Angela Farmer (born c. 1939) is a teacher of modern yoga as exercise. She uses a non-lineage style that emphasizes the feminine, free-flowing aspect. She is known also as the creator of the first yoga mat.
Farmer was trained by the yoga guru B. K. S. Iyengar for ten years, becoming a senior teacher of his strict and precise Iyengar Yoga style. She became uncomfortable with this, and left to teach her own much freer style of yoga, admired by other yoga teachers. Her approach combines the use of imagery, fluid movements, and conscious breathing. She and her life partner Victor Van Kooten teach regularly in the United States, and run immersive courses on Lesbos in Greece four times a year.
Farmer was born c. 1939 and grew up near London, her father Richard Farmer being English, her mother American. In her teens, she had surgery to cut several nerves, leaving her with reduced sensitivity to touch and "intense and chronic pain". She studied physical education and dance in college. After college, she practised Sufism.
In 1967, working as a schoolteacher, she attended her first yoga class. Six months later, she met the yoga guru B. K. S. Iyengar. She studied under him for the following ten years, in London and in India,[1] becoming an Iyengar Yoga teacher.
While teaching Iyengar Yoga, Farmer became increasingly uncomfortable with its "relatively rigid “masculine” influence". She tells how in the late 1970s she visited a Hindu temple near Orissa that was adorned with sensuous sculptures of female figures. From then on, she taught a form of yoga free from the rigidity of Iyengar's style with its predefined "postures", losing most of her students in the process. Among the reasons was that the intense Iyengar Yoga practice had caused her menstrual cycles to stop.[2] The yoga teacher Richard Rosen describes Farmer's transformation from a "dyed-in-the-wool Iyengar-ite, trained by the Boss himself" to teaching a yoga of "free-flowing, serpentine-like, 'feminine' performances" as an "epiphany". The yoga scholar-practitioner Theodora Wildcroft, in her book on post-lineage yoga, states that Farmer's life and business partner, the painter and yoga teacher Victor Van Kooten,[3] claims to have been "seriously hurt" by Iyengar, and that both Farmer and Van Kooten were "blacklisted or denigrated" in some manner by Iyengar Yoga.
See main article: Yoga mat.
In 1967, while teaching yoga in Germany, Farmer created the original yoga mat, consisting of carpet underlay cut to towel size during yoga classes. She later returned home to London with the material. Angela's father contacted the German padding manufacturer and became the first to sell "sticky mats" to yoga practitioners.[4] [5]
Farmer teaches yoga in Yellow Springs, Ohio, and at other places including the Kripalu Center, Massachusetts and Harbin Hot Springs, California. Each summer she and Van Kooten teach yoga in their studio in the Eftalou valley in Lesbos in Greece. They began teaching together in 1984 and have continued to do so for over 25 years.[6] They lead immersive courses in yoga on Lesbos lasting two to three weeks, four times a year.[7] Farmer and Van Kooten call their approach "yoga from the inside out". Farmer uses imagery, intentionally fluid movements and conscious breathing to explore what in her view is the prana energy that animates and guides the body. Since refugees from Asia, the Middle East, and Africa have arrived in Lesbos, Farmer has taught yoga classes in the island's refugee camps, and trained yoga teachers for that work.[8]