Delara Tiv - Teachers
Meet Delara
Delara Tiv is an Advanced Certified Rolfer® and movement educator whose work explores postural organization in gravity, fascial relationships, breathing, and the perceptual processes that shape how we inhabit and move our bodies.
With a background as a professional dancer and teacher, her work integrates Structural Integration, movement education, and the broader practices of yoga, including āsana, prāṇāyāma, and meditation. Drawing from her experience in dance, Rolfing®, and yoga, Delara helps practitioners cultivate a deeper perception of movement, alignment, and breath, allowing them to move with greater efficiency, resilience, and awareness.
She has worked internationally with dancers and athletes, including touring with the Alvin Ailey Dance Theater as a Rolfing therapist and movement educator, supporting performers in recovering from injury, refining movement, and developing greater efficiency and ease.
Alongside her clinical work, Delara is actively involved in training, mentoring, and educating yoga teachers, sharing an integrated approach to movement, anatomy, āsana, prāṇāyāma, and meditation. She continues to deepen her expertise through ongoing study in Barral Osteopathy, the Neijing tradition of Chinese medicine, and the Yogic Wisdom teachings that continue to inform her work.
An eternal student by nature, Delara has practised yoga for more than two decades. Her personal path began in 2003, during her university studies and professional dance training, when the practice initially served as a means of cultivating balance amid the physical and mental demands of that period.
In 2009, at the age of 23, while living in Madrid, she began practising Ashtanga Yoga with Borja Romero. where in that beautiful shala dedicated and consistent practice could take root. Over the years, she has had the privilege of studying with David Garrigues, Richard Freeman, Gregor Maehle, Rolf Naujokat, Linda and Gerald Diss, and John Scott. Among them, Rolf Naujokat, David Garrigues, and Gregor Maehle have had the greatest influence on the course of her practice and the way she shares Ashtanga Yoga.
During a season of study with Rolf Naujokat, sustained daily prāṇāyāma practice marked a decisive turning point in Delara’s life, eventually leading her to leave her professional dance career at the age of 31 and undertake her training in Rolfing® Structural Integration. She later continued to study and refine her practice of prāṇāyāma and yogic meditation extensively under the guidance of Gregor Maehle, whose teachings continue to inform her personal practice and approach to yoga.
Delara began teaching Ashtanga Yoga at the age of 33, after a decade devoted to practising and studying the method. During this time, her Rolfing education further developed her understanding of movement, structure, perception, and breath, while she continued to deepen her practice of the Advanced A and B sequences, prāṇāyāma, meditation, and the yogic darśanas under the guidance of her teachers. She continues to practise with, assist, and demonstrate for David Garrigues, whose guidance has been particularly influential in the development of her practice and teaching.
Having completed the Advanced A and B sequences of Ashtanga Yoga, she guides practitioners across the full spectrum of practice: from complete beginners and those navigating physical limitations, recovery from injury, or periods of fatigue and stress, to practitioners who have developed the preparation required to explore more complex āsanas within the method.
Delara holds a bachelor’s degree in Human Geography and Spanish Literature from the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. Persian by origin and an immigrant since childhood, she has spent approximately a third of her life on each of three continents. Living across different languages and cultures, and experiencing the hardships, resilience, and continual adaptation that immigration can require, has profoundly shaped how she perceives, communicates, and relates to others. It has also given her a personal understanding of what it means to repeatedly leave familiar ground, create a new home, and integrate into a new society and community.
These experiences are particularly meaningful in Switzerland, where her work brings her into contact with people from many cultural backgrounds, including expatriates, immigrants, and refugees. While each person’s circumstances are distinct, Delara’s own history allows her to meet experiences of displacement, transition, and cultural adaptation with sensitivity and respect. It informs her teaching and therapeutic work, with an awareness of how personal history, language, culture, and environment influence the ways in which we inhabit, perceive, and express ourselves through the body.
After many years of travelling internationally as a dancer and living abroad, she now resides in the canton of Vaud, Switzerland. Grateful to have found a place in which to put down roots, she founded Ashtanga Yoga Vevey in 2018 and continues to share her work through teaching, therapy, and ongoing study.
