:: September/October 2004 Volume 3/Number 5

Sydney Coale & Kevin Light

By Laura Shin

When Sydney Coale told Kevin Light that yoga would change his life, she didn’t know that that statement would end up changing hers too. That was eight years ago when the couple, who now teach flow yoga both privately and at studios in Santa Monica and the Valley, were actors and met in an acting class. Coale had been doing yoga for several years, and Light had worked in fields as varied as engineering and modeling.

‘I had a girlfriend and Sydney had a boyfriend, but she talked to me about how yoga would change my life. And I thought that was a pretty bold statement.” He laughs.

“She said it would find me a wife,” says Light. Eventually it did, and that wife is Coale. But their wedding five years ago is only the beginning of the story.

Since then, their lives have been filled with love – not just for each other but for what they do and for what they are learning. At any given time, they teach a combination of privates and public classes between 8-12 times weekly. In addition to small classes at their home studio, Tara Yoga, Light and Coale both teach at Santa Monica Power Yoga, and Light also has three classes at Black Dog Yoga in Sherman Oaks. In the past, they’ve also graced the schedules of centers like Y.M.I. (Yoga, Meditation, Insight), Brentwood Yoga and Yoga Works, which is where they completed their asana teacher training.

As they’ve moved studios, students like Liberté Sheldon, have followed. “They really bring all of themselves to the practice,” she says. “They’re knowledgeable on the spiritual side, but when they speak to you, they’re very real. They speak to you as your friend.”

That may be because they still see themselves as students. They have many spiritual teachers, from Aadil Palkhivala, an Iyengar teacher, to Jai Uttal, their harmonium instructor, to the Dalai Lama, to Jesus, to Ram Dass, to author Eckhart Tolle, to kirtan singer Krishna Das. Their garden even has spiritual teachers, like a statue of Hanuman that reminds them to serve as selflessly as he served his master Rama.

They seem to channel that desire to serve in their classes. “The ego has to recede completely when you teach, which is a very satisfying aspect of teaching,” says Coale. “The most joyful occasions of teaching are when you, the small self, have disappeared completely.” Although they say that no one becomes a yoga teacher to be rich, they note that yoga teaching brings them endless wealth in the currency of joy.

Their classes use many avenues to bring people communion with the divine. They start or end their classes with the harmonium, because it’s an instrument that has its own breath, and during asana, they play music that has been screened to support the breath and still the mind. They also use the physical body as a way to create a meditative focus. “We do a lot of alignment points. I believe it brings people’s attention into their body, and that’s a meditation,” says Coale, joking that their ashtanga and Iyengar-influenced classes could be called “ashtengar.”

Light adds, “But the first and foremost thing is breath. The breath and the thoughts are inseparably linked. So you can slow your breath and slow the thought process.”

“What we teach is surrender,” he says. “How deeply can you drop into this moment? How rich can it become? And that’s how you come into peace with the rest of your life, not just when you’re on your mat before you get into Warrior II.”

Sounds like their teaching will change your life.

 

For more information go to
www.coalelightyoga.com or
email ceelight@coalelightyoga.com.