Parveen Nair
Movement Artist · Embodied Yoga Mentor · Non-Duality Teacher
Parveen Nair is a movement artist, yoga educator and explorer of non-dual wisdom whose work emerges from a lifelong devotion to spirituality, expressed through the language of the body, movement, breath and awareness.
His journey into Yoga has never been simply about the body. It began with an early fascination with spirituality and the sacred rituals of Hindu dharma, introduced to him by his parents. He then found this in Indian classical dance, as a doorway into experiencing the body as a living expression of consciousness. His studies in Bharatanatyam and Odissi opened an intimate relationship with rhythm, stillness, gesture, space and the subtle movement of the Gods and Goddesses. Over time, this inquiry naturally unfolded into Yoga.
For Parveen, movement is not the destination, but a doorway (Dvara, the gateway into the Garbha Griha, the sanctum sanctorum). Here he realised that the gateway and the goal is one truth appearing as two.
After many years of dance practice, his movements became a portal into sensing the life that is already moving through us. The breath, the spine, the senses and the subtle currents of the body become ways of entering into a deeper recognition of what is here: before identity, before achievement, before the idea of becoming someone.
His approach to Embodied Yoga is deeply influenced by non-dual traditions, particularly the Advaita Vedānta teachings of Ramana Maharshi and the Mahamudra of Guru Tilopa and Guru Milarepa. He is especially drawn to the Shaiva Tantra understanding of Śakti as the living power of consciousness, and to Spanda, the subtle pulsation, vibration and movement through which life reveals itself.
In this way, the body is not something to be perfected or transcended, but a living mandala of awareness.
For Parveen, Yoga is an invitation to listen rather than impose; to sense rather than control; to recognise rather than attain. The practice becomes a meeting place between the gross and the subtle, between movement and stillness, between form and the formless.
His teaching has evolved through more than two decades of studying, practising and teaching many traditions of Yoga, alongside movement research, bodywork, breathwork, meditation and philosophy. His early foundation was within the Sivananda tradition, followed by years of study with his mentor, the late Yogini Karin O’Bannon, in Rishikesh. Through an ongoing practice of Svādhyāya, self-inquiry and self-study, his teaching has gradually become less about transmitting a fixed method and more about creating spaces where students can discover their own relationship with the living intelligence of the body.
From this exploration he developed Embodied Yoga, a practice arising from the meeting of dance, Yoga, breath, embodied movement and non-dual awareness as a play of awareness. This eventually became part of the wider field of what he now shares as Embodied Yoga.
Parveen’s teaching is an invitation into an experiential spirituality, one in which the sacred is not separate from ordinary life, and where the body itself can become a doorway into recognition.
He continues to travel internationally, offering Embodied Yoga immersions, teacher trainings, retreats, workshops and satsang-inspired explorations. He has worked with practitioners and teachers across Asia, Europe and the Americas, while continuing to spend much of his time in the Himalayan region of India.
He is also a co-founder of Yoga Sadhana, established with his senior student Louis Lim (Ramana), with spaces and teaching communities across Malaysia and India. He still teaches at the studio there when he is in Malaysia.
Today, Parveen’s work continues to unfold as an inquiry:
What happens when we stop trying to become something through Yoga, and instead become intimate with what is already here?
Perhaps this is where movement becomes meditation.
Where the body becomes a mandala.
Where Śakti moves.
And where, in the quiet recognition of awareness, there is nowhere else to arrive.
- Embodiment: The Dance of Movement and Breath a conversation on the Native Yoga Toddcast
- Advanced asana is when the mind is resolved an interview with TopYogis
- Yoga Sadhana the school he co-founded, with spaces in Malaysia and India
- Swasthyam, Pune where he taught Embodied Movements at the wellness festival