Meghan Currie is gosh-darn likeable. She peppers her conversation with “do you know?” and you get the impression she really wants you to know what she's talking about.
Hanging out with a dog named Kiwi in Nicaragua; she spoke with us at length. She showed us her compassionate side, like when she stopped the flow of conversation for a moment to try to save a little green moth from a colony of ants. Meghan dreamt about cultivating a bug farm in BC and we think that she's surpassed that goal with her impressive yoga career that takes her around the globe.
Meghan, who wrote the bio on her website as a series of her “likes,” is passionate and inspiring. You’re just going to have to read more, cause we guarantee that you'll like her too…
How did you end up on this amazing round-the-world teaching gig?
It happened really organically. People were emailing me asking me to come to their studios and I slotted them in. Every single weekend I fly out to a different place in Europe. My last European tour was a little shorter, only a month and a half.
Is it hard to keep your own yoga practice when you’re on the road in such a concentrated way?
Yeah, it is, because the body reacts to being in airplanes. It’s hard to keep a consistent practice as I would have in Vancouver where I am so spoiled by saunas and sweaty classes. I’ve kind of shifted in my practice. I don’t practice the way I used to.
How so?
My practice is always changing. But it has changed in the sense that I’ve always listened to my body, yet the messages are even louder now. So the practice is not at all for me something that is consistent in what I do. It is medicine for the moment.
Do you believe we can become better yogis as we become older?
Yes! You get stronger, you are feeling more and you are moving slower. Everything becomes richer. It is beautiful to move slowly and have a different understanding coming through the practice. There is something so beautiful in growing older.
How did you get to where you are today – the Queen of Arm Balances?
When I was little, my mom put me in everything – soccer, gymnastics, dance, baseball, piano, swimming. That had a lot to do with flexibility – not just flexibility in the limits of the body space but flexibility in the mind. When you are that young and are thrown into situations that are very physical and leave a mental impression, it helps to develop a kind of flexibility that can be long-lasting.
This background led to your inversion-friendly practice?
I wasn’t doing handstands five years ago! This is the thing with the practice. It is listening. Something else takes over. It’s plugging into something bigger, truly. When I teach inversion workshops, it’s very, very technical. I’m so specific about alignment to the millimeter because it is very technical. We need that structure in order to plug into that thing that is bigger. They feed one another – you need both! You need the structure and the understanding of how to place your bones.
How did you establish your flowing style?
Everything that I am is a coagulation of all my experiences and all of the people I have met. It is also everything moving through me. Some days I flow and the articulation seems to move through me so beautifully, but sometimes when I listen, my experience in the moment is telling me to hold high plank.
Creativity does not give a consistent outcome. It is complex and in order to experience it, it has to be unknown, as it will be coming though in a spontaneous and unique way moment-to-moment. If I try to flow like I did yesterday, if I am holding that thought in my logical brain, then there is an expectation. If there is an expectation, then there is a barrier. If there is a barrier, there is a block. With the block, I am disconnected.
It's one of those things that is easy to talk about, but hard to bring into practice.
So hard to bring it into practice! We can intellectualize the f*@k out if it, you know? As we talk about it, we feel it, so we think we’re doing it. That’s a trick. That’s not the practice. That’s not the truth. The truth is in the sticky [situations] how to actually remember. The remembrance comes from this deep source inside that is hard to hear because there is so much other noise.
Catch a do-you-know moment with Meghan by checking out her adventure schedule here.
