Mornings run 8:30 to 11:00 and are physical. Afternoons start at 16:30 and go inward. The hours in between belong to you, and the beach is five minutes down the hill.

You do not need an established practice to come. If you have never done a sun salutation, you will be taught one from the beginning. If you have been at this twenty years, there is more than enough here.

Ashtanga means eight limbs. Asana, the postures, is the third of them. The afternoon sessions take up what comes after.

Pranayama is breath practice. We work in the system Andrew learned from Śrī B.N.S. Iyengar in Mysore, and take up the eight classical kumbhakas, the breath retentions, from the Hatha Yoga Pradipika. Mudra is a seal, a way of holding the body that changes what the breath does. There is Thai body work in its four classical positions, so you leave able to give it as well as receive it. Philosophy runs alongside all of it, with chanting and sitting practice.

Everyone goes home with free downloadable PDFs of the Sankhya Karika, the Patanjali Sutras and the Bhagavad Gita, so the reading can carry on after the week ends.

None of this requires advanced practice, just sincere curiosity and willingness to learn the deeper, more internal aspects of yoga.

The yogashala, the room where practice happens, stands at the top of Tertsa and looks down over the valley and the sea, with the hills of the south coast on every side of it.

Nathalie and Andreas designed and built it themselves. Andreas is a master stone worker, a landscaper and a real artist, and the shala carries his ingenuity in every part of the design. There is nothing else quite like it.

Check in on the afternoon of Sunday, September 27. That evening at 19:00 we eat together in a tavern in the village. Check out is after brunch on Saturday, October 3. Six morning sessions and three afternoon workshops across the week.

Andrew directs Ashtanga Yoga Studio in Norman, Oklahoma, the first dedicated yoga studio in the city, open since 1999. He is a long-time student of Śrī B.N.S. Iyengar and of the Mysore tradition, the Nāthamuni Sampradāya, the lineage Śrī Kṛṣṇamācārya belonged to.

He first went to Mysore in 1990 and has gone back many times since, mostly to study with the senior Sanskrit scholars there. He read the Bhagavad Gītā with Śrī U.Ve. Prof. M.A. Lakṣmīthāthāchārya Swami over three and a half years, until his teacher died in 2021. He founded the Mysore Yoga Conference, and directed and produced the Mysore Yoga Traditions film. A second one, Kings and Yogis, is underway.

He has also studied magic for thirty-five years, most of it in his twenties, when he performed on the street across India and Europe.

In his teaching, philosophy and practice are one continuous study. That is what the afternoons in Crete are for.

The photographs on this page are Andrew's.