Mysore Style Practice
You must be familiar with Ashtanga Mysore Style for joining Grischa's retreats. This traditional teaching method from Mysore (South India) is the key component of Yoga teaching from our point of view.
A new understanding of Adjustments
Grischa is using the 1:1 teaching approach to help you grow in your own practice and to educate your inner teacher. His assists and adjustments are extremely precise. They are helping you to understand the meaning of a pose and how to remove obstacles on the path to learn it. The ideal adjustment awakens immediate insight into the internal nature of a posture and ultimately the meaning of Yoga practice.
You will see that forceful adjustments in Ashtanga are ineffective and harmful. They do not educate and oppose internal healing.
Learning new postures
Once you understand the core principles of good internal alignment you will re-experience all poses of your practice as fundamentally new. From that moment learning "new" poses becomes a lot easier when you see that they are all just variations of the same core principles of practice.
Healing your practice
Teachers have full responsibility for their students' health. Most injuries in Yoga simply come from misunderstandings about the nature of correct practice. As soon as such ignorance is removed, the body will no longer be strained (or even re-injured). The body will then heal, that is it's nature.
Typical unnecessary injuries
Due to the methodological approach of Ashtanga Grischa has become an expert in removing the causes of typical injuries that can be found in the Ashtanga series. With good alignment practically all injuries can be avoided.
How can I learn more about "Mysore Style Practice"?
Asana is incomplete with Pranayama, practice without good alignment is harmful, Yoga practice without knowing the “philosophy” has no orientation.
All components of Yoga practice need each other. Therefore all of Grischa’s Retreat intensives are as complete as they can possibly be.
Many practitioners today learn only fractions of Yoga practices, in almost all cases only about the asana layer. If you are lucky to even hear about the other (much more powerful) practices, you normally need to find different teachers for different topics. But that is very problematic.
There are for example only few philosophy teachers and those often times have no idea about pranayama or asana. The experience shows, that studying from different teachers is fruitless. The teachings are unconnected and often not based on concrete experiences. But theoretical Yoga knowledge is useless just like “practice” without knowledge is ridiculous.
As teachers we MUST know and practice all yogic components. And we MUST know the theoretical foundation of all practices.
That is how Grischa has learnt it from his teacher Richard Freeman. You know why there is no alternative to this approach once you have experienced the difference between a mere asana teacher and one who has done his or her homework.