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Norman Allen - Not on the KPJAYI (now sharathjois.com) 'list'..... and never has been.

February 5, 2018, 5:19 pm
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"In 1973, Norman Allen was the first American to be taught by Pattabhi Jois. Norman attended a yoga demonstration at the Swami Gitananda Ashram in Pondicherry; the yoga was performed by Manju Jois, the son of Pattabhi Jois. Impressed by what he witnessed, he decided to study this system of yoga". from Ashtangayoga.info.


Norman Allen: (1970's?) Screenshot of a photo from the You tube movie below

This is a repost of one of my favourite posts, some glorious early photos of Norman Allen as well as  a short documentary at the end of the post. Norman, as far as I know, still practicing, still teaching. Given that Pattabhi Jois is said to have stopped practicing Ashtanga Vinyasa relatively early, by my reckoning, Norman may now have been practicing longer than his teacher.

So why is it that Norman Allen isn't on 'the list'..... and never has been?

A short reminder of how the KPJAY list came about. 

Originally Pattabhi Jois just gave his blessing to teach, 

Tim Miller writes about this 'blessing to teach' following Pattabhi Jois' third trip to the US in 1980

"Guruji gathered us together for one final meeting.  At this gathering he told us which westerners he felt were qualified to teach.  It was a fairly short list—David, Brad, Nancy, Gary, and a few others.  Since Brad had decided to move to Maui, he wanted me to take over his school in Encinitas.  He asked Guruji, “What about Tim?”  Guruji looked perplexed and said, “Who?”  “Tim,” Brad repeated,  and pointed at me.  “Oh, that man,” Guruji replied, and studied me for a moment.  “Yes, that man is some better, okay.” Dust. Tim Miller (http://timmiller.typepad.com/dust_by_tim_miller/)

Note: None of those names above, including Tim Miller, are on I believe Sharath's current list

I believe Tim Miller may have been the first to ask for an actual piece of paper.

In the 90s following the writing down and publishing of the count I heard a couple of teachers started suggesting there should be more formality around who should and who shouldn't teach.

I'm not sure when the Ashtanga.Com list first came about, 2004 I believe  See my Ashtanga History 1980 to present for 2004 Ashtanga.com list (87 teacher) The Ashtanga.com list was originally just a resource of where teachers could be found, addresses/contact details (pre internet), the teachers were either recommended by Pattabhi Jois himself or by letters from senior/ long term  teachers/practitioners etc. 

Begs the question whether given the internet we even NEED a list any longer.

In 2008 there seems to have been a bit of a falling out between Ashtanga.com and AYRI ( later KPJAYI and now Sharathjois.com). AYRI own list came into being in 2008 I believe - See my Ashtanga History 1980 to present for the first list. Pattabhi jois wasn't well ( he died the following year ) and Sharath was taking more control of the shala. Letters were sent out asking teachers to return their letters of blessing to teach, certificates etc. to be renewed (although it appears some never were). They were told that they couldn't be on any other list ( i.e. the Ashtanga.com list). 

So, by the time the the first KPJAYI list of authorised teachers came about, there was perhaps less warmth between Sharath and those first practitioners who actually did the ground work of spreading/propagating the practice. As far as I know, Norman Allen was never on the KPJAYI list, nor were David Williams, Nancy Gilgoff, David Swenson, or those teachers Tim Miller mentions above, Brad Ramsey, Anthony Gary Lopedota, they were never carried over from the Ashtanga.com list to the KPJAYI list.

One of Sharath's main arguments in his new code of conduct is that these teachers no longer came to Mysore. Although one might ask why, when they had practiced with Pattabhi Jois for decades, they SHOULD then come and bend the knee to Sharath, we might wonder if it indeed matters. Sharath is fond of insisting that the practice hasn't changed, if that is the case then there is surely need to come. He does mention that he has been running some teaching workshops  for authorised teachers (Special trainings) and that these of course haven't been attended by the senior, early teachers. I've heard from a couple of Authorised teachers about the content of these expensive trainings run by Sharath and there really doesn't appear to be anything that stands out as essential to the new order, mostly just practice and conferences.

Given that these senior teachers, the elders of the practice, have practiced from their youth into middle age and beyond it strikes me that it is their experience that should be sort.

In the next few days I'll see about putting up some other post of those who are not on the list....and never have been. 

Here's Norman.


The original post from October 2014


It seems to be Norman Allen week on fb this week, 

Norman Allen: (1970's?) Screenshot of a photo from the You tube movie below

Some background to the interview and videos from Ashtanga.info

How Ashtanga Yoga found its way to the West

It was just a small photo in one of many yoga books. And yet this picture set a revolution in motion. It brought Europeans and Americans to Pattabhi Jois in India, and Ashtanga Yoga to the West.

In 1964, André van Lysebeth, a Belgian, found his way into Pattabhi Jois’s tiny Yogashala in Mysore. With his profound knowledge of Yoga and Sanskrit, André became intrigued by this old yogic system. He spent two months with Pattabhi Jois who taught him the first and second series. Among the many books André van Lysebeth wrote in the ensuing years, one carried the title "pranayama". André wrote this book directly after he spent time with Jois. A photograph of the guru including his name and address was published in "pranayama”. Through this book, Pattabhi Jois’s name started to spread slowly in the Western world, mainly in Europe. So it came as no surprise that quite a few Europeans were among the first Westerners who travelled to India with the goal of meeting Pattabhi Jois.

In 1973, Norman Allen was the first American to be taught by Pattabhi Jois. Norman attended a yoga demonstration at the Swami Gitananda Ashram in Pondicherry; the yoga was performed by Manju Jois, the son of Pattabhi Jois. Impressed by what he witnessed, he decided to study this system of yoga.

A little later, David Williams and Nancy Gilgoff joined the tiny Yogashala in Mysore. They were the first to invite Pattabhi Jois to California, USA, to teach a workshop, in 1975. Only ten to fifteen students participated in the first workshop. This was a very modest start, compared to the amount of people who attend Pattabhi’s classes today.

Manju Jois accompanied his father on this legendary trip. He decided to stay in America to spread the traditional technique of Ashtanga Yoga there.

As time went by, Ashtanga Yoga became more and more known in the Western world. Pattabhi Jois was invited to teach many workshops not only in the U.S. but also in Brazil, the UK and many other countries. Today, the Ashtanga Vinyasa Yoga is one of the most famous yoga traditions in the world. One can find Ashtanga yoga classes held almost everywhere. Stars such as Madonna and Sting commit themselves to this ancient practice, a fact which has undoubtedly increased the popularity of Ashtanga yoga even more.

*


A nice long Interview that you can sink your teeth into with Norman Allen with  from Guy Donahaye's website  Yoga Shala NYC 
Below a taste of the interview, follow the link for the full Interview


"... Pattabhi Jois he came with his wife and his daughter and his cousinand his nephew. (Guy - Vishvanath?) Yes, lean boy then, not lean now…But he was lean and really spiffy at one time so he came todemonstrate, Pattabhi Jois came to discuss, cousin came to translate, Ama came to take care of him. Saraswati was she there? I’m not sure. 
  
M.S. Viswanath, fondly known as Masterji by his students
Masterjiyoga website

A month or two before this conference, two young Indians from Mysoreshow up at the Ashram with Saris - wanting to sell saris and littlesarongs, and one of their names is Basaraju and one of them is Manju,OK? And they hung out there, in their young 20’s and this one boy Manjudemonstrates some Yoga postures that he had learned from his father… OhMan! look at that…

...and I wanna’ show you something... so I saw these boys do thisyoga work... so this one boy he had a card... and these were the two boys: far out huh? so that is Manju Jois, huh?

So, I saw Manju and Basaraju and then a month or two later saw his father and then saw 
Vishvanath demonstrate and I said: “OK, this I want to learn”.

Guy: Had you ever seen anything like that before?

No, you know that time before we met, I saw the Iyengar book in thoseearly days and that was interesting and what we did was kind of nice, alittle bit of a mix with some Sivananda stuff, very nice......but notlike that...

I wanted to study (with Jois), there was no question, andI asked, and they said: “No, he does not want to take any foreignstudents at this time, and one of the reasons was that he had had thatbad experience”

Guy: So he didn’t want to have you as a student?

No, he didn’t… but I would bring them everything that they needed: water and coffeeand I’d go to town and there’s almonds and badami... and I had mybeautiful daughter with me and my wife... and my daughter had her one yearHindu initiation with a great scholar in the Ashram in Pondicheri....so she’s a little baby, you know, in the East they like babies…

Guy: So how did you persuade him?

Well, I didn’t keep on, but… I’m a nice guy (good vibes) and Amaji toldhim or asked him to give it a chance... so because of her....otherwisehe wouldn’t take us - there was no need. In those days he was teachingat the Sanskrit Patashala, 50 Rupees a month... and he would have hischetty merchants who were his patrons, you know, and they’d come and hehad a room where the locals would come (for yoga classes)...

