Maya is much loved for inviting and challenging students to learn more advanced asanas in a safe and playful way, breaking them down to make them more accessible to a wider group of students. As someone who could not even touch her toes when she started into yoga, she is living proof in the transformative power of the practice.
Maya Georg is a disciple of Swami Kailashananda (Yogi Gupta) and Swami Chetanananda. She received her spiritual name “Maya” from Yogi Gupta in 2005. Although the name Maya can be taken to mean “illusion” or “magic,” Yogi Gupta explained to her that Maya also means “divine manifestation” and that is her essential nature as well as the goal she must achieve through her yoga practice.
Her other teachers are Dharma Mittra and Swami Jnanande. Dharma Mittra, called “the greatest living hatha yogi in the Western hemisphere” by Yogi Gupta, has been a great inspiration to many yoga practitioners and teachers. Maya has been studying with Dharma Mittra for years and he is the biggest inspiration to her method of teaching and practicing asana. Swami Jnanade led Maya to Yogi Gupta and has been tutoring her in raja and jnana yoga for several years. Both are fellow disciples of Yogi Gupta.
Maya Georg has studied yoga since 1999 and teaches in an attempt to further her own practice by learning from her students. “Every time someone asks me a question about yoga, I always learn from it. It doesn’t matter how simple or esoteric the question is. It’s why I teach.”
Maya founded Sani Yoga in Albuquerque, New Mexico in 2009 where she also served as an adjunct professor at the University of New Mexico. There, she taught hundreds of students in yoga as well as conducting her own yoga teacher trainings which left a lasting legacy of highly skilled and authentic teachers.
She has taught in New York City, sometimes substituting Shri Dharma Mittra’s classes. She has also taught classes in Washington DC, as well as workshops in Boston and Miami. She’s worked with students as young as 4 years old to 95 years old, performers of Cirque du Soleil and expectant mothers. The settings in which she has taught is just as varied as her student base, teaching in NYC public schools, yoga studios, universities, gyms and the conference rooms in office buildings.
Now in Portland, OR, she continues to teach private lessons and workshops all over the United States. “Every opportunity for me to teach is really and opportunity for me to learn. I am so blessed to be able to do what I love and share it with so many that are just as passionate.”
Styles practiced :
Bhakti, Hatha, Kids, Postnatal, Power, Pregnancy, Senior, Vinyasa,