I’m Alyson Tyler and I’m a qualified and insured yoga teacher and massage therapist offering yoga, meditation and wellbeing courses in Dumfries and online. I have been teaching yoga for over 17 years.

I live in Dumfries, south west Scotland and moved here from Wales where I’d lived for 20 years. Prior to that I grew up on the England/Wales border, but was born in Scotland – so I’ve come full circle! I’m very glad to be back in Scotland.

My yoga background

I have been practising yoga for over 30 years.

I first attended yoga classes in college in 1991 and continued throughout the 1990s and 2000s with different teachers at college and university. I began teaching yoga in 2008 and qualified with the British Wheel of Yoga (tutor Richard Adamo) in 2010.

The British Wheel of Yoga teaching is comprehensive and extensive and took three years. (I studied before the era of labelling the qualifications "200" or "500" hours.) It gave me an excellent basis on which to build and expand my skills. In my personal practice I attended Ashtanga, Jivamukti and hatha yoga classes and workshops, but also learnt from Iyengar teachers.

The list of yoga teachers I've studied with and courses undertaken is long. Of relevance here is that I have undertaken pregnancy and post-natal yoga training with Uma Dinsmore-Tuli and am happy to have pregnant and post-natal women in appropriate classes.

If you like labels, I teach hatha yoga, in that there is asana, pranayama and meditation. These are the core elements of yoga.

My classes are informal, friendly and relaxed (no pun intended).

I don’t hold with conformity and believe each person knows and understands their own body best. I teach a compassionate, person-centred yoga: if there's 15 bodies in the room there's 15 different expressions of the posture or movement. I will not insist we all have our feet pointing in exactly the same position for example.

The ethos of my classes is to facilitate the unity of the breath, the mind, the body, and your ‘self’ (or your spirit, your soul). And to do so with as much ease and comfort as possible.

My holistic approach takes into account what’s going on in the body, mind, the emotions, at conscious and sub-conscious levels. For the last 7+ years my learning has been informed by the biopscyhosocial model of understanding our health and wellbeing, particularly around pain and stress.

Additional skills

In 2021 I gained the certificate of Foundations in Teaching Mindfulness Meditation with Yoga Campus.

In 2017 I qualified as a sports massage therapist. Throughout my continued learning I have researched more around the nervous system being fundamental to massage therapy (and yoga, and much else besides) and offer massages that are holistic and focus on relaxation.

I'm a member of Yoga Teachers Together and the Federation of Holistic Therapists.