So, he agreed to take me on as a student, and in a month or so Ishifted on to Mysore. At first, I stayed upstairs there, where theyreside still, undoubtedly, unless they got a new house"

For the full, fascinating, interview head over to Guy's place
http://aysnyc.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=48&Itemid=184

More excellent interviews on Guy's website

Saraswathi Rangaswami - An interview with Guruji´s daughter37135
Sharath Interview - Mysore February 200831022
Tim Miller - Mysore 1999 and Encinitas 200034480
Manju Jois - New York 200030073
Nancy Gilgoff - Vermont 200126811
David Williams - Maui 200123193
Norman Allen - Big Island, Hawaii 2001
*******

This little movie of out takes from Enlighten Me along with some grist  old photos of Norman has been circling around for a couple of weeks I think, I caught up with it this week on fb.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hUWVEgTsnlQ



 A series of screenshots of photos from the movie, love this photo sequence,
 










And one more movie from You Tube...

A Day With Norman Allen

Norman visits with long-time friend from India. Shot using a Nikon D600.



UPDATE: This seems to be an outtakes version  - from the notes
"Directed by Kate Churchill, outtakes from filming "Enlighten Up" a documentary film about yoga. The Norman Picture was put together as a gift to Norman Allen. Om Namah Shivaya & Aloha ! Enjoy :)"

The photos above are from 7.36-8.54


And this which is unfortunately Anonymous

The Cult of Norman Allen


http://yogahawaii.blogspot.jp/2007/05/cult-of-norman-allen.html?m=1

I wasn't sure whether to include it in this post because it is Anonymous and a on post blog but, I don't know, perhaps it's the British love of eccentrics but I came away from this post wanting to go to Hawaii practice with him even more.


UPDATE: My brother posted an old photo of me from 1983, the hair reminded me of norman Allen and this post.



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'Developing a Home Practice' and 'The List' - Mark Darby, David Swenson, Sharath, John Scott, David Williams, Richard Freeman

February 11, 2018, 4:43 pm
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With all the discussion of the list of Ashtanga teachers recently, who remains on it, who is off...., or back on again, I'm reminded of the teachers who inspired me to practice Ashtanga in the first place.

At some point while writing this blog I was asked how I got into the practice, how it developed etc.
I started this series of posts 'Developing a home practice'. I cringe a little reading it back now but perhaps it's of interest. I've included here the first seven short posts - There's an Afterword at the end .

Part 1 - The first books I took from the library were by Tara Frazer and Liz Lark, I'm not sure if Ashtanga was Tara's main practice but Liz was one of Derek Ireland's early students.

Part 2 - The first DVD I practiced to was Mark Darby's

Part 3 - Concerning David Swenson's Ashtanga manual and his Short forms

Part 4  -  Concerning John Scott's book Richard Freeman's DVD

Part 6 -  Concerning John Scott' s DVD Lino Miele's DVD

Part  7 -  Concerning Sharath's Primary Series DVD

*

- With regards to the KPJAYI List and those teachers who first inspired me to practice and to continue practicing....,

Tara Frazer and Liz Lark, were never on a list (If I'm not mistake, Ashtanga wasn't Tara's main or only practice).

Mark Darby was on the kpjayi list but then taken off - It turns out he and Joanne Darby have just been put back on again.

David Swenson and David Williams were never carried over from the Ashtanga.com list to the KPJAYI list.

Lino Miele asked for his name to be removed in I believe 2008 when teachers were asked to reurn thier cerificates given to them personally by Pattabhi Jois.

Richard Freeman recently had his name taken off the list - Update: now put on a new 'Honorary' list along with mark and Joanne Darby

See my posts on Ashtanga authorisation  1980s to present.

Here is the full series of posts.

Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Part 6 Part 7 Part 8 Part 9 Part 10 Part 11a Part 11b Part 12 Part 13 Part 14 Part 15a Part 15b Part 16 Part 17 Part 18 Part 19 Part 20 Part 21a Part 21b Part 22 Part 23 Part 24 Part 25 Part 26a Part 26b Part 27 Parts 28, 29 and 30 Part 32 Part 33 Part 34


Developing a Home Practice Part 1

I was asked this in an email this week.

'By the way, did you start doing Ashtanga gradually or if not how? If it does not bother you that I ask I would be very interested in your first days and weeks. I am curious and I feel I could also learn from that'.

I think I pretty much dived in. My flat had been burgled in February 2007 and seven saxophones stolen. Although I managed to get five of them back I was angry about the whole affair and was annoyed with myself for being so angry about it. I decided to get back into Meditation, I'd practiced a little Zen years before. I came across the ZenCast podcast with Gil Fronsdal  and began to practice Vipassana meditation. Reading around the practice I found that a lot of meditators were also doing yoga so I picked up a two books from the library. One was Total Astanga: The Step-by-Step Guide to Power Yoga at Home for Everybody by Tara Frazer  I think it had looked the best laid out and the least embarrassing to take up to the Library counter. The other was by Liz Lark ( a student of Derek Ireland).



I practiced with that book for about a month, practicing in the mornings, before work, in the living room with my Chinchilla looking on. If I remember correctly I got as far as the Standing sequence in that time which would take me about half an hour to forty minutes, stopping every now and again to turn the page or check the book. I used to use blocks, or rather books as blocks, for Utthita Trikonasana as I couldn't reach my hands to the ground. I was what, 44 weighed 94 kilo and hadn't done any exercise for about four years. I had a bit of a belly and was feeling generally unhealthy.





I remember really enjoying getting up in the mornings to practice alone in the dark. I loved Surynamaskara A  but B exhausted me. I was frustrated that I couldn't straighten my legs in forward bends and having to hold on to the wall in Utthita hasta etc. Virabhadrasana A and B were agony, as was Utkatasana, I couldn't imagine being able to do Ardha baddha padmottanasana. I would ache all over for most of the day but it was a good ache and the practice became highlight of my day. Sometimes it felt like the day was over as soon as I finished my practice and I couldn't wait for the following morning to come around. I still feel like that occasionally, after a particularly good practice followed by my morning grapefruit and coffee.

Next: First DVD Ashtanga Yoga Primary Series Mark Darby

Developing a Home Practice Part 2 - Mark Darby


I think in the beginning I didn't even think of myself as doing Ashtanga but rather just doing some Yoga. The book I was using just happened to be Ashtanga. I didn't read much of the introduction but just dived into Surynamaskara and the standing postures. Going to a yoga class wasn't something I even considered. A guy here, outside London, might think about going to a gym to get in shape but not a Yoga class, probably not even an aerobic class, at least not in the beginning. Besides getting fit and healthy was more of a by product. I was doing Yoga more as a meditative thing right from the beginning. I wanted to get absorbed, lost even, in what I was doing. I think it was that absorption that delighted me and that I looked forward to in the morning. It helped that it was the tail end of winter, still dark in the mornings. I didn't want to put the light on and disturb the Chinchilla so would just throw down my towel (no mat then) and practice in the dark with just the light from the hallway to see the book by. After I finished I would sit for a while and do some Vipassana.

http://grimmly2007.blogspot.jp/p/h-hey-nyt-my-body-was-wrecked-before.html

At the same time I started to Google. I found out more about yoga and of course Ashtanga. I remember seeing that Youtube video of the guy practicing in the temple and being blown away by it (still am) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hu9Sq1RvuoA , was this what I was doing? I think that video got me excited and 'lit a fire' for the practice. I started trying out some of the seated postures from the book. My Paschimottanasana's were pretty sad, I could reach my ankles but my knees were very bent, I couldn't imagine ever having them flat on the floor.

I was now thinking about Ashtanga rather than Yoga and wanted a video and a mat. I remember feeling a bit sheepish going to an exercise shop and looking at the yoga section. I bought a box that had a purple mat and some blocks and wanted to say at the counter that it wasn't for me but a present for a friend. But I loved that first mat (still have it). I remember reading Elsie's blog (that I miss, by the way) where she talks about 'old blue', that's how I felt about my purple mat. As soon as I got home I rolled it out and threw down a few Sury A's.

I can't remember how I came across the Mark Darby DVD but I still think I was really lucky to choose it and that it's THE best beginners ashtanga DVD. I lent it to a friend and still haven't got it back. I think it starts with a little Demo of Mark doing his own practice, a mixture of 1st, 2nd and Advanced I think, very very cool. Could I ever do that, loved the jump back and the handstand/arm balances even then.

The video has Mark Darby doing the standard Ashtanga Primary but his student Nicole Bordeleau practicing alongside, but doing some simplified variations and explaining them in her French Canadian accent...I'm still madly in love with Nicole Bordeleau. Presenting it this way the practice didn't seem dumbed down for beginners but rather just making allowances for an individuals flexibility. Here was a simplified Jump back or rather step back allowing you to link the poses. I began to get the hang of the Ujjayi breath. I remember it being described somewhere as constricting the throat and trying to sound like Darth Vader. I was skeptical about the Bandhas (no change there then).

