ABOUT
I'm Gem Maryan.
I teach yoga, train yoga teachers and offer massage, online and from my studio at Dess, near Aboyne on Royal Deeside. My work is for yoga teachers who want more depth and better questions in their teaching, and for anyone looking for a considered, steady practice.
I hold E-RYT 500 and YACEP status with Yoga Alliance. I've practised for over twenty years, taught since April 2011 and trained more than seventy Yin teachers since 2018. I'm completing an 875-hour yoga therapy diploma, working towards certification with the International Association of Yoga Therapists (C-IAYT).
My teaching began on a Bikram training in Los Angeles in 2011. In 2014 I did a 200-hour training that included Mysore Ashtanga, and later a 300-hour. Along the way I've studied with Sri Sharath Jois, Phillippa Asher, Hamish Hendry, John Scott, Noah Maze, David Swenson, Sarah Hatcher, Paul Grilley and Bernie Clark. For many years I taught full-time in Glasgow, where I co-founded Finnieston Yoga Shala and taught Ashtanga, Yin and Mysore-style classes.
My own practice has changed over those twenty years, from daily Ashtanga as a discipline to Ashtanga and Yin practised with less rigidity, and that change shapes how I teach.
I teach asana as a set of possibilities, with as much attention on strength as on mobility, and on how one body differs from the next. Each student remains the authority on their own experience.
My teaching draws mainly on Samkhya philosophy and Patanjali. Physiology and nervous system science come in to support that, studied critically, as different maps of human experience. Polyvagal theory is one of those maps, and I teach it as a working theory.
With teachers, I'm after greater knowledge, better questions and more confidence in your own teaching.
Online, under Space Between Breaths, I run the 50-hour Yin Yoga Teacher Training, Maps of Experience, Practice Labs and 1:1 mentorship for teachers, and I write on Substack. Here in Aboyne there's Turiya Yoga Massage, and one-to-one yoga in my studio at Dess or online.
After twenty years, I don't think yoga has given me a neat set of answers. I'm rather glad about that. That's where the practice remains alive.
Begin with the body. There are more than seventy full-length practices in the free library, and the newsletter brings new writing, practices, research and occasional invitations to study together.
