Yoga styles and a teacher I irritated!

I reflect on today's acheivements and can only laugh. My goal today was to seek out only a few of the many courses that McLeod Ganj has to offer. Of those, yoga was one of my stops.

As per the advertisement, I showed up at the Iyengar Yoga center to learn more information and possibly register for a 5 day yoga beginner's course. As I sat among a whole 4 other people including the teacher, I listened assuming that the teacher would give a brief introduction and explanation of the course followed by a possible Q&A - sounds reasonable? Nah, seemed the dog in his lap got more attention than we did for a moment. I heard nothing from the teacher but brief, quick answers. I continued to listen. As a few more questions were flailed at him and somewhat answered I decided I had a few questions of my own :) The first few were obvious - when, where, how much - he hadn't covered these yet! After this set I reflected on the fact that he learned from BKS Iyengar himself and asked how many years had he studied under him. A sharp reply came back at me, "Six and a half years - it's in the brochure"! (Breathe in and smile inserted here) My next question got even worse. As I asked him to educate me with some kind of explanation about the differences between the more popular styles of yoga such as Iyengar and Hatha, I was quickly and fiercly met with criticism. "You should never ask a teacher to tell you the difference between the different styles of Yoga. . ." Clearly, the teacher/student relationship was in question and for me, I was disheartened and a bit shocked at his defensive reaction. Although I offered to reword my question and did so with a smile, he lost me on "never". Do you think he knew the answer? Com'mon, now really.

Being the little analyst that i am, I decided I could try to look the answer up myself and here's what I found. A nice little website that gives a fairly good explanation for each of the more popular styles - or maybe this is all of them. http://yogasite.com/yogastyles.html

Enjoy, in case you were also interested. Don't ask this guy.