Europe's strongest daily Mysore-style community, where authorised teachers run six-morning-a-week rooms and a serious cohort holds the practice.
Ashtanga yoga was born in Mysore, in southern India. On 11 August 1933 Tirumalai Krishnamacharya opened a yoga school in a wing of the city’s Jaganmohan Palace, and among his students was K. Pattabhi Jois, who had first met him at twelve. Krishnamacharya said the sequences came from an old text, the Yoga Korunta, later eaten by ants; that is legend, and Jois’s own son said Krishnamacharya created them. Jois opened his institute in Mysore in 1948. After the Belgian André Van Lysebeth trained with him in 1964 and printed his address in a book, Westerners began to come, and they still do. For the 2026 season at Sharath Yoga Centre, the family’s shala on the edge of Mysore, demand was such that places were allotted at random.
Learn to hold a six-mornings-a-week self-practice in Europe's strongest daily Mysore room.
Three rooms running six mornings a week, which is what a daily practice community looks like when it is real — the same faces before work, all year, rather than a course that ends. ⚠ Nothing outside those rooms establishes it. Stillpoint and Astanga Yoga London name their teachers on their pages; the site we link for Yoga Place is no longer theirs.
Living sceneWho teaches itTeachers, London Bridge: Emma. their teacher page ↗
A London Bridge studio teaching Ashtanga Vinyasa in the traditional Mysore self-practice style since 2009, with weekday early-morning in-person mentored practice and six-day-a-week live online classes.
Facts read on the school's own pages, 17 Sep 2026.
Who teaches itWeekday early-morning Mysore: Hamish Hendry · Weekday mid-morning Mysore, Saturday led, Sunday Mysore: Louise Newton · Weekday evening Mysore: Lauren Munday · Cover: Tom Norrington-Davies. their teacher page ↗
A central London shala led by Hamish Hendry, certified to teach Ashtanga since 2001, running a daily morning-to-evening Mysore-style self-practice program plus a monthly led primary series.
Facts read on the school's own pages, 17 Sep 2026.
The domain we link now belongs to a yoga studio in the old St John's Church at Clydach, in Wales. read on their site, 17 Sep 2026 ↗
A long-running Bethnal Green studio in East London offering traditional Ashtanga in both counted-led and daily morning Mysore self-practice formats alongside Hatha, Iyengar, and Vinyasa classes.
KPJAYI/SYC Authorisation (then Certification) — historically the rarest stamp in yoga · Certifying body: Sharath Yoga Centre (formerly KPJAYI) / Yoga Alliance
There is a real difference between a school that teaches you and a good-looking website, and too much of the internet is the second kind. Four instruments do the work, and every one of them is visible on the page you are already on.
If a place dodges these, that's your answer. It costs you nothing to ask, and it tells you everything.
This is the short version. The full method is here — the six questions, in order, for any craft anywhere.