If I'd started by going to Shala to learn Ashtanga I guess I would have been given one pose at a time and not allowed to progress past the current pose until it was... acceptable. I didn't hear about any of that until much later, and was, (still am) very surprised by it. I was only constrained by time. The video was an hour and a half, I would just do Standing and finishing on a work day but follow the whole video through on my day off and on Sundays. So within a month I was practicing all of Primary, though using variations throughout.

It was a good job I bought the video when I did, Nicola would give lots of advice for practicing safely, if I'd just carried on with the book I would probably have injured myself. After an hour and a half practicing with the video I was completely wasted. I would sweat a kilo and every muscle in my body would ache/tingle..... it felt fantastic.

Next : Coming across David Swenson's book and videos


Developing a Home Practice Part 3 - David Swenson


I don't remember getting on the mat being that difficult in the first couple of months. I'd always got up early. And in Japan, a couple of years before, I used to get up in the morning and go and practice playing my saxophone beside the Kamo Gawa, the river that runs through Kyoto and was just outside my house. When I came back to the UK and lived in Oxford, I used to go down to the Ring Road in the morning to play. When I was burgled I pretty much stopped playing saxophone, it was if it was sullied somehow, didn't feel the same.

Still, playing everyday for the last five years or so had developed some self-discipline, it wasn't so hard to transfer that to practicing Ashtanga in the morning. The trick was to make it a routine that was pretty much nonnegotiable. With the saxophone, I would go down to the river whatever the weather, take out my Sax and practice. If it rained I would play under the bridge. In Winter I would cut the fingers off a pair of gloves. I might not play for as long, and I might not practice as many scales as I should have done, but I would always go down to that river and play.

With Ashtanga it was almost easier, I didn't have to leave the house. I just went into the next room and unrolled my mat, six days a week, nonnegotiable. I've managed to keep to that. The only problem for me being that you practice six days a week rather than seven. It's OK if you have a fixed day off, but my day off practice tends to float about a bit. There are mornings when I really don't feel like practicing but I know that once I get past the first couple of Sury's I'll get into it and be fine.

The problem for me, at that time, wasn't so much getting on the mat, but rather what to practice, how to practice. The Darby DVD was too long for me for days when I was working. I would do most of standing, a couple of seated, a bit of finishing, but there was no structure and it became a bit frustrating. Some mornings I would be flicking through the book trying to decide which poses to practice and just end up wasting time.

I'd come across mention of David Swenson's practice manual and managed to win it on eBay in May 2007.  This book made a huge difference to my practice and I really can't recommend it enough. Up until I got that book I think I was doing a 'bit of yoga' in the mornings, though the books and DVD's were Ashtanga style. With the Swenson book I began to think of my practice as an Ashtanga practice. I began to take it all much more seriously. You open the cover and there's K Pattabhi Jois smiling at you. On the next page there are some early pictures from 1975 of the guys who first practiced Ashtanga in the west and a little box called A Living Tradition. Cool. And he's an old guy! Well, around my age anyway. And the book contained not just the Primary series but the Intermediate as well. Strange, wonderful poses, Kapotasana, both legs behind the head in Dwi pada Sirasana, Titibhasana...this stuff was insane. I'd never be able to do any of that, I'd probably never manage to bind in Marichiyasana C let alone Supta vajrasana, but that didn't matter it was all just wonderful.

Best of all there is a section in the back called Short forms. 15 minutes, 30 minutes and 45 minutes as well as the full practice. You don't have enough time for the full practice, that's OK how long have you got? Thirty minutes, no problem, only fifteen, that's OK too, a couple of Sury A's and B's a couple of seated and a little finishing, there it ,was all laid out and in this 'serious' book. You could practice for just half an hour and that was OK. Love David Swenson for that.

Next : John Scott and practicing in Paris and Japan


Developing a Home Practice Part4 - John Scott

As far as my practice was concerned, Summer 2007 was a kind of golden age for me. Nice warm mornings that helped with my flexibility. I was still quite new to the practice so still really excited by the newness and otherness of what I was doing. I 'd lost five or six Kilos and was feeling healthier, fitter, much more flexible. I was eating less, drinking less. I was feeling calm and relaxed, practice was good, life was good.

I'd settled into the Swenson short practices on work days, the 30 or 40 minute program. I didn't need to keep referring to the book now so could begin to focus on the practice more, on my breathing. On my days off I would work through the full practice with Swenson's book, employing his different variations.

I read about Ashtanga more. I'd never been to a Shala and so was still very much outside the whole tradition and didn't feel much connection to it. That was fine by me I was only interested in the practice anyway. I'd traveled for much of my twenties, hitchhiking and living in different countries, although not India. The whole run off to India to study yoga thing didn't entice me as much as it might have done if I'd come to Ashtanga earlier. My background is Philosophy so I'd read and studied to lesser and greater degrees world philosophies and religions. I'd been interested in Buddhism in my youth and done some Zen, explored the Tao a little. Heidegger was my philosopher of choice and while I might have been interested in the past concerning comparisons between him and Sankara or Heidegger and Buddhism I wasn't in the market for a new philosophy or belief system. The practice was enough, still is.

I went to Paris in July 07 for 10 days and took my mat with me. I tried to find a little hotel that had enough room to practice. This was mainly a reading week for me. I liked to go to Paris with some Heidegger and sit in the Tuilleries with some wine and a sandwich and do some close reading all day. I did the full series every morning for the first time since I'd begun Ashtanga.
And in November I took my mat to Japan when I went home and practiced there every morning.





During that summer I became quite the Ashtanga consumer. I bought John Scott's DVD as well as the Richard Freeman collection on eBay. I didn't get on with the Richard Freeman DVD's (although now I use his intermediate all the time ) and John Scott's was too advanced. That said I was blown away by John's practice, the strength and grace he brought to it. I couldn't practice along with it, but watching it again a few months later would bring me back to Ashtanga after I began to flirt with 'The Rocket'.




Note: Part five was about a brief flirtation with 'The Rocket'.


from Developing a Home Practice Part 6 - John Scott


I think I practiced 'The rocket' for about a month possibly two (see part 5 and 6). It was great fun, I became stronger and fitter and more fearless but the Jump back didn't seem to be getting any closer. I was beginning to have doubts. It was a cool practice, but somehow....soulless. It felt more like an exercise program where Ashtanga had felt, if not a spiritual practice then at least a meditative one. I could focus on the breath in the Rocket but I didn't feel as if I was meditating on the breath.

I came across my John Scott DVD again, put it on and was just blown away. Here's a link to the Intro on youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PDWUjPUpbHo In his Primary he's practicing on a black mat in an empty, white studio. There's this big booming ujaii breath and a voice over giving the count and drishti. His gaze is fixed and he moves through Primary with such Strength, and yet..... grace. It's a very powerful, controlled and focused practice. I watched Lino Miele's Practice http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8KAU3xNVTAE too and ordered the DVD, getting a similar impression. Inspiring stuff

The Rocket may have all these cool asana but it had nothing on John Scott doing his Primary. Yes he was throwing in some handstands and lifts but they made sense within the practice, they didn't seem out of place, unlike the core work in The Rocket. There was an integrity to the practice. It wasn't about being able to do cool poses or being strong and powerful. It was something about moving the body through space on the breath. Body, Spirit, Will. 

Next : Returning to Ashtanga, turning Veggie and Sharath

Developing a Home Practice Part 7 - John Scott / Sharath

The John Scott DVD brought me to realise that I wanted to practice Ashtanga rather than any other style or variation of Yoga. I should probably consider here why it was that I decided to continue practicing at home alone, rather than seek out a Shala to practice at. I mean, if I had been so taken with the practice and wanted to commit myself to it then why not?

Good question, and one that I've never really attempted to answer in any detail, probably because I'm really not sure of the answer. Curious thing Yoga, there you are..... on your mat, it's your space, you focus on your breath as you move within this space, It's private, solitary and yet you look up and there's another eleven people in this little room, doing the same thing, or a hundred in some giant studio. Something doesn't fit. And yet..... your engaged in a practice and a practice tends to be social, it has a history, it has a world. Strange how the personal and the social come together here on the mat. The practice then is never private.

Perhaps I just got used to practicing alone. I can see how practicing at a Shala, with others, can be a rewarding experience. I've heard about the energy in the room , the sound of the breath, and the movement of all these other bodies. The video's I've seen of practicing in Mysore, for instance, I've found moving. Something wonderful about all these people from all over the world coming together in this room, practising together with focus and sincerity.

I'm tempted to go, I am. I know there's so much I could learn from generous teachers, and yet I love practicing alone. I love getting up in the morning and going into my practice space in the near dark. I love the little rituals, the sound of my mat rolling out, aligning my towel perfectly. I love, best of all, taking my place at the head of the mat, I can hear cars going by outside the window and yet here it's like a sanctuary. With that first reaching up in Sury A the world drops away for an hour, hour and a half. I don't notice the cars again or the voices outside until sometime in Savasana.

