ABOUT
I'm Gem Maryan.
I teach yoga, train yoga teachers and give massage, online and from my studio at Dess, near Aboyne on Royal Deeside. I've practised for over twenty years and taught since April 2011. I hold E-RYT 500 and YACEP status with Yoga Alliance, and I'm completing an 875-hour yoga therapy diploma, working towards certification with the International Association of Yoga Therapists (C-IAYT).
Yoga came into my life at nineteen, during pregnancy. 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. I've taught Yin since 2012 and have trained more than seventy Yin teachers since 2018.
For a long time my practice was discipline. Daily Ashtanga, working through third series. Then I had a nervous breakdown, and recovery has taken years and hasn't moved in a straight line. I couldn't discipline my way through it. What surprised me was that yoga stayed. My relationship with it changed, and I practise Ashtanga again now, with less rigidity, alongside Yin.
Caring for my father full-time taught me a lot about capacity: how much a person carries in an ordinary week, and what kind of practice still fits around it. When he moved into a care home nearby in October 2025, I felt I had room again, and for a while my trainings ran as Deeside Yoga Institute. This past year I've learned how much room I really have, and I've simplified everything back to my own name.
Those years changed how I teach. I'd rather walk alongside my students than stand above them. I offer poses as possibilities, I care about strength as much as mobility, and I pay attention to how one skeleton differs from the next. The student stays 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, and I study them critically, as different maps of human experience that can sit alongside one another without being treated as the same. Polyvagal theory is one of those maps. I find it useful, and I teach it as a working theory.
With teachers, I'm after greater knowledge, better questions and more confidence in your own teaching. I want you to understand more clearly why you teach the way you do.
Online, under Space Between Breaths, I run the 50-hour Yin Yoga Teacher Training, Maps of Experience (a 50-hour training in yoga philosophy, physiology and the nervous system), 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.
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