Susan Aharona Shackman has been practicing Ashtanga yoga since 2003. She has studied exclusively with senior teachers who follow Ashtanga’s “old school” method of practice, including her primary teachers, for whom she is eternally grateful, Nancy Gilgoff and Casie Newhouse. She is also grateful to have studied with Manju Jois, with whom she has completed both Primary and Intermediate Series teacher trainings. Aharona feels extremely blessed to have been given the now rare opportunity to practice the entire Ashtanga syllabus in its original form of four set series – and in this way to help keep the "old school” tradition alive. Back in 2005, seeking a further exploration into the traditions and philosophies behind her yoga practice, Aharona completed a teacher training at the Mount Madonna Center, where she greatly enjoyed the teachings and presence of Baba Hari Dass; and following Babaji's instruction of "teach to learn," she then began to teach. Since then, sharing the practice of Ashtanga yoga, which has had such a healing, grounding, and enlightening effect on her life, has been one of Aharona's greatest joys.
Also a massage therapist, Aharona has been practicing deep tissue massage since 1998. Besides Ashtanga, her practices include writing and West African drum and dance.
To experience an optimum state of health, happiness, and overall well-being, Aharona firmly believes in the power of maintaining, foremost amongst other things, a clean diet. Over the course of about 25 years, as she passed from the standard American diet (SAD) of her childhood (and a rather sad version of the SAD at that!) ultimately into her present path with pranic nourishment, Aharona went back and forth through periods of vegetarianism, veganism, whole foods, raw foods, “mucusless diet,” fasting, fruitarianism, and pranic nourishment, and along the way she researched and experimented extensively with various means of cleansing. Having found the shifts in her diet to provide the most profound impact on her physical, mental, and emotional bodies and, most importantly, on her state of consciousness, she has been greatly impressed with the transformative power of dietary cleansing, and she is also available for counseling on these matters.