Each time I walked past the tea and coffee corner at Lendrick Lodge, where I was teaching a weekend yoga course, there was an animated buzz of conversation. During the weekend, several of the students told me that everyone was talking about the 'newness' of what I was teaching; for many it was different from, even diametrically opposed to, what they had been taught before. At first I was surprised at the strength of their reaction, and both surprised and amused that I had provoked such controversy! But it made me think again about the work that I have been engaged in for the past ten years or so of my life and that I have been so absorbed in that I had almost forgotten how 'different' it is.

I remembered the first time I went to work with Vanda Scaravelli at her house in the hills outside Florence. I had been invited by her to take lessons with her there after meeting her briefly in London. This was my first visit to Italy, I had spent the previous six weeks studying 'Teach Yourself Italian' and Vanda had told me not to practice yoga at all before I went but to rest as much as possible! Everything was so entirely new for me then that the moment of my arrival at her house is vividly and indelibly printed on my memory. I had flown to Pisa airport on a grey and cloudy late May day. I had taken the train to Florence station, found the number 7 bus which wound its way through the cypresses and villas up to Fiesole. At Fiesole I sat in the late afternoon sunshine opposite the Roman theatre and the Pizzeria Etrusca for about half an hour waiting for a taxi to arrive. Eventually I boarded a taxi and gave Vanda's address in my excited and hesitant Italian. We wound further into the hills, past groves of silvery olive trees with purple irises growing beneath them. When we reached the top of Vanda's unmade road the driver refused to take his car any further. I walked along the curving white track waiting for her house to come into view - a clump of cypresses, a simple stone farmhouse sitting comfortably, almost casually, in a landscape that was so perfect, so classically familiar yet so unreal that I almost did have to pinch myself to make sure that I was really there. I felt as if I had wandered inside the frame of a Renaissance painting!

A woman was sweeping the paving outside the house. She asked when I approached her if I was looking for 'la signora' and led me round to the back of the house which overlooked a terrace covered with shrubs and trees in terracotta pots and a view which dropped away towards Florence in the far distance. From inside the house I heard classical piano music. With some trepidation I knocked at the glass door of Vanda's room. The music stopped abruptly (it was Vanda who had been playing) and she came to the door, greeted me and took me by the hand. Her first words to me were 'It was a good idea of yours to come'! My trepidation vanished. From that moment on I felt love, certainty, a dropping away of tension I didn't even know I had, a deep sense of security which came from some source which wasn't so much in Vanda but something she seemed to be in touch with - and an immense feeling of gratitude. That gratitude has stayed with me to this day and I sometimes feel that my teaching is a way of repaying what Vanda gave me. But it's not a debt in the burdensome sense, just a desire to pass on an amazing secret.