-19 lockdowns when we moved online.

I have a counselling background and we were taught that consistency is crucial for any spiritual, mental health, and wellbeing practices. Often in therapeutic practices, it can be helpful to come to the same place at the same time. The same is true of yoga. But when the pandemic hit, this consistency was at risk.

At first, when everything closed, I thought the right thing to do was to stop teaching because the greatest risk was to our physical health. And, at LSE we were all so busy, there was no time to overthink things, we just had to do what we had to do, support our students and get our work done. So the yoga just stopped, we didn’t use Zoom, as it wasn’t very normal back then to jump on a video call and we weren’t used to it. I just wouldn’t have thought you can do yoga virtually, and I didn’t think it would go on so long. But quite soon after the first lockdown was implemented, people began to get in touch to say “please, run some yoga sessions, we need something to keep us sane”, and I realised I felt the same way. During that period it became an important anchor point for colleagues during the working week, particularly when we were working from home where the boundaries of being at work and not being at work were blurred, taking that one-hour break for yoga became even more important. Some participants said they only knew what day of the week it was based on the yoga sessions running.

Thankfully, we made it through the pandemic, and since then the classes have adapted to being hybrid. Where before I would have thought the face-to-face, community element of yoga is too important to put at risk by going hybrid, since Covid-19 I’ve realised that consistency and accessibility are as important and that community can be built and maintained in more than one way.

Yoga as a community

In general, these classes at the Faith Centre are a model for how I’d like to run all my classes. I think it is beautiful that people come to the Faith Centre purely by choice. Having a room full of people who step into this room because they choose to, not because it’s their job or their course, makes it extra special.

For yoga, isn’t about skill or who can do the most positions, it’s about community – bringing people together from different divisions and departments at LSE, any level of seniority, and all with varied expertise in yoga practice. Community-building happens here every week, where a diverse array of participants come together, shedding their titles and email signatures, or whatever might differentiate us all, for one purpose for one hour.

Yoga in a multifaith space

Sometimes people ask why yoga happens in a multifaith space. I would say, firstly, because the space is very beautiful, calming, and quiet, so it matches my kind of practice. Yoga sessions would be very different if I held them in the gym or in a random classroom.

Secondly, we remember that yoga is a practice rooted in the religious and spiritual, formed out of Hindu tradition, despite a lot of Western practices removing some of the more religious aspects.

And thirdly, there is something about the energy of this space that depends on the people using it. As a multifaith space, there are no hardwired insignia of any particular faiths, and so many different practices happen here every week, that’s a beautiful thing. It’s the welcoming in the space of a diverse array of energies, culminating into the single goal of just ‘being’.

If you ask me, the Faith Centre should be a blueprint for running community centres or interfaith spaces. Whether a person is religious or not, having a space dedicated to community building is crucial, especially somewhere like LSE, with a very diverse cohort of staff, students, and visitors. Community can be built in many different ways and while it can happen through department events, society events, and so on, there is something about having a space like the Faith Centre that welcomes everyone outside of their daily routine in a university. I consider that something truly special. Here is to ten more years!

Note: This article gives the views of the author, not the position of LSE Religion and Global Society nor the London School of Economics and Political Science.  

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