Erich Schiffman, the founder of Freedom Style Yoga is known as the first teacher who gave us permission to find our own yoga.
Freedom Style Yoga offers three practices: meditation, asana/poses, and 'the rest of the time'.
Originally from Southern California, and as a student of B.K.S. Iyenar in London, Erich followed him and travelled to India to learn more from Iyengar.
Erich says, “I found his yoga style (Iyengar) to be most spiritual in a practical, grounded sort of way. The point of all the hard physical work is to get into a deep meditative state.” While learning to “play my edge” he states, through another yoga teacher (Joel Kramer), he further says, “It was a whole new way of doing yoga for me. It felt like the real thing, authentic, like the way the ancients probably practiced, and I was hooked immediately. I had finally ‘got how to do yoga.’ It finally became clear. It's internal.”
You can read more about Erich’s story here on his website. Erich’s website has not been updated in quite some time, years in fact, so I’m not quite certain if he is still teaching.
During my 2nd 200 Hour YTT our required reading and the training was based on Erich Schiffman’s book Yoga: The Spirit and Practice of Moving Into Stillness. It had not dawned on me until much later after YTT that this book was about “moving into stillness” as we mainly used the book to learn about asana and not really how to “move into stillness”. It just was not presented in that way. Now that I know this, the book has brought an enlightened sense of awareness to my personal practice and to my class teachings.
The asana presented in this book are the same asana as in any other yoga practice, the names may be different on a couple of asana and the cueing may be a different, but the asanas will be familiar to you.
*See Erich’s interview on the ‘Yoga Anytime’ video below
*See the Freedom Style Yoga practice with Ali McGraw with narration (cueing) from Erich.