But then no doubt it's a similar experience at the Shala.



So John Scott's DVD made me realise that I wanted to practice Ashtanga again. However, I found the DVD hard to practice with, it's long too. Luckily, I came across Sharath's Primary just in time. I think I bought it on ebay.  The first time I practiced with it, everything changed. the practice took about an hour and five minutes. I'd been practicing Swenson's 40 minute short form, four days a week and full primary twice. Now I began to do full Primary every morning. I could even shave a little time off the finishing to bring it in under an hour if I needed to. This revolutionised my practice. I was working towards Mari B and D every morning and supta Kurmasana and Garbha pindasana........ there's something about doing the whole practice too, the short form always felt a bit of a cheat. Now I felt more committed to the practice. By the end of the first week I remember being exhausted, all those extra Jump backs (even my lame jump backs). But I was becoming fitter and stronger.

I was losing weight too. I was feeling healthier. I'd already started to eat better, eat less, drink less wine in the evening. You don't feel like eating so much when you know you have this full on practice in the morning. In March I also became a Vegetarian, mainly due to a growing disgust with the meat industry. But Ashtanga had something to do with that decision too.

And Sharath's practice was so simple, nothing fancy, no.....flourishes, no fancy handstands and lifts. And his Jump back, he just lifted and jumped back. None of that lifting up in pike that Lino does in his DVD before crossing his legs and lifting back through. And his jump through....it was almost a little hop. I'd been trying to do a Lino jump back and of course failing miserably, but Sharath's jump back now that was doable.....wasn't it?


I practiced with Sharath's dvd for a few months I seem to remember, which established a full daily practice. As I moved away from practicing with the DVD I found I naturally slowed my practice, it's a slower practice that I've leaned towards ever since


*

Afterword: 

And I haven't even mentioned how inspired I was by David Williams and how getting his poster of Primary to Advanced series in 2010 ended up inspiring me to practice everything on it, madness. But also reading a long review of his workshop from my friend Maya and how he talked of a lifelong 'sustainable' practice.


And how he and Nancy also mentioned the mythical 'Rishi' series and that was a whole rabbit hole of discovery right there. And Richard Freeman's week long workshop in London, which I'm still processing, enough in that one week to keep you practicing for decades.

*

In 2010 I attended Srivatsa Ramaswami's Vinyasa Krama Teacher Training. Ramaswami was a student of Pattabhi Jois' teacher Krishnamacharya, for over thirty years, from just after Krishnamacharya left Mysore.

One element of the teacher training was a close reading, line by line, of Krishnamacharya's texts, including Yoga Makaranda (Mysore 1934). I've continued that close reading and exploration of Krishnamacharya's approach to asana ever since and it's this text that has more than anything continued to inform my practice. I still consider my practice Ashtanga, these days it's mostly half Primary/half Intermediate. I would say my main inspiration now comes from Krishnamacharya's texts, from Srivatsa Ramaswami, Manju (see my Manju resource from 2013) and Richard Freeman as well as Simon Borg-Olivier and his focus on safe and sustainable practice.



*

↧
↧

Why did I waste so much time on the fancy asana?

February 12, 2018, 5:20 pm
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It strikes me now that only one of these postures is worth my time and that’s the first, Maha Mudra, why did I waste so much time and energy on all the others?



Is it really to keep us coming back to the mat or is it all a bit of a con, are we being distracted from what we first found when we practiced Primary. When I look back at my previous post I’m reminded of how I was more struck by the meditative quality of the practice than the actual asana, the asana madness came later, seduced by the awareness that my middle aged recently obese body could do these strange and wonderful contortions. Are we led astray? Did I lead myself astray, it was a home practice after all. And don’t we alway end up back at Primary asana anyway, sooner or later, whether from injury or age or self awareness?

These days, when practicing Primary, I’ll tend to skip even Janu Sirsasana A an B and just spend quality time in Maha Mudra instead with Kumbhaka after the inhalation (I might include C and D, I might not). All these postures, aren’t they a distraction? Jois said they were for Instagram ( OK, he actually said demonstration).






Above: The photos in the poster were all work in progress photos, this was before Instagram. However I too succumbed to fancy asana in fancy location, the one above in Santorini to promote Manduka's new blue mat .


Jois inherited From Krishnamacharya, lists of Primary and Intermediate asana, which he kept pretty much in the same order but practiced as fixed series. He also inherited a rag bag of what Krishnamacharya referred to as ‘Proficient ‘ postures that Jois employed as an Advanced series, then it seems to have become Advanced A and Advanced B and finally 3rd, 4th, 5th and 6th. That’s a lot of demonstration asana, I’ll ask it agai, have we been, are we being, led astray?

Exploring these asana was fun though, I admit it, and we can often use perhaps the distraction in our lives. There is a time though, surely, to put the toys away or perhaps not even take them out in the first place. And on reflection the Advanced asana were actually easy, no really, all that work on Kapo and dropping back over the years, the leg behind head work, easy compared to just sitting with the breath, getting beyond the monotony and relishing the space to be found there. I let my Pranayama slip a little, a lot, after coming back off nights and finding myself with less time in the mornings, it was a bugger to get it back again, to just sit and breathe rather than just knock out some asana. There was time of course, it was just harder, it is just harder, just sitting has always been harder than the most mind blowing arm balance.

Krishnamacharya wrote that they (‘advanced’ asana - are they really advanced or just intricate?) were unnecessary for most but that a few practitioners should practice them, so that they were not lost again. I asked a question of Krishnamacharya once on the blog “Hey Krishnamacharya, is there really any point to putting my leg behind my head?” ( you can google for the post or http://grimmly2007.blogspot.jp/2015/09/convince-me-krishnamacharya-are-there.html ). He replied via Yoga Makaranda (Mysore 1934) that these postures could benefit the different chakras, I’m still not convinced.

See this post which looks at most of the leg behind head postures in the poster this way, with a photo from Yoga makaranda and Krishnamacharya's list of supposed benefits http://grimmly2007.blogspot.jp/2015/09/convince-me-krishnamacharya-are-there.html


I originally made up this Leg behind head sheet to show how Krishnamacharya seems to have taught, not in series like Jois but in groups of asana. If you had a nice Janu Sirsasana then he might lead you to a basic leg behind head posture and if proficient then he would ‘rediscover’ more leg behind head postures and no doubt use you in his demonstrations. Krishnamacharya was of course trying to promote Yoga that had fallen into disfavour. These days we tend to use these asana to promote ourselves (yep, done it, allowed my playing the flute with my leg behind my head to sit on a workshop flyer) rather than Yoga. Krishnamacharya fell into the same trap of the rest of us, rather than disclose Yoga he seems to have unintentionally hidden it under a pile of manure. Note the last photo isn’t me but a young BKS Iyengar from Krishnamacharya’s 1938



In my defence, there was actually a point to the flute photos, see this post
http://grimmly2007.blogspot.jp/2013/04/chanting-or-playing-flute-in-asana.html




In the past I've asked if we are at fault with Instagram and social media but perhaps now I'm asking if they too were at blame, Jois certainly with his four series of advanced postures, Iyengar,  but Krishnamacharya too. In seeking to promote yoga through asana perhaps he buried it away, hid it even further from sight just as perhaps the Hatha yogi's did before him with all their tantric practices, taking us ever further from Patanjali. Ashtanga, it isn't perhaps what it says on the box. It's a thought.
↧

The Ashtanga.com Teacher's List (including criteria) but also so much more inc. Ashtanga classes from Feb 1999

February 15, 2018, 8:18 pm
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On my earlier posts concerning Ashtanga Authorisation 1980-Present and on the later posts concerning the KPJAYI.org list ( now Sharathjois.com) I mentioned the role of Ashtanga.com and how it had the original list of Ashtanga teachers that was eventually carried over to become the first AYRI list in 2008 (Ashtanga Yoga Research Institute - later KPJAYI, the K. Pattabhi Jois Ashtanga yoga Institute).

Ashtanga.com is is a wonderful site, a resource I often forget about only to feel like it's Christmas every time I rediscover it, a list of Ashtanga articles that stretch back to 1999 and more besides. I've added a banner and link to the teachers page over on the right of the blog, that will stay there in pride of place. If you haven't visited the site for awhile, below is the, to my mind, sensible criteria for listing teachers. I've also added the main links to the different sections of the blog and the treasure trove of articles.


Today, via Wayback.com - the Internet Archive, I also came across even earlier manifestations of the list. It appears that in Feb1999, there was a list of places on Ashtanga.com where Ashtanga classes were being held, an asterisk indicating those teachers authorised by Pattabhi Jois.

In 2000 the list of places becomes a list of Authorised teachers (under pressure perhaps).

"This list contains only teachers PERSONALLY AUTHORIZED by Sri K. Pattabhi Jois."

