east32_IngleBasWeb_Pp_135-139

INTERVIEW
Dona Holleman:
«Yoga c’est moi»
Bangkok-born Dutchwoman Dona Holleman has practiced yoga for 50 years.
a major role in its Italian development.
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She played
But she objects to the way it’s taught and
received in the West, where she says the practice exists to soothe egos and rein in waistlines.
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As a result, she’s created an approach that uses the creatures closest to her heart: Horses.
In her Normandie center, she tries
teaching students and visitors how the life
and movements of horses can teach people
how to live their lives better and more purely.
by Alessandra Garusi
hough Dona Holleman holds a Dutch passport, it is
Asia that most rears up in her past. She has practiced yoga for half-a-century, taught it for 45 years,
and written a book about it (“Dancing in the Body of
Light,” 2000). She moved to Italy in 1972, helping to introduce yoga to a country that at the time knew little
about it. “The only thing a teacher can do is to get people to stop calling her ‘teacher,’” she says. “You get to that
point by doing what you. If you want to progress in life,
anything is teachable, and all you see teaches you. A
horse can be a wonderful teacher. Rain can teach, so can
leaves. It depends on how you choose to see things. If you’re bored, you block yourself from taking anything in.”
Many of Holleman’s students have become instructors in
their own right, which makes her proud (though she refuses to acknowledge the “great teacher” label many
have bestowed on her).
“Now, I travel a lot less,” she smiles. “I can teach from
home. Move a little furniture and I can get 14 people in-
T
to the room.” She spends the first week in August teaching at the Epona Academy for Personal Development “La
Chevrie,” in Normandy, France, which she helped
found. When she’s not traveling, she lives in Soiano, near the verdant shored of Lake Garda.
“I have no ‘future plans,’ per se,” she laughs, “apart
from taking care of my animals, petting them, feed them,
nurturing them.” She has “Cisco,” a 22-year-old horse (“a
gentleman,” she calls him); a four-year-old pony named
Julius Caesar (“fluffy,” she smiles); two donkeys named
Suzy Wong (after a character in a 1950s movie) and Lulu Bel; cats Ricky and Lucy; and Bonita, a dog she picked
up from a local kennel. He love for animals, and horses
in particular, dates back to childhood. As a girl, she frolicked in rice and tea fields of in Thailand.
number 32 . october 2010 . 135
n many respects, Holleman’s life could make for
a movie in its own right. She was born in 1942 in
Japanese refugee camp in Bangkok in 1942 (editor’s note: during World War II, Thailand agreed to assist
Japan, resulting in the arrest of Allied nationals) to an Indonesian mother. Her father died in the camp, leading
the four-year-old Holleman and her mother to seek safe
harbor at the Eerde Estate in Holland, owned at the time
by Baron Philip van Pallant, a friend of Holleman’s mother. Situated in the middle of a forest, the castle itself had
a rich history. Van Pallant had deeded it to Order of Eastern Star in 1924, led by Indian-born philosopher and
spiritual leader Jiddu Krishnamurti (1895-1986). But in
1929, the 34-year-old Krishnamurti decided against becoming a guru in 1929 and dissolved the order. He continued teach at the estate until it was transformed into a
Quaker school, where Holleman’s widowed mother got
a job as a biology teacher. “I have a lot of memories of the
estate,” says Holleman. “I was the youngest child on the
premises, which made me into a kind of mascot.” She
roamed the woods and watched Quaker rites. “A typical
Quaker meeting called for silence while all the people
gathered around waited for divine forces to energize their
bodies. In fact, the term ‘Quaker’ derives from English
‘shaker.’” Watching these rites was the first chapter in
what would become a lifelong spiritual quest.
After life with the Quakers came time spent in Indonesia, where Holleman lived from ages six through 14. Immediately after World War II, the country, which had
long been a Dutch colony, was confronted by turmoil and
civil strife. Even before the end of the war, Japan had organized an independence committee, naming nationalist Sukarno to head it (early on, Sukarno had supported
the Japanese, which he later regretted). On Dec. 17, 1949,
following four years of war and negotiations, Dutch
Queen Juliana recognized Indonesian independence,
with Sukarno becoming the new nation’s first president.
Her mother felt more at home in Indonesia, where
she’d met and married her late husband. Holleman still
has vivid memories of growing up during those years,
above all because they put horses into her life. “There
was civil war going on, and soldiers were everywhere.
At night you could still hear the shooting. But as the conflict died down, the military tried to reinvent itself. One
officer, a Colonel Kriynders, built a horse stable. You
know how kids go crazy for ponies, and I was no differ-
I
136 . east . europe and asia strategies
ent.” Holleman and her friends saw Kriynders as kind of
guru. Her love for horses would stay with her always.
By age 23, Holleman had therefore already been exposed to four major religions, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, and Hinduism. As a result, she distanced from
any specific faith. “It is a paradox that on the one hand
religions lock you in a cage, on the other they encourage
you to liberate yourself,” she says. “What any human being should say is, ‘Like animal and plants, I am a child of
nature, of the universe, and therefore I can receive without intermediaries.’”
Dona Holleman with her animals.
She helped introduce yoga in Italy.
