Norman Blair

A practice of stillness: held with precision, offered without dogma.

Approach

Three threads sit at the centre of Norman’s teaching: accessibility, openness, and inclusivity. He treats the practice as something that should meet the practitioner where they are, not the other way round –– props are welcomed, adaptions are encouraged, and the room is shaped so that no body or background should ever apologise for itself.
Norman is non-–dogmatic by design. Where some teachers tighten the rules, Norman widens the doorway. Theory is offered alongside enquiry; poetry sits next to anatomy; meditation threads quietly through the practice rather than being bolted on at the end. Students often describe leaving his classes feeling both met and changed.

Yoga is a beautiful way of being –– it welcomes you back to your body, releases habitual tension, and encourages a greater focus and quality of mind.

Early years

Norman came to yoga as a way to experience perhaps less drama and more ease; he was taken to his very first yoga class in 1991 by a friend who thought that it would be good for him. His early years were spent in the Ashtanga tradition, where the daily discipline of the Mysore room shaped a body that would later turn, with deliberate slowness, toward stillness.
Since 2013, Norman has taught more than 80 of the five-–day Yin courses (including seven for the Shala School) and has trained more than 1000 yoga teachers in this practice

Training & influences

Norman’s practice has been shaped less by a single school than by a long conversation with teachers whose work has stretched and steadied him in turn –– the rigour of Ashtanga in one hand, the receptivity of Yin in the other, with Buddha-–Dharma meditation running quietly beneath.
From the Ashtanga lineage came the discipline of returning to the mat day after day; from Sarah Powers and the wider Yin tradition came permission to slow down and to listen; from years of Buddha-–Dharma practice came a steadier interior, the kind that lets a teacher hold a room without needing to fill it. The thread between them all is enquiry: how practice meets a life, how a life meets a body, and what becomes possible when neither is rushed.

Teaching today

Today Norman teaches classes, workshops and teacher training across the UK and internationally, and offers supervision for yoga teachers navigating their own paths. At the Shala School, he leads the five-–day Yin Yoga Teacher Training, a course he has been running since 2013, and which has become a rite of passage for so many teachers wanting to bring Yin into their work.
In 2016, he published Brightening Our Inner Skies: Yin and Yoga, a book that holds the same warmth and clarity as the room he teaches in –– practical where it needs to be, spacious where it can afford to be.

My approach is about enabling accessibility, encouraging acceptance and deepening awareness.

Specialisms

Yin Yoga · Ashtanga Yoga · Buddha-–Dharma Meditation · Teacher Training · Teacher Supervision · Yoga & the Nervous System