Classes
Classes at The Small Room are small by design — up to four people — which means the work is specific.
We use props. Blocks, blankets, straps, bolsters, chairs. Not as shortcuts or accommodations, but as tools for precision — scaffolding that helps the body find a more informed version of itself.
Physical adjustments are central to the practice. A good adjustment isn't a correction — it's information.
It tells your body something it couldn't have figured out on its own, and that information stays.
Private Lessons
A private is an opportunity to go deeper into your specific body — its patterns, its history, what it's been compensating for and what it's capable of. We start with a body reading. From there the session is built around you: therapeutic adjustments, targeted work on injuries or long-standing restrictions, or simply the kind of close attention that a group class can't always provide.
If you've been carrying something in your body for years and haven't found the right approach, this is where to start.
Mei-Ling Wong
I started The Small Room because I wanted a place where people could come to practice yoga as a way of being in dialogue with the body they're already living in.
I walked into my first Katonah class in 2014. What stayed with me was the intelligence underneath the poses — the sense that the body has a structure that means something, and that a good teacher can help you organize it.
I've been studying and teaching Katonah for ten years now, and that quality of attention is still what I'm after. The poses are a means, not an end.
The Small Room is an invitation to bring what you're carrying and stay long enough to see what organizes.
Founder of Katonah Yoga
KATONAH YOGA® is a syncretic Hatha yoga practice developed by Nevine Michaan of Katonah Yoga® Center over 40 years. She and her teachers incorporate classical Hatha yoga with Taoist theory, geometry, magic, mythology, metaphor, and imagination — in a practical framework designed to potentiate personal and communal well-being. Framing the practice, maps of time and personal space are defined and refined. Themes using asana as origami, manipulating form for function, and developing a sense of personal measure are incorporated in Katonah Yoga practices. Katonah Yoga is organized around three principles of esoteric dialogue: all polarities are mediated by trinity; the universe has pattern, pattern belies intelligence; by virtue of repetition there is potential for insight. Disciplined techniques are organized for revelation through revolutions.
Magic Square Logo © 2016 Katonah Yoga Center, Inc. Illustration by Nevine Michaan and Susan Fierro.
“The great goal is to support personal and communal well-being. Make yourself healthy, round, well-adjusted, buoyant, radiant — position yourself to be the center of a sphere. So that if you fall, you will bounce.”