Hadspen’s Harmonious Hatha

Suzie Brazendale greets visitors to her home studio with a bubbly warmth and humour that puts anyone at ease within minutes. 

Brazendale did not set out to become a yoga teacher. A hairdresser by trade who stands six feet tall, she spent her mid-twenties nursing postural problems and thoracic spine pain that resisted every remedy she tried. It was a client, offhandedly, who suggested yoga. 

“I went along to a class, and I was hooked, and I’ve never looked back since then,” she says.

That single class set in motion a four year training process. She studied the philosophy of classical yoga and Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras by distance education through the Australian College of Classical Yoga in Melbourne, then spent five years learning postures and alignment under teacher Lyn Edwards at the Rosevears Yoga Centre. She began teaching in Hadspen in 2010, and in 2013 opened a studio from her own home.

To Brazendale, yoga is less a form of exercise than “a way of life,” she says, one that steadies breath, eases anxiety and supports the body alongside the mind. Her 90 minute classes open with ten minutes of meditation meant to draw students into the present, move through joint rotation and postures suited to whatever the group needs that day, and close with ten to fifteen minutes of Shavasana, a guided relaxation she likens to two hours of sleep. She keeps her classes small, usually six to eight students, and also sees private clients referred by a doctor under health cover.

More than ten years into running her own practice, Brazendale has watched the pandemic push much of the yoga world online, a change that has its complications. “I am teaching a person the tools and the awareness to understand their body, and watching someone on a screen doesn’t give you that,” she says. A teacher in the room, she argues, can catch a shoulder out of alignment and correct it before it becomes a habit, in a way no video ever could.

The satisfactions of the work, she says, have come from watching students change, especially those working through anxiety, depression or the stiffness of long hours at a desk. The job has also demanded firmer boundaries than she expected, protecting a studio she wants to remain free of judgment and comparison.

But she has also built a business beyond the studio walls. A series of her own free videos posted to Instagram, covering flexibility, strength and mobility, gave way to a paid program of longer sessions on hips, spine and shoulders, along with a guided breathing practice drawn from pranayama. The online offerings are a way to provide yoga to those who may not have the time to get to a studio, though she is careful to note the trade off. Time in the studio, she says, lets her give the kind of hands on correction and guidance that people can then carry into their own practice at home, video or no video. 

Now Brazendale is angling to slow down. After years spent tending to everyone else’s practice, she’s carving out more time for herself, and has added strength and weight training to her routine. Brazendale hopes to one day run her own yoga retreat, though for the moment she is perfectly happy attending other people’s.

Brazendale has loved Hadspen for 30 years because there’s a river to walk beside daily, swim in over summer, and drive out to the Meander waterfalls whenever she likes.