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Black Lotus Yoga Studio

Black Lotus Yoga Studio is a beautiful and unique centre for learning Iyengar yoga. You don't have to be fit, strong, relaxed or even flexible - although you may end up that way!

Marrickville, New South Wales

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Sue-Ellen Kohler

Sue-Ellen Kohler

Sue-ellen Kohler is the director and founder of Black Lotus Yoga School. She has been teaching yoga for 20 years, and started practicing in 1986. Her teacher here in Australia is Peter Thomson, and she travels regularly to the school established by BKS Iyengar in Pune, India to study with the Iyengar family. Mr Iyengar, born in 1918, is still an amazing and inspiring yoga practitioner and teacher at the Institute.

Sue-ellen is also a dancer. Her early dance training was at the VCA in Melbourne and she spent the first 2 1/2 years as a professional dancer with ‘Tasdance’ in Tasmania. She worked with Dance Exchange for a year and over the next twelve years choreographed and performed new dance work in collaboration with all kinds of art makers – choreographers, composers, writers, filmmakers, dancers, improvisers, visual artists and actors.

Her performance work was premiered at The Performance Space in Sydney and toured throughout Australia and Asia. ‘Hybrid’, ‘BUG – Body Under Ground’, ‘Premonition’ and the films ‘’Vivarium’ and ‘Falling’ (with director Mahalya Middlemist) are among her best known work.

She was a director on the board of The Performance Space during the ‘90’s and was also a member of the Australia Council for the Arts, Dance Committee between 1994 and 1997.

Sue-ellen’s very first experience of yoga was as a 12 year old in Buderim, Queensland in the 1970s. Imagine - yoga poses on the carpet in the lounge room, with her beautiful Aunty Margaret teaching her in flowing muu muu, a family friend whose garden was full of magical spirits, and another who was a medium communicating with Sue-ellen’s own personal spirit guides, and even some excruciating moments on the local nudist beach. All contributed to an unusual and very entertaining entry into womanhood, and a first taste of ‘yoga’.

Sue-ellen moved to Sydney in 1985 as a young professional dancer from Melbourne to join Russell Dumas’s company ‘Dance Exchange’. She was performing with 'The Sydney Front' at Expo '88 in a public parade as a butterfly, when a fall from stilts crushed a vertebrae in her spine. This accident became an important catalyst for her yoga development, helping her to understand yoga’s capacity to heal on a holistic level.

When she had recovered enough from her injury, she began initial yoga teacher training with Martyn Jackson at the Australian School of Yoga in Bondi Junction, and began teaching there in 1999. She was one of the first teachers in Sydney to introduce ‘stretch’ classes to gyms as a form of extending yoga practice beyond the boundaries of yoga-specific school sites. She remembers having to convince ‘City Gym’ to add a stretch class to their timetable as yoga was not yet a part of gym culture. Now they have a dedicated yoga room. She was also well known for her classes for dancers at Sydney Dance Company in the early 90’s.

When Peter Thomson opened the Glebe Yoga School in 1993 Sue-Ellen began teaching there, and then continued when the school moved to East Sydney at the Sydney Yoga Space. When that school closed in 2007, she opened her own yoga and natural therapies centre in Enmore – Black Lotus Studios.

Sue-ellen became a certified Iyengar Yoga teacher in 1995, three weeks before the birth of her daughter, and she now has a Junior Intermediate - Level 1 certification.

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