What Is Katonah Yoga?
Katonah Yoga® is a modern style that blends traditional Hatha yoga with principles of Taoism, sacred geometry, Chinese medicine, and imaginative metaphors from the natural world. Developed over the past four decades by Nevine Michaan, this unique practice offers a practical and multidimensional approach to physical, mental, and spiritual health. Katonah Yoga uses the body to understand, measure, and harmonize personal and universal patterns.
A Blend of Tradition and Innovation
Fundamentally, Katonah Yoga builds on the traditional Hatha yoga practice. When you enter a Katonah class, you’ll recognize familiar poses like down dog, warriors, or triangle. However, it goes beyond the physicality of the asanas by introducing new ways to align the body, integrating geometry, metaphor, and philosophy.
In Katonah Yoga, you become familiar with the blueprint of your personal abode—the body. With architectural references, the body is organized into three floors and nine rooms, a modern reimagination of the Chinese Lo Shu square (see picture below). Katonah teachers will liken body parts to rooms, foundations, and windows, emphasizing that no matter what kind of home you live in, it needs to be cleaned and cared for in the same ways: windows (lungs) need to be opened, toilets (kidneys) need to be flushed, garbage (colon) needs to be taken out, which is, in essence, what yoga therapy addresses, and what this practice enables every time we come to the mat.
The poses in Katonah Yoga focus heavily on organizing oneself—not just in the muscular and skeletal sense but also in the organs and glands, your breath, awareness, and energy. This method of finding proper alignment puts the yogi in the middle of themselves, distributing weight evenly across the foundation, creating space in the joints, balancing out muscular effort, and setting one up to receive grace. Every form, asana, has a formula and a recipe per se, and once the practitioner knows the formula, they can find the angles and the folds within the poses. Then, the forms and the practitioner both become formidable.
We can use the ubiquitous downward dog as an example. For many, this pose stretches the hamstrings and calves but also hurts the wrists, neck, shoulders, and/or lower back. Yoga should never hurt. If an asana is causing pain, especially in a joint, one needs to stop, back off, and check the recipe. A downward-facing dog is an equilateral triangle representing strength, structure, and stability. Viewed from the side, the pose looks like a triangle with equal angles at the wrists, pelvis, and ankles. The pelvis is the peak of the pose. Without knowing the correct formula, many people make an upside-down U shape with the body, where the low back is the highest point of the arc, and their pelvis is posteriorly tilted. This elongates the back body, shortens the front, squishes the organs, and puts more weight on the arms than the legs. This unfortunate tucked-tail version is what I refer to as a “scared dog.”
Sacred Geometry and Alignment
Katonah Yoga is known for its emphasis on sacred geometry. Poses are designed to help practitioners find a sense of "personal measure"—an understanding of their body as an inherently perfect structure that can be measured in shapes and angles as a reference point to come back to time and time again—the human body benefits from geometric alignment that is structurally sound and energetically balanced. By returning to a consistent measure in your asana practice, habits imbued into the body from life off the mat are reformed on the mat to experience your inherent perfection. Transcending your physical habits and exhibiting spacious archetypical architecture results in poses that look and feel effortless.
The Role of Breath
Pranayama is central to Katonah Yoga, and the practice emphasizes breath manipulation and imagination to imbibe and dwell in all rooms of the abode. With an emphasis on finding the central channel, your energetic spit, or the shushumna nadi as it is known in Sanskrit, from this center, you can go in any direction: up, down, diagonally, forward, backward, inward, and outward. Polarities reconcile when we mediate from the middle. Metaphors and movements converge with expansive arm and trunk rotations, paired with bellows breaths to oscillate between and mediate the polarities within and around us – day and night, the sun and the moon, masculine and feminine energies, etc. Working the imagination from the first floor of the pelvis, legs, and feet, the second floor from the diaphragm to the mouth, and the third floor of the intellect and intuition provides an engaging terrain to traverse through interoceptive breathwork. Through the experiment of mediation, we experience meditation.
Incorporating Taoism and Chinese Medicine
Katonah Yoga draws heavily on the philosophy of Taoism and the principles of Chinese medicine. By integrating principles of Taoism, like balance, yin and yang—the dualities of life—, and the interconnectedness of opposites, we recognize patterns and reconcile polarities within and without. The body is the microcosm; the Universe is the macrocosm. As above, so below.
From Chinese medicine, the method incorporates an understanding of the seasonality of time and one’s yoga practice. Using the 5 element theory, where each element corresponds to a season of the year, we can hone our health and longevity. Every winter is followed by Spring.
With this insight, we move, grow and flow with nature and the elements, which creates balance and harmony.
Using Metaphors for Personal Growth
One of the most distinctive features of Katonah Yoga is its use of metaphor and imagery to teach more profound lessons about yoga and life. You may hear a teacher liken the organs and glands to the inner workings of a vehicle or talk about parts of the body as specific rooms of a house. Seeing the right leg as the garage where you put the pedal to the metal and step out into the world, or the left leg as the laundry room that represents a never-ending cycle requiring willpower and stamina to bring your dreams to fruition. The metaphors allow practitioners to understand how physical anatomy relates to energetic qualities.
The esoteric language invites practitioners to explore their own physicality and energetic pathways, learning what they do well, and where they have room to grow. Eventually, the goal is to inhabit all rooms of your house, to be stable, able, with a full 360 degree vision.
Ultimately, Katonah Yoga is more than just a physical practice—it's a comprehensive system for self-care that creates personal and communal well-being. With its unique blend of Hatha yoga, sacred geometry, Chinese medicine, and Taoist philosophy, Katonah Yoga offers practitioners a deeper, more nuanced understanding of the body, mind, and spirit. Integrating these elements encourages balance, self-awareness, and lasting well-being, both on and off the mat.
