Simon Borg-Olivier

Simon Borg-Olivier is not easy to categorise. Maltese-born, Australian-raised, he has been a yoga teacher for 25 years, but he can also lay claim to being a research scientist, a physiotherapist and a university lecturer.

Borg-Olivier has studied many forms of yoga and has been taught by BKS Iyengar, K. Pattabhi Jois, TKV Desikachar and Shandor Remete. In 1990, Borg-Olivier co-founded Yoga Synergy, which blends Iyengar, Ashtanga Vinyasa and Tibetan yoga styles with Western physiological knowledge, and is now one of the most well-known yoga schools in Australia. He lives in Sydney with wife Vitoria and children Amaliah and Eric, and practises yoga on Bondi Beach as often as he can.  Interview by Liz Graham

Was yoga a part of your childhood?

My father told me how to hold my breath when I was six years old. He was an underwater diver, so he’d learned these exercises. Then when I was eight years old, an athlete called Basil Brown taught me the main bandhas. I learned by mimicking and practised this all through my teenage years. When I was 17 or 18, I met a Tibetan lama and spent a year visiting him every weekend, learning tantric yoga, which was very good.

You were once a fan of aerobics?

In my 20s, I thought that aerobics was going to keep me fit. So, for two or three years I ran back and forth in these aerobics classes, and did lots of gymnasium things, until I dislocated my knees and then got shin splints, lower back pain and knee pain from running across a hard wooden floor! My teacher at the gym suggested a funny stretch to do, which turned out to be a yoga pose, Supta Virasana. I asked if she had any more of these stretches, as they really helped my knees, and she said, “If you want more like that, you should come to my yoga class.” And so I did my first Iyengar class when I was 23.

Do you think Westerners need to rethink their approach to yoga?

Yes. Often people at the end of a yoga class feel in pain, but they’ll tell themselves that the pain is a good thing, because the next time they come to yoga they’re going to feel stronger, fitter, healthier. But they don’t necessarily feel good. What makes you feel good during yoga is the movement of energy and information through the body. You can get that connection, which is the essence of yoga, without having to be in pain, and in my experience you can actually get the strength and flexibility without having to go to these radical stretch-to-extremes positions. It’s a little bit slower, but you won’t have the risk of damage, of tearing, of tensing that people tend to have at the moment.

Why do you love doing yoga outdoors?

I see a lot of yoga teachers, who, as soon as they become teachers, they lose their practice. They have to teach so much yoga to make a living– three, four classes a day. Each class takes an hour and a half to teach, but three hours of your time, which clocks up to nine hours in a studio, and you don’t really feel like spending more time inside doing your own yoga after that. So, rather than continue to practise inside a room, I take myself outside. I get some fresh air, I get some sunshine and I can still practise and get a new joy from it.

How do you balance your yoga practice and being a father?

I’ve become less flexible! But I’d much rather sacrifice my physical condition, the maintenance of it, in order to relate to my family more. When I was 30, I used to do six or seven hours of yoga practice every day. Now, I’m almost 50, and if I get an average of an hour to myself I think I’m doing ok. For me, my most important yoga is connecting with my wife, my kids, my parents, my students and my friends, and so that’s what I try to foster.