Honouring IYTA and Roma Blair
The International Yoga Teachers Association closed its doors in 2023 after more than fifty years of service to Australian yoga. This page honours that legacy and the woman whose vision gave Australia its first formal yoga teaching body.
Roma Blair
Roma Blair, born in 1923 near Coonamble on Wailwan land, lived a life that reads like fiction. She survived three and a half years in a Japanese prisoner of war camp in Java, came to yoga in South Africa on the recommendation of a Chinese medicine doctor, and was initiated by Swami Satyananda in 1963 as Australia’s first female swami, taking the name Swami Nirmalananda, pure bliss. In 1957 she returned to Sydney and opened a small studio on Pitt Street. Her full story is told here.
Founding IYTA
What followed from that studio shaped the next half-century of Australian yoga. In 1967 Roma founded IYTA, convinced that yoga in Australia needed standardisation, professional training, and a community of teachers who could hold the practice with integrity. The first World Yoga Convention in Australia followed the year after, at Camp Yarrimundi near Richmond, with around three hundred attendees. Roma’s intention then, as she put it, was to bring yoga schools out of my-school-is-better-than-yours sort of thing and into a unified Australian movement. Yoga, she said, was on the move.
Half a Century of Service
IYTA grew from that beginning into a national body and then an international one, with members and representatives across Singapore, South Africa, Switzerland, India, the United Kingdom, and beyond. Its teacher training, codified in the early 1970s, ran for more than four decades and graduated over two thousand teachers. Its code of ethics, drawn up by early president Sally Janssen, anchored teaching to the yamas and niyamas of Patañjali and refused dogma. International Light, the association’s quarterly journal, became a much-loved companion to working teachers across generations.
The Great Work of Roma Blair
Guru, Mother of Yoga, TV star, supporter of philanthropic endeavours, and author. Having lived an extraordinary life, Roma Blair is celebrated as the woman who brought yoga to Australia.
Roma passed in 2013, a few months after her ninetieth birthday, in Burleigh Heads on the Gold Coast. The lineage she opened in Australia continues through every teacher she trained, every teacher trained by those teachers, and every student who came to yoga because Roma made it ordinary and possible to do so. IYTA’s closure is not the end of that lineage. Yoga Australia carries forward, in our own way and through our own community, the work she began.
