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I am deeply committed to the practice and teaching of IYENGAR® yoga. I have been practising IYENGAR® yoga for 25 years, and teaching for 16 years (9 years of this as a level 3 teacher). I am 48 years old.
Yoga is the most significant thing in my life. Every day starts with yoga practice, and this informs everything I do, including my yoga teaching. Before having a child (and changing my surname from Lockyer to Golds) in 2020 I had been practicing many hours of yoga asana, pranayama and (mainly patanjali) yoga philosophy study (in sanskrit) each day for about a decade. More recently, the yoga of parenting has replaced some of my time on the mat. I have found the practice of yoga to be an ongoing process of finding a deeper and deeper stillness within, this inner peace inspiring one to look further into the stillness.
I know that some of my students do yoga for other reasons such as wanting to be flexible, wanting to change their bodies, wanting to look young as they grow older, and wanting to prevent injury and improve performance in sports. I have certainly heard people report having experienced all of the above benefits from practicing yoga. I, myself, greatly improved my rock climbing skills in my 20s and 30s through my yoga practice. However, the main reason I practice yoga is to find inner peace, and although I am happy for any benefits my students find from the practice, the main reason I teach asana, pranayama & philosophy is to aid my students in finding, within themselves, a deeper understanding of what it means to be human, and a deeper sense of inner peace.
Outside of yoga (if anything in my life could be "outside" of yoga), from our little flat, my partner and I consciously co-parent a 5-year-old whom we have spend a lot of loving time with, and only 2 days of nursery each week until age 5. I am a keen intuitive swimmer, practicing 7 different strokes regularly, and including some elements of underwater and artistic swimming. I taught maths in secondary schools for ten years, before going full time with yoga teaching, and I still enjoy co-running a small workers coop of maths tutors within a system I founded called All Teach Maths Tuition. You can download the chapters of my book Understanding Mathematics by Yogi Toby Golds here. At our maths club, we teach young people and volunteers to love and understand maths, manage their own learning, teach one another, and learn mindfulness, emotional intelligence, whilst developing their authentic voice and selves along the way.
I have been studying, and growing, around what I call IDEALS (Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, Anti-racism, Liberation-Learning and Soma-Safety) for a very long time. I began learning-for-self-change on feminism in 2020, and added the learning-for-self-change of white-racism and anti-racism since a calling on seeing Lynette Yiadom-Boakye's painting of a black man, "Coterie of Questions," in around 2018. More recently I have become a much more active LGBTQ+, and more specifically transgender, ally. My approach has become more and more intersectional/womanist/black-feminist and uses my experience of being raised poor and working class (despite going to University and holding a middle class role now) to find empathy for those who are oppressed. I try to take responsibility for where I hold power (eg as a man, as a white person, as a cis-het person), and use this power to be an ally to anyone in those areas, whilst recognising there are a mix of these dynamics in all people.
My qualifications
Introductory Teaching Certificate Level II in 2010.
Intermediate Junior Levels 1, 2 & 3 in 2015, 2016 and 2017 respectively (since a new teaching qualifications structure in 2020 this is now more simply called being level 3 teacher).
I have also held a regularly updated first aid qualification since 2010.
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