Yogic Light, In Memory of Ailsa Gartenstein
In memoriam
Ailsa Edith Gartenstein taught yoga across Brisbane for half a century, and she passed on 28 November 2025 at the age of ninety-two. During Yoga Week, her students remember a teacher who lived what she taught.
Through the late 1960s and into the 1970s, when the Beatles had been to see the Maharishi and ordinary Queenslanders were curious about what all of it meant, Ailsa was the one offering them a way in. She taught in rented halls across the Brisbane suburbs, a large network of classes under her own name, and she thought nothing of finishing in one suburb and driving through town at peak hour to teach the next. Suzanne, who first met her in 1971 as a sixteen-year-old, watched the rooms fill. “What she was doing,” Suzanne says, “was really making yoga available to the everyday Brisbane and Queensland person who wanted to explore the sorts of things they were hearing about, that phenomena of the Beatles and the Maharishi and all that sort of thing.”
Ailsa ran her schools as a businesswoman with high standards, the Ailsa Gartenstein School of Yoga settling in time at Stafford Heights, and she never stopped being a student herself, putting continuing professional development at the centre of how she taught, for the teachers who worked under her and for herself, keen to the end to explore and develop and keep up to date. Into her late sixties and seventies she was still turning up to conferences to learn new things about movement, often the oldest in the room and glad to be there, practising alongside teachers half her age and bringing home what she found to pass on to her students. At a stretch-therapy conference not long ago she would have been the oldest there by years, and it made no difference. “We were inspired by her willingness to learn and practise and develop,” Suzanne says, “for herself and for her students.”
Plenty of teachers keep a class going into their seventies, and Ailsa kept learning in hers, still inside the profession, its culture and its learning. “She was a big CPD fan,” as Suzanne says, “but she led by example.” She practised what she preached, and she looked fantastic for her whole life, and her students saw the proof of the practice standing in front of them.
Elegant and sensible, she enjoyed all that life offered, the galleries and the theatre and fine food and music, every bit of it with discretion and discernment. She was no ascetic. She could talk about the show that was on or some new way of moving, and people saw in her that yoga could enrich a normal life rather than set a person apart from it. “This is how you can live yoga in your daily life,” as Suzanne puts it, a high standard worn lightly.
Her classes held all sorts, mature men and young hippies, career women and women going through every kind of physical change, children who loved to practise, and football-loving blokes who would never have named themselves yogis. Ailsa taught all of them without discrimination, and she gave each the authentic thing, the tradition and how it could be lived in a Brisbane week. People felt something in her, what Suzanne calls a yogic light, and it drew them to her.
She had come to it through Roma Blair, an old friend and fellow lover of the fine things, and it was Roma who set her on the path and showed her she could follow it. Ailsa took it up, applied her own standards to it, and then spent the years that followed handing it on.
Mary-Anne began with the Ailsa Gartenstein school of yoga in 1969 at the age of seventeen, when yoga was new to Australia and to Brisbane. She climbed the stairs to a dimly lit and very modest room and laid rolled-up beach towels over the carpet on Wednesday evenings. More than fifty years on she still does her five exercises, and as she says, “if I can still do these today, I will be able to do them on all of my tomorrows.” Her weekly class continues, and what began in that upstairs room has stayed with her for life. “Yoga is a self-empowering form of physical exercise,” Mary-Anne says. “Ultimately, it encompasses an entire philosophy. That is its enormous appeal to me.”
Suzanne knew her for sixty years, and when Ailsa gave up her own studios she came to Suzanne’s, where the two went on as they always had, to the theatre and onto the mat together, a teacher and her student grown into old friends. “It’s because of Ailsa,” Suzanne says, “that my practice sustained.”
The teachers she trained are in their rooms across Brisbane, turning up and learning and handing on what she handed them, the same willingness she brought to every conference now theirs to keep. She made yoga an ordinary part of a well-lived life, and a great many lives are better for it.
Yoga Australia thanks Ailsa Gartenstein for half a century of making yoga available to the everyday Brisbane person, and for the teachers she leaves to hand it on.