Krishnamurti, whom Holleman met for the first time
at 18, helped embodied this approach. “I want to teach
yoga,” she told Krisnamurti while visiting him at his
Swiss home. “If that’s the case,” he replied, “then you
should learn from the best — B.K.S. Iyengar.” In 1952,
Iyengar had met and befriended the famous violinist
Yehudi Menuhin, who arranged for him to teach in London, Switzerland, Paris and elsewhere. Iyengar. Credited with helping popularize yoga in the West – he was later named among the world’s most influential people by
Time Magazine — he by chance had an apartment not far
from Krisnamurti’s.
In 1964, Holleman departed for Bombay (now known
as Mumbai), where she became one of three Iyengar stu-
dents, and the only Westerner. She practiced with him
every morning. On weekends, he lectured about position
and technique. The work itself was intense. In six
months, she learned more than 200 asanas (positions)
that would take her 40 years to fully understand, digest,
and apply. “When I think of those days I see myself and
Iyengar as two fireballs that collided,” she says. “We both
had extremely strong characters, so we often argued. At
the same time we also shared deep understanding.”
In 1965, Iyengar published his first book, “Light on Yoga,” in which he explored the practice position-by-position. Yoga derives from ancient tradition that originated
with the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali in the second century
AD. A Sutra is literally a thread or line that holds things
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together. Metaphorically, it’s a formula designed through repetition to revolutionize
the perception of body
and mind. It can be applied and practiced
anywhere and at any
time.
Holleman returned
to Holland to finish her
training but returned
to India in 1969. This
time she worked in
Pune, which housed
the Ramatami Iyengar
Memorial Yoga Institute. On this occasion
The Tao reinforces yin and yang,
Iyengar had more foropposite but complimentary forces.
eign students and a
few Indians.
But she soon fell out
with him. “According to Iyengar, the body must adapt to
the asanas, and not the other way around. His idea was
that you start with the asanas and then move on to the
body. Instead, for me, it’s the body that comes first,” she
says. “He wasn’t about to take me seriously, let alone adjust. His macho Hindu background wouldn’t him even
consider the though. It was ‘My way or leave.’” So she
left. Her wish was to adapt ancient yoga to more modern
times and a different cultural context. After 1969, she returned to Pune only once, in 1972.
ers was anything but the easy choice. “The West
yoga embraced yoga in a very superficial way,”
she says, “and an egocentric one. It wasn’t about
love but about self. People practiced yoga in all kinds of
forms, but to save themselves. They wanted to stay young, to stop time. It was as if they wanted the world to
begin and end on their mat. " Holleman is candid and bitter about what amounts to a betrayal, at least from her
perspective. “The great lesson of yoga,” she continues,
“is that we’re all equal and should live in harmony. Yoga is intended to make us feel the union between human
beings and plants and stars and animals. Even Einstein
said humanity had to broaden the density of its love, not
H
138 . east . europe and asia strategies
shrink away from it.”
The idea of eating animal flesh, in the context of such thinking,
was unthinkable. A
chicken, a rabbit or
horse were, or should
be, on the same plane as
all other living creatures. “They are our
brothers, our friends.
Eating them is a sin against God!” she says.
Dona. All she’d learned
from the times she’d cavorted as a child in Thai
tea fields and studied
yoga on hot August
days in India suddenly
came together. “Being
involved with horses
wasn’t enough, not was
yoga. So I decided to merge them, hence Epona Yoga.”
The Romans picked up on Epona, which had emerged
from Celtic mythology. Epona was the goddess of horses
and mules. The cult tended to united people who had
moved west from the steppes of Asia. The term "pony"
comes from Medieval Latin, so does the “hypo” in “hypo-therapy,” with the prefix meaning “more.”
Says Holleman: “I’m indebted to my supreme masters:
Horses. They taught me — and continue to teach me —
to pay full attention to the environment around me.
There is a proverb that says, ‘Before a horse, a man is
naked.’ If you do something you don’t like you have to
look inside yourself, because that’s where you’ll find the
answers. Of course it’s hard to work on yourself all that
time. At the same time, it represents an opportunity to
grow. The way yoga is practiced in the West facilitates a
fiction. That fiction, in turn, is unacceptable to a horse.
A horse seeks truth. As such, the horse is a master. And
a master is a creature that lives totally in the present
without fostering any personal agenda...”
The Epona Academy for Personal Development “La
Chevrie” helps teach and develop this worldview, which
is Holleman’s. Some come for the yoga, having never ridden a horse. Others ride horses and seek a synthesis. She
Holleman with “Cisco,” one of her horses Her love for horses
dates back to time spent in Thailand when she was a child.
hosts guests of all ages, cultural backgrounds, and profession. She’s teaches her students both how to “read the
signs” that horses offer, and to create a “yoga-centered”
life. In essence, she applies Yin-Yang, where “yang” represents the part of people who wish to act positively on
the world in thought and deed, while “yin” is the receptor, the introverted part: the way the universe imprints
its inhabitants.
Other concepts come into play, including Taoism. She
applies “Wei-wu-wei” (doing by not doing) and “yan-t-
su” (internal action). Wei-wu-wei means moving in harmony with the forces around you — the antithesis, for
example, of applying body and soul to win material
goods. Yan-tsu, meanwhile, is identified as movement
based on internal energy that exists outside the context
of external forces or stimuli. The asanas then flow like
water, and action becomes itself.
Nature plays a central role in learning the meaning of
these instructions. “I’m not saying that we practice in
the rain,” she laughs. “But the stones are alive. So are
the clouds, the stars, the animals, and the trees. All is
alive and pulsating. Our bodies are alive. If you accept
that it’s easier to feel a connection with the forces of the
universe.”
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