I've included both those lists in the appendix at the bottom of this post and have added them to the original Authorisation post where you can also compare the 2008 Ashtanga.com list with the list as it was carried over to the AYRI and KPJAYI website, noting perhaps the names that were left behind.

The Ashtanga.com Ashtanga Classes and teachers list is part of the history of the practice, the tradition if you will but the list is only one part of this amazing website.

Looking at the names, the address of those early studios, shalas and early places of practice I thought it might be nice to add old photos of the locations. If your old studio is listed and you have a photo or if you were a student there and have a picture of the outside of the building and possibly from inside feel free to pass it along on my fb blog page or send me a link to the photo in comments and I'll add the photos next to the name on the list. If you don't have a photo yourself perhaps send the link to someone you think may have. I imagine many of these old studios (some still current)  hold fond memories for those who practiced there. 

This will all end up on the permanent  Ashtanga authorisation page at the top of the blog.


Thank you Betty for all your work over the years maintaining this Ashtanga institution.


http://ashtanga.com/html/criteria.html

Links on the Ashtanga.Com Website


















*


The Newsletter page has links to newsletters going back to 2004, each lists also includes the workshops for that year.
http://www.ashtanga.com/html/ashtanganews.html


*



The articles are a treasure trove in themselves, I've spent hours reading through some of these in the past, then I would forget about the page only to rediscover it again at another time and spend another couple of hours.

I had assumed that the articles were old but they continue up to the presents, one from Scott Johnson, an interview with Anthony "Prem" Carlisi from last year.

Continuing the research to keep ashtanga yoga alive — An Interview with Anthony "Prem" Carlisi by Scott Johnson (Stillpoint Yoga Blog, April 2017)

There's even one of mine...

Entelechy: An Interview with Certified Ashtanga Teacher Kristina Karitinou (19 November 2013



Articles


Yoga Tour Articles






***


APPENDIX


1. First ONLINE mention of the cost of studying at AYRI - Dec 2001

2. First AYRI mention of Authorisation process - Ashtanga.com - Jan 2004
Includes request for all teachers to sent in their Authorization letters to be replaced/renewed

"Starting in January 2003, the Ashtanga Yoga Research Institute will issue NEW official authorization letters to authorized Ashtanga Yoga teachers. All authorized teachers are requested to send their original authorization letters to AYRI in exchange for official authorization letters on AYRI letterhead. AYRI will then notify Ashtanga.com of the teachers' names that can be re-listed on Ashtanga.com. Failure to turn in your original authorization letter may result in removal from the teachers' list."

3. First ONLINE List of teachers - 
Update: Ashtanga Classes Feb1999
First Authorised teachers Ashtanga.com June 2000
Ashtanga.com List Jan 2004
(basis of the AYRI list)


4. First AYRI Authorisation details mentioned on AYRI website - May 2007


5. First AYRI ONLINE Authorised/Certified List - 22 Aug 08 


*


1. Ashtanga Yoga Nilayam 15 dec 01

If you'd like to attend classes at the Ashtanga Yoga Research Institute in Mysore please write to:
Sri K. Pattabhi Jois
876/1 First Cross
Laxmipuram, 570004 Mysore
 Karnataka, India
Please include your full name, home address, arrival date, and duration of your stay.
The class fees are $350 US per month, with a $200 registration fee the first month. Please allow for a minimum stay of one month, however three months are recommended in order to have time to learn the practice properly. Food and lodging are not provided, but there are good hotels and restaurants nearby.


***

2. Authorized Teachers  


Part 1 Before the the Authorised teacher list on Ashtanga.com there was the 'Classes' page.

from Wayback machine Feb. 1999

Yoga Schools



To be listed on this page, your ashtanga school must meet all of the following criteria:
1. Offer at least one class in TRADITIONAL ASHTANGA (ASTANGA) YOGA (e.g., Mysore-style, Primary Series);
2. Explicitly state or indicate on your Web site and brochures that traditional ashtanga yoga is offered; and
3. Provide your address, instructors' names and teaching backgrounds, types of ashtanga classes, and studio history.
4. If you also would like your logo listed, e-mail it to betty@ashtanga.com in GIF or JPEG format in a 10K or smaller file size. Logos are subject to editing for easy loading.
5. Listings are subject to removal if classes no longer meet the above criteria.


*Note: If you are PERSONALLY AUTHORIZED by Sri K. Pattabhi Jois to teach ashtanga yoga, an asterisk will be placed next to your studio name (subject to confirmation by Sri K. Pattabhi Jois). (Please be patient if the asterisk has not yet appeared next to your listing.)

Namaste. United States Australia Canada Finland France India Israel Italy New Zealand United Kingdom UNITED STATES NORTHERN CALIFORNIA Ashtanga Yoga School of San Francisco Robert Brook, Director Shotwell Studios 3252A 19th Street San Francisco, CA 94110 Center of Balance 1220 Pear Avenue, Suite I Mountain View, CA 94043 (650) 967-6414 Center of Balance Beverly Frederick Ashtanga Vinyasa Yoga Marin/Sonoma Emily Griffith Ashtanga Vinyasa Yoga Monterey/Pacific Grove Cathy Hall Finnish Brotherhood Hall 1970 Chestnut Street Berkeley, CA It's Yoga 848 Folsom Street San Francisco, CA 94107

Monkey Yoga Shala Tim Thompson 3215 Lakeshore Ave Oakland, CA 94610 Piedmont Yoga Studio 4125 Piedmont Avenue 4131 1/2 Piedmont Avenue Oakland, CA San Francisco Yoga Shala 1500 Castro Street @ 25th Street San Francisco, CA 94114 Soma Yoga 30 Minna Alley (between 1st and 2nd Streets & Mission and Howard Streets) San Francisco, CA Yogasource 525 Alma Street Palo Alto, CA 94301 (650) 328-YOGA The Yoga and Movement Center 2940 Camino Diablo, Suite 200 Walnut Creek, CA 94596 The Yoga Studio* John Berlinsky 650 East Blithedale Mill Valley, CA 94941 Yogic Arts Studio 1097 54th St. #C Oakland, CA 94608 (510) 595-YOGA 4th Street Yoga 1809C 4th Street Berkeley, CA 94710 (510) 845-YOGA SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA Astanga Yoga Center* Tim Miller, Director 118 West E Street Encinitas, CA 92924 San Luis Obispo Yoga Centre Peter Sterios, Director 967 Monterey Street P.O. Box 653 San Luis Obispo, CA 93406 Yoga Works* (two locations) Maty Ezraty and Chuck Miller 2215 Main Street Santa Monica, CA 90405 1426 Montana Avenue, Second Floor Santa Monica, CA 90403 COLORADO The Yoga Workshop* Richard Freeman 2020 21st Street Boulder, CO 80302 DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA Ashtanga Yoga Center David Ingalls 4435 Wisconsin Ave N.W. Washington, D.C. 20016 FLORIDA Boca Yoga 450 NE 20th St Boca Raton, FL 33431 ILLINOIS N.U. Yoga Center Suddha Weixler 3047 N. Lincoln Avenue, Suite 320 Chicago, IL 60657 MASSACHUSETTS Harvard University Ashtanga Yoga Practice Joji Montelibano Eliot House - Dance Studio (Mon-Fri, 6-9am) Harvard University Cambridge, MA 02138 (Note: need Harvard ID to enter Eliot House; otherwise, contact Joji for admittance.) NEW YORK Astanga Yoga Shala* Eddie Stern 611 Broadway, Room 203 New York City, NY 10012 Jivamukti Yoga Center 404 Lafayette Street, 3rd Floor New York, NY 10003 Power Yoga Thom Birch and Beryl Bender Birch OHIO Joyful Practice Yoga Martha Marcom 479 North Columbia Avenue Columbus, OH 43209 PENNSYLVANIA Yoga Sport 950 Colwell Lane (@ Superfit Gym) Conshohocken, PA 19428 TEXAS The Center For Awareness Jeri-Sue Barron 2507 Lazydale Drive Dallas, TX 75228 UTAH Yoga Central 1550 E. 3300 So. Salt Lake City, UT 84106 VERMONT Yoga Vermont Kathy McNames, Director Box A23 Chace Mill Burlington, VT 05401 WASHINGTON The Ashtanga Yoga School 1412 12th Avenue Seattle, WA 98122 INTERNATIONAL AUSTRALIA Ashtanga Yoga Moves* The Verona Building 17 Oxford Street Paddington 2021 NSW Centre of Balance Dena Kingsberg P.O. Box 1443 Byron Bay 2481 NSW Gold Coast Yoga Centre 2 Fleay Court Burleigh Heads West Queensland 4220 CANADA Downward Dog Yoga Centre Ron Reid and Diane Bruni 110 Spadina Avenue @ Adelaide St.W. Studio #212 Toronto, Ontario M5V 2K4 Kaivalya Yoga Centre Allison Ulan, Director 401 Richmond St. W., Studio 1 Toronto, Ontario M5V 3A8 FINLAND Astanga Yoga Helsinki* Vilhonvuorenkuja 20 F 00500 Helsinki Finland FRANCE Centre Samasthiti - Ashtanga Vinyasa Yoga Caroline Boulinguez Paris France INDIA Astanga Yoga Research Institute* Sri K. Pattabhi Jois, Director R. Sharath, Assistant Director 876/1 First Cross, Lakshmipuram Mysore 570004 Karnataka State, South India ISRAEL Ashtanga Yoga--The Israeli Center Gilad and Miri Harouvi 10 Shoken Street, First Floor Tel Aviv 65153 Israel Shimon Ben-Avi 7 Ha'Etzel Street Karkur 37068 Israel ITALY Astanga Yoga School* Lino Miele Via Cassia, 698 00189 Rome Italy NEW ZEALAND Auckland Yoga Academy 33 High Street Auckland City, NZ UNITED KINGDOM Astanga Vinyasa Yoga in the North 3 Owlers Walk Todmorden Lancs, OL14 8HY UK John C. Scott Yoga Therapy Centre Royal London Homeopathic Hospital 60 Great Ormond St London WC1 Oxford Ashtanga Timetable December 1998 - April 1999 (courtesy of Ian Macdonald)
Raphael Dabora Colemans Hatch (near Forest Row) E. Sussex Sangam Yoga Studio 80A Battersea Rise Clapham Junction London SW11 1EH UK The Yoga Centre 16 Canning Street Edinburgh EH3 8EG UK
*


