Tiffany is in the yoga pose Utthita Trikonasana, extended triangle pose. She is wearing a mustard yellow cardigan, dark pants and white sneakers. She is standing on the Tessellated Pavement at Eaglehawk Neck, Tasmania /lutruwita. She looks to the sky

YOGA STORY is the online home of Tiffany Hambley, an Iyengar Yoga teacher and writer based in Sydney, Australia.

How things began

Here’s a little about me: I grew up here in Sydney, then I spent time living in Beijing and Hong Kong, and now I am back in Oz, but forever changed by that time in Asia.

I love what yoga has done for me, inside and out, over time.

I also love language and ideas. I love big-picture questions: why are we here, what are we doing, how do we know stuff (DO we know stuff?!), and what are we each going to do with what the poet Mary Oliver calls this “one wild and precious life”.

Yoga connects us to all these things, and it does so through the practical, material reality of the body.

My yoga study and lineage

I am a Certified Iyengar Yoga teacher. Iyengar Yoga is a authentic and traditional yoga lineage with strong ongoing ties to India. It requires lengthy study, practise and dedication to become an Iyengar Yoga teacher. It can be a fiery process, and is not for the faint of heart! This method springs forth from the deep wellspring of BKS Iyengar.

Creativity and yoga

In addition to teaching yoga, I am also a writer and a teacher of writing. I hold an MA (Creative Writing) from the University of Technology, Sydney. I have previously taught writing at UTS and at UNSW.

I love examining the creative intersections between writing and yoga — and creative life and yoga. The parallels and the criss-crossings are profound.

The effect of yoga

Yoga is an oceanically deep and wide subject. It is a discipline, a science, an art and a philosophy. It is an honour to study it, dive into it, practise it, teach it.

Yoga has offered me: physical change, greater integration of self, coming home to my own self and being more at home in my own skin, a sense of community, a feeling of constancy, a place to return to and from which to begin again and again, afresh each time.