About The Teacher

Your teacher for this weekend of Yoga will be Shama Sara Palmer.

Shama first learned Yoga from her Yoga teacher mother, who taught her the power of the breathing practices of Hatha Yoga when she was a teenager.

After spending a lot of time travelling around the globe to places such as India, Japan, Thailand, Italy, USA, Canada and Bahamas, where she learned from and practiced many healing and spiritual traditions, Shama spent four years managing an integrative health clinic in central London.  Here she came across many chronically ill people, some who made recovery, some who did not.

Remembering the healing power of Yoga learned from her mother, Shama decided to deepen her understanding of Yoga so she might share it’s transforming and life-enhancing practices with others. She went to the Sivananda Ashram Yoga Retreat in Bahamas and took the teacher training course there, followed by the advanced teacher training course and other further intensive trainings. In between these trainings, Shama lived in the ashram in the Bahamas immersing herself in a Yoga life and learning much from the seniors teachers that she lived with there.  She also offered specialist programmes such as Yoga for Healing and Pain Relief, and Healing Power of the Breath.

Whilst there, she also commuted to and from New York for one year to study with Mukunda Stiles, a great teacher of Yoga Therapy and later became Yoga Therapist at the Sivananda Ashram Yoga Retreat. This training and experience has enabled her to teach with a sound understanding of how to adapt practices to suit particular body needs and limitations in class, and also to support people individually who are ill or in pain with specifically adapted Yoga practices.

Shama has also studied Ayurvedic Yoga with Dr David Frawley and Mukunda Stiles, and workshops with Max Strom, Roger Cole and Godfrey Devreux amongst others. She is trained in Yoga for the Heart (cardiac disease and cancer) with Nischala Joy Devi, pregnancy yoga, and some study of macrobiotics, with participation in macrobiotic health weeks.

When not teaching, Shama spends much time journeying more deeply into the fields of Yoga, Ayurveda and Vedanta, exploring their teachings for healing and transformation of the human body, mind and spirit. She also writes a regular Yoga for Health column in the Stratford-Upon Avon-Focus magazine.