Angela Farmer

She and her life partner Victor Van Kooten teach regularly in the United States, and run immersive courses on Lesbos in Greece four times a year.

[3] In her teens, she had surgery to cut several nerves, leaving her with reduced sensitivity to touch and "intense and chronic pain".

[1] She tells how in the late 1970s she visited a Hindu temple near Orissa that was adorned with sensuous sculptures of female figures.

From then on, she taught a form of yoga free from the rigidity of Iyengar's style with its predefined "postures",[1] losing most of her students in the process.

Angela's father contacted the German padding manufacturer and became the first to sell "sticky mats" to yoga practitioners.

[15] Farmer uses imagery, intentionally fluid movements and conscious breathing to explore what in her view is the prana energy that animates and guides the body.

Claudia Cummins, in Yoga Journal writes: "Ask devoted students to describe Angela Farmer's teaching, and they'll offer words like freedom, empowerment, surrender, and transformation.

[2] Carolyn Brown, in Yogi Times, writes that a yoga class by Farmer and Van Kooten gives no clue to their training under Iyengar, as their style has evolved away from his strictness into a "more organic, self-expressive and self-healing way of practicing".

[19] According to Wildcroft, the post-lineage yoga teachers Uma Dinsmore-Tuli and her partner Nirlipta Tuli are among those inspired by Farmer's teaching.