DAVID SYE - Activist and Yogi

Born of Russian descent, the son of a scientist mother and an international Artiste/Performer father David first began his practice of Yoga in response to suffering from ulcerated colitis and a spastic colon. Yoga cured his condition and then on yoga became his life’s focus. In 1990 he moved to Yugoslavia to work as a Radio journalist on a non-political radio station, whilst also teaching Yoga to classes in Belgrade. Circumstances conspired to the point where he found himself caught up in the middle of the Bosnian war. This resulted in the emergence of his own unique practice, a style of Yoga, born out of an environment where the possibilities of death and (the stress of this) were always close at hand. He began teaching Yoga and in his classes he used music to drown out the conflict. All of his classes used music which he initiated primarlity to drown out the sound of the conflict, both “overt” and “covert”.

 

 

His life is now divided by an extremely intensive global teaching schedule alongside his groundbreaking “urban” Yogabeats work, noteably with Glasgow street youth in the infamous Easterhouse district – alongside his work with the International Group ‘Youth at Risk’, an extraordinary and effective combination of Yogabeats working in tandem with psychologists and social workers, which has initiated a unique six month project for 2010 with thirty nine (mostly asbo) boys between the ages of ten and eighteen in Southend, Essex. David’s excitement at this work arises out of the fact that what is being created here is not only a model for transfomation through yoga, but a system where these young men and women are given the tools to maintain the transformation, so they can go on to realise their life’s full potentiality and the implications of this model for urban centres worldwide are all to obvious!

His work in the Community is developing a life of its own and is now being recognised and acknowledged by peace makers at governmental level.