Part 2 - in 2000 the classes page turned into the first
list of teachers authorised by Pattabhi Jois.

Yoga Schools This list contains only teachers PERSONALLY AUTHORIZED by Sri K. Pattabhi Jois.
See the Ashtanga.com Requirements for Listing for more information. UNITED STATES Arkansas California (Northern) California (Southern) Colorado District of Columbia Hawaii Illinois New York Ohio Oregon Texas Washington ASIA AUSTRALIA & NEW ZEALAND CANADA EUROPE UNITED STATES ARKANSAS Louise Ellis 2332 Hatfield Street Fayetteville, AR 72703 NORTHERN CALIFORNIA John Berlinsky The Yoga Studio 650 East Blithedale Mill Valley, CA 94941 Betty Lai Center of Balance 1220 Pear Ave, Suites I & J Mountain View, CA 94043 Leigha Nicole (2 locations) San Francisco Yoga Shala 1500 Castro Street (@ 25th Street) San Francisco, CA 94114 7th Heaven Body Awareness Center 2820 7th Street Berkeley, CA 94710 Mark Yeo 7th Heaven Body Awareness Center 2820 7th Street Berkeley, CA 94710 (510) 665-4300 SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA Manju Jois Certified (son of Sri K. Pattabhi Jois) 2428 CMTO Ocean Cove Cardiff, CA 92007 Tim Miller Certified Astanga Yoga Center 118 West E Street Encinitas, CA 92024 ashtangayoga@home.com Maty Ezraty Chuck Miller Certified Yoga Works (2 locations) 2215 Main Street Santa Monica, CA 90405 1426 Montana Avenue, Second Floor Santa Monica, CA 90403 Kimberly Flynn Noah Williams Ahimsa Yoga 3820 Sunset Blvd Los Angeles, CA 90026 Jorgen Christiansson Maha Yoga 13050 San Vicente Blvd #202 Los Angeles, CA 90049 Steve Dwelley Santa Barbara Yoga Center 32 East Micheltorena Street Santa Barbara, CA 93101 David Miliotis Santa Barbara, CA (805) 692-9469 Andrea Werner Santa Barbara, CA COLORADO Richard Freeman Certified The Yoga Workshop 2020 21st Street Boulder, CO 80302 The Yoga Workshop Annie (Grover) Pace Certified Box 125 Crestone, CO 81131 DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA David Ingalls Kelly Lynch Ashtanga Yoga Center 4435 Wisconsin Ave N.W. Washington, D.C. 20016 HAWAII Nancy Gilgoff House of Yoga & Zen Makawao, Maui, HI 96768 Norman Allen Kona, HI David Williams Maui, HI ILLINOIS Suddha Weixler N.U. Yoga Center 3047 N. Lincoln Avenue, Suite 320 Chicago, IL 60657 NEW YORK Eddie Stern Certified Patanjali Yoga Shala 611 Broadway, Suite 203 New York, NY 10012 Guy Donahaye (2 locations) Astanga Yoga Shala (at Segue Performance Space) 303 E. 8th Street New York, NY 10009 Patanjali Yoga Shala 611 Broadway, Suite 203 New York, NY 10012 Chris Buhner Patanjali Yoga Shala 611 Broadway, Suite 203 New York, NY 10012

David Life Certified Sharon Gannon Jivamukti Yoga Center 404 Lafayette Street, 3rd Floor New York, NY 10003 OHIO Martha Marcom Joyful Practice Yoga 479 North Columbia Avenue Columbus, OH 43209 OREGON Vance Selover Gillian Lerner Portland Ashtanga Yoga 3736 N.E. 17th Avenue Portland, OR 97212 TEXAS David Swenson Ashtanga Yoga Productions 3350 Highway 6, #194 Sugarland, TX 77478 WASHINGTON David Garrigues Certified Catherine Garrigues Certified The Ashtanga Yoga School 1412 12th Avenue Seattle, WA 98122 ASIA - AUTHORIZED TEACHERS INDIA Sri K. Pattabhi Jois, Director Sri R. Sharath, Assistant Director Astanga Yoga Research Institute 876/1, 1st Cross Lakshmipuram Mysore - 570004 Karnataka State, South India Sharmila Rao's Tutorials (granddaughter of Sri K. Pattabhi Jois) 5th Block Jayanagar Bangalore - 560041 Karen Haberman Certified Gerald Disse Bharat Nivas P.O. Poste Restante 605101 Auroville Tamil Nadu, South India Rolf Naujokat Certified Kirsten Berg Goa, India MALAYSIA/SINGAPORE Mark Yeo markyeo@hotmail.com (Mark is currently teaching in Berkeley, California. See Northern California classes) AUSTRALIA - AUTHORIZED TEACHERS Carl Nelson's Australia Ashtanga page Eileen Hall Certified Peter Sanson Tim Burns Paul Frechtling Mike Berghan Victoria Grouden Ashtanga Yoga Moves The Verona Building 17 Oxford Street Paddington 2021 NSW Dena Kingsberg Certified Centre of Balance P.O. Box 1443 Byron Bay 2481 NSW Iain Clark Certified Astanga Yoga Shala PO Box 5828, West End Brisbane Qld 4101 Monica Gauci Gregor Maehle 8 Limbs Ashtanga Yoga (2 locations) 2nd Floor, 3 Mouat Street Fremantle 6160 Western Australia 8 Limbs Ashtanga Yoga 220 Carr Place Leederville 6007 Tel 61 9 93854743 Graeme Northfield Certified Leone Northfield Brisbane David Roche 47 Sixth Avenue St. Peters, South Australia 5069 NEW ZEALAND Peter Nilsson Jude Hynes Auckland Yoga Academy 1st Floor 33 High Street, Central City Auckland, New Zealand CANADA - AUTHORIZED TEACHERS Ron Reid Downward Dog Yoga Centre 110 Spadina Avenue Studio #212 Toronto, Ontario M5V 2K4

EUROPE - AUTHORIZED TEACHERS


Finland
France
Greece
Italy
Spain
United Kingdom


FINLAND
  
Astanga Yoga Helsinki
Kolmas linja 21 C 60
00530 Helsinki, Finland


FRANCE

Caroline Boulinguez
Centre Samasthiti - Ashtanga Vinyasa Yoga
Paris, France


Brigette DeRose Certified
74 Bd Gambetta
62100 Calais

Philippe Mons Certified
86 Rue De La Gare
59350 St. Andre

Odile Morcrette Certified
20 Rue Fenelon
59000 Lille


GREECE

Radha and Pierre
Yoga Plus
Crete


ITALY

Lino Miele Certified
Tina Pizzimenti Certified
Astanga Yoga School
Via Vasi 18/A
Rome Italy


SPAIN

Tomas Zorzo Certified
Camino Diez
Astanga Yoga Center
C/ San Bernabe 7-3ª
33002 Oviedo
Spain


UNITED KINGDOM

Oxford Timetable

Michael Taylor
Elisabeth Wilson
Astanga Vinyasa Yoga in the North
3 Owlers Walk
Todmorden
Lancs, OL14 8HY


John Scott Certified
Lucy Crawford Scott
The Space at Number 8
8 Chapel Street
Penzance, Cornwall TR18 4AJ
England


Hamish Hendry
Yoga Therapy Centre
Royal Homeopathic Hospital
60 Great Ormond Street
London WC1N


Cathy Louise Broda
Yoga Therapy Centre
Royal Homeopathic Hospital
60 Great Ormond Street
London WC1N


The Yoga Centre
1 Meadow Place
Edinburgh EH9 1JZ
Scotland



*

Part 3 Teachers' Listings on Ashtanga.com updated January  2004

The procedure for obtaining a teacher's listing on Ashtanga.com is outlined below. Only Sri K. Pattabhi Jois and Sharath Rangaswamy of the Ashtanga Yoga Research Institute (AYRI) can issue teaching authorizations and certifications for Ashtanga Yoga. Inquiries about teachers' qualifications should be directed to the individual teachers. Teachers are responsible for verifying the accuracy of the information in their listings. Ashtanga.com and its creators, producers, and deliverers assume no liability or responsibility for any errors or omissions in the class listings on this site. The teachers' listings on the Classes pages are approved by Sri K. Pattabhi Jois.

1. Starting in January 2003, the Ashtanga Yoga Research Institute will issue NEW official authorization letters to authorized Ashtanga Yoga teachers. All authorized teachers are requested to send their original authorization letters to AYRI in exchange for official authorization letters on AYRI letterhead. AYRI will then notify Ashtanga.com of the teachers' names that can be re-listed on Ashtanga.com. Failure to turn in your original authorization letter may result in removal from the teachers' list.

2. "Certified" Teachers: Contact betty@ashtanga.com to send a photocopy of the official government certificate via email (scanned image of certificate), fax, or post in order to be listed on Ashtanga.com.

3. Verbally Authorized Teachers should write to AYRI to request the new official authorization letter. Please enclose a photograph of yourself with your correspondence.

4. Class Schedule Requirement: In addition to receiving certification or authorization to teach, you are required to teach Ashtanga Yoga in the TRADITIONAL FORMAT. The traditional format consists of daily classes in the Mysore style in correct sequential order and without deviation from the traditional form of the asanas as taught by Sri K. Pattabhi Jois at the Ashtanga Yoga Research Institute in Mysore, South India. The traditional format includes the practices outlined in the Yoga Mala, Astanga Yoga by Lino Miele, and Ashtanga Yoga by John Scott. Explicitly indicate on your website and brochures that such traditional Ashtanga Yoga is offered.

5. Omissions from the List: Teachers' names may be omitted from the list if they are on hiatus or are not currently offering classes in the style or quantity required for a listing.

Please send all AYRI correspondence regarding authorization letters to:

R. Sharath
Gokulam, Mysore 570002
Karnataka, India

***


3. Teachers LIST Jan 2004 Ashtanga.com 
( this list was clearly used as the basis for the later AYRI list)
Note: 87 teachers mentioned on this list

United States | Africa | Asia | Australia & NZ | Canada | Europe | South America | Traveling Teachers

United States



California


Louise Ellis Certified

Ashtanga Yoga Center

Fayetteville, AR 


Northern California



John Berlinsky

Lea Watkins 
YogaStudio - Mill Valley, CA 

Leigha Nicole 
YogaStudio - Larkspur Landing CA 

Vance Selover

Zoe Slatoff

7th Heaven Yoga
Berkeley, CA 

Clayton Horton

Greenpath Yoga Studio
San Francisco, 



Manju Jois Certified

(son of Sri K. Pattabhi Jois)

Leucadia, CA 92024


Tim Miller Certified

Astanga Yoga Center
Encinitas, CA 

Mary Jo Mulligan

San Diego, CA


Maty Ezraty

Chuck Miller Certified

Yoga Works Montana

Santa Monica, 


Kimberly Flynn Williams

Noah Williams Certified

Ashtanga Yoga Shala

Los Angeles, 


Jorgen Christiansson

LA Yoga Center
Los Angeles, CA 



Steve Dwelley

Ashtanga Yoga Shala

Santa Barbara, CA 


David Miliotis

Andrea Werner Miliotis

Santa Barbara Yoga Center





Colorado

Richard Freeman Certified

The Yoga Workshop
Boulder, CO 


Annie (Grover) Pace Certified

Crestone, CO 

Gary Damsky

Telluride, CO





Wisconsin

David Ingalls

Ashtanga Yoga Center

Wisconsin Washington, D.C.


Florida

Keith Moore
Florida



Wayne Krassner

Miami Beach, FL


Hawaii



Nancy Gilgoff

House of Yoga and Zen
Makawao, Maui, HI 

Bhavani Maki

Ashtanga Yoga Kaua'i


Cathy Louise Broda

Purple Yoga Hawaii
Honolulu, HI 

Nicki Doane

Eddie Modestini

Maya Yoga
Paia, HI 

Norman Allen

Kona, HI



David Williams

Maui Fitness Plus 
Kihei, Maui, Hawaii



Illinois


Amy Beth Treciokas

YogaNow
Chicago, 


Louisiana

Melanie Fawer Certified
The Yoga Room
New Orleans, LA 


Michigan


Matthew Darling


New York




Guy Donahaye

Ashtanga Yoga Shala


New York, NY 

Govinda Kai

New York, NY 

James Butkevich



Texas



David Swenson

Ashtanga Yoga Productions

Houston, TX 


Seattle



David Garrigues Certified
 
Catherine Garrigues Certified

The Ashtanga Yoga School
Seattle, WA 98122


Carola Schmid

The Practice Space

Seattle WA 



Africa - Authorized Teachers

Egypt

Charlie Taylor-Rugman

Ashtanga Yoga Cairo
 
Zamalek, Cairo






Australia & New Zealand - Authorized Teachers

Australia


Eileen Hall Certified

Paul Frechtling

Ashtanga Yoga Moves
Paddington, NSW




Dena Kingsberg Certified

Centre of Balance
 Byron Bay 2481 NSW



Iain Clark Certified

Ashtanga Yoga Shala




Monica Gauci

Gregor Maehle

8 Limbs Ashtanga Yoga 
Leederville, Western Australia


Graeme Northfield Certified

Leonie Northfield

Absolute Astanga 
Yoga
 Cooroy  QLD



David Roche Certified

St. Peters, South Australia 5069



New Zealand

Peter Nilsson
Jude Hynes




Mike Berghan

Victoria Grouden
Te Aro Astanga Yoga

Wellington, Aotearoa
 


Canada - Authorized Teachers

Ron Reid

Downward Dog Yoga Centre

Toronto, Ontario 



Mark Darby Certified

Joanne Darby Certified

Ashtanga Yoga Studio

Montreal, Quebec 

Fiona Stang

City Yoga
Vancouver, BC 



Europe - Authorized Teachers

Denmark | Finland | France | Greece | Italy | Spain | Sweden | United Kingdom

Denmark

Gwendoline Hunt

Astanga Yoga Skole 
København
Copenhagen



Finland

Juha Javanainen

Petri Räisänen

Monna Gronlund

Astanga Yoga School of Helsinki 

Helsinki, Finland


Anne Nuotio

Helsinki, Finland

France

Caroline Boulinguez


Ana Maria Magalhaes
 
Paris 


Brigitte Deroses Certified

Calais

Philippe Mons Certified

St. Andre



Odile Morcrette Certified
 
Lille


Greece


Radha Warrell

Pierre Seghir

Yoga Plus
Crete


Kristina Karitinos Ireland

Yoga Practice in Mani Greece

Maria Papaioannou

Aerodromio Mykonos 


Italy

Lino Miele Certified

Tina Pizzimenti 
Certified
 Ashtanga Yoga School Roma


Spain

Tomas Zorzo Certified

Astanga Yoga
 Oviedo, Spain


Camino Diez
 
Lanzarote, Spain



Sweden

Charlotte Lindstrom


United Kingdom

Michael Taylor

Elisabeth Wilson

Astanga Vinyasa Yoga in the North

Todmorden,Lancs, 


John Scott Certified

Lucy Crawford Scott

The Yoga Studio

Newlyn, Penzance, Cornwall 





Hamish Hendry Certified

Anna Wise 

Astanga Yoga London 
 NW1 London



R. Alexander Medin 
Certified
Yoga Place E2
Bethnal Green Road, London 

Tracy West

Birmingham 

South America - Authorized Teachers

Chile

Gustavo Ponce

Yogashala

M. Sanchez 
Las Condes, Santiago, Chile



*

Traveling Teachers - Authorized

Ashtanga Yoga teachers who are always on-the-go. See Workshops for individual workshop locations and details.

Joseph Dunham


Anthony Carlisi


Rolf Naujokat (Certified)


Kirsten Berg


Dominic Corigliano (Certified)

Saisha Stephanie Petersen


Michael Gannon



Randy Parrish




The current Ashtanga.com list can be found here

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------



4. AYRI.org
Ashtanga Yoga Research Institute, Mysore, India
(Now KPJAYI)


May 2007

1. How do I become an authorized/certified Ashtanga Yoga teacher?

You must receive an official Authorization Letter or Certification Certificate through the Ashtanga Yoga Research Institute (AYRI) located at #235, 8th Cross, 3rd Stage, Gokulam, Mysore 570002, Karnataka, India. Only the Ashtanga Yoga Research Institute issues valid teaching authorizations and certifications for Ashtanga Yoga. Participation in the Sri K. Pattabhi Jois workshop tours and trips to AYRI locations outside of Mysore do not count towards authorization or certification.

NOTE: A student should by no means visit AYRI in Mysore for the sole purpose of getting authorized. Their visit should primarily be for their own education of the lineage to further their own practice under correct guidance of Pattabhi Jois.

2. What is the difference between Authorization and Certification?

There are two categories of teachers, "authorized" and "certified." Both types of teachers receive documents from the Ashtanga Yoga Research Institute indicating their teaching status. Authorized teachers generally are permitted to teach only the Ashtanga Yoga Primary Series and generally have made at least four trips to AYRI Mysore of 3+ months. The student must also demonstrate appropriate attitude, devotion to the practice, and proficiency in the Primary Series (and usually at least half of the Second Series) as determined by the directors of AYRI. Certified teachers have completed at least the first three series of Ashtanga Yoga and must demonstrate an appropriate level of proficiency in these series as determined by the directors of AYRI. These students generally have made 8 or more annual trips to AYRI Mysore and have at least 8-10 years of daily Ashtanga Yoga practice.

NOTE: AUTHORIZATION SHOULD NOT BE REQUESTED BUT GIVEN. The decision to give authorization or certification to teach is by no means solely dependent on the number of times a student has visited Mysore. It is based upon Guruji and Sharath’s evaluation of the person, his/her commitment and full respect of the lineage of the practice. Authorization is given with the trust that an AYRI student will teach as he/she has been taught in Mysore by Guruji and Sharath.

These guidelines are subject to change and do not constitute an official published policy of the Ashtanga Yoga Research Institute in Mysore, India. Please use these guidelines for your personal information only.





5. First AYRI ONLINE Authorised/Certified List
22 Aug 08 


Asia | Australia & New Zealand | Central & South America Europe | North America (Canada & USA 
* Certified


ASIA


India


Shri K. Pattabhi Jois, Director
K. Pattabhi Jois Ashtanga Yoga Institute, Mysore
www.kpjayi.org

Shri R. Sharath, Assistant Director
K. Pattabhi Jois Ashtanga Yoga Institute, Mysore


Saraswathi Rangaswamy *
K. Pattabhi Jois Ashtanga Yoga Institute, Mysore
www.saraswathiashtanga.com



Sharmila Mahesh
K. Pattabhi Jois Ashtanga Yoga Institute, Bangalore

Rolf Naujokat *
Goa, India

Louise Ellis *
Rishikesh, India

Maya Rao
Mumbai

Monica Marinoni
Ashtanga Yoga Auroville

Gabriella Pascoli
Ashtanga Goa


China


R. Alexander Medin *
The Landmark Mandarin Oriental Hotel, Hong Kong

Hortario Perez
Oriental Spa, Hong Kong


Japan


Govinda Kai * 
Mae Yoshikawa
Fukuoka

Ken Harakuma
Ashtanga Yoga Japan, Tokyo

Barry Silver
Ashtanga Yoyogi, Tokyo

Kranti
Under the Light, Tokyo


Singapore

James Figueira
The Yoga Shala, Singapore


Taiwan


Russell Altice Case 
Sally Evans
Ashanga Sangha, Taipei


Huang Chih Jo (Gladys Huang)
Space Yoga, Taipei


Thailand

Kirsten Berg  
S Mitchell Gold
Ashtanga Yoga Koh Phangan
Koh Phangan, Thailand




 Australia & New Zealand 


Aus - New South Wales

Eileen Hall *
YogaMoves, Bondi Junction

Dena Kingsberg *
Centre of Balance, Byron Bay

Nikki Fulford
Yogamat, Bondi Junction


Aus - Queensland

Iain Clark *
Ashtanga Yoga Shala, Paddington

Graeme Northfield *
Absolute Astanga Yoga, Cooroy


Aus - South Australia

David Roche *
Have Yoga - Will Travel, St. Peters


Aus - Victoria


Karyn Grenfell
Melbourne - Western Australia

Rob Schütze  
Jean Byrne
The Yoga Space, West Perth


New Zealand

John Scott *
Stillpoint Yoga, Nelson

Michael Norman Berghan
Te Aro Astanga Yoga, Wellington


Central & South America 


Brazil

Praça Santos Dumont,
 Rio de Janeiro - RJ, Brazil

Fábio Sayão
Ashtanga Yoga São Paulo

Ana Maria Magalhaes
Via Corpo, Salvador-Bahia

Sara Dubois
Ashtanga Yoga Atibaia


Chile


M. Sanchez Fontecilla,  S
antiago, Chile


Loreto Cortés
Ashtanga Yoga Chile, Santiago


Costa Rica


Mariela Cruz
Namasté Ashtanga Yoga Studio, San José



Europe

Austria

Horst Rinnerberger
Pure Yoga - Ashtanga Yoga Vienna


Belgium


Anne Pinette Meadows 
Brussels


Denmark

Susanna Finocchi & Jens Bache
Astanga Yoga School of Copenhagen


Finland


Juha Javanainen
Astanga Yoga School Helsinki


France

Brigitte Deroses *
Calais

Odile Morcette *
Lille

Germany

Bettina Anner
Köln, Germany


Heike Katharina Schmidt
Dvipada Studio, Cologne

Greece


Limni Evias 
Greece


Italy

Lino Miele * 
Tina Pizzimenti *
Scuola di Ashtanga Yoga, Roma


Norway

Taran Bhattal
Puro Yoga, Oslo


Poland

Basia j Lipska
 Wroclaw, Poland


Portugal

Casa Vinyasa,
  Lisbon, Portugal


Russia

Mikhail Konstantinov
Ashtanga Yoga Center, Moscow

Spain

Tomas Zorzo *
Centro de Yoga Ashtanga, Oviedo

Katia Garcia
Ashtanga Yoga Sadhana, Oviedo

Camino Diez
Centro de Yoga Ashtanga, Lanzarote

C Juanelo  
Madrid, Spain

Paseo Isabel 
Barcelona, Spain

Calle Pelayo 
Barcelona, Spain

Nick Evans
Yoga Studio, Barcelona

Eva Oller Ribosa
Estudio de Yoga, Barcelona


Sweden

Charlotte Lindstrom
Ashtangayoga.nu, Stockholm

Maria Boox
Yogashala Stockholm

Bill Brundell
Planet Ashtanga Yoga, Stockholm

Switzerland

Brett Prozio
Zurich


United Kingdom


Hamish Hendry * 
Anna Wise
Astanga Yoga London

Roberta Giannotti
Astanga Yoga London

Katie Heller
Astanga Yoga London

Lynne Pinette
West London Ashtanga Yoga, London

Cary Perkins
Yoga Place, London

Sarai Harvey-Smith
London

Beverley Sowerby
Ashtanga Yoga Bath

Simon Chandler
Ashtanga Yoga Bath


 North America (Canada & USA )
* Certified

Canada

Mark Darby *
Joanne Darby *
Sattva Yoga Shala, Montreal

Paul Gold 
Rachelle Gold
Ashtanga Yoga Shala, Toronto

David Robson
Ashtanga Yoga Centre of Toronto

Jeff Lichty
Harmony Lichty
Living Breathing Yoga


USA 


Arizona

Lisa Schrempp
Tucson, 

JB Linsky
USA - Northern California

Vance Selover
Ashtanga Yoga Berkeley

Heidi Lender & John Wilhelm
Ashtanga Yoga San Francisco

Adarsh Williams
Ashtanga Yoga Palo Alto



USA - Southern California

Manju Jois *
Leucadia

Tim Miller *
The Ashtanga Yoga Center, Carlsbad

Maia C. Heiss *
Ashtanga Yoga Malibu

James Butkevich
Ashtanga Yoga Los Angeles

Diana Christinson
Pacific Ashtanga Yoga Shala, Dana Point

Steve Dwelley
Ashtanga Yoga Shala, Santa Barbara


USA - Colorado

Richard Freeman *
The Yoga Workshop, Boulder

Annie Pace *
Shakti Sharanam, Crestone

Leigha Nicole
Splendid Yoga, Crestone

USA - District of Columbia

Keith Moore
Ashtanga Yoga Center DC

Faith Scimecca
Woodley Park Yoga, Washington DC



USA - Florida


Kino MacGregor *
Miami Life Center, Miami Beach

Tim Feldmann
Miami Life Center, Miami Beach

Greg Nardi
Miami Life Center, Miami Beach



USA - Hawaii

Noah Williams *
Pahoa, Hawaii

Anthony "Prem" Carlisi *

Chuck Miller *
Honokaa, Hawaii

Pamela Luther
Simply Ashtanga, Maui

Kimberly Flynn
Pahoa

Eagle
Pineapple Yoga, Kauai



USA - Illinois

Amy Ananda, 
Chicago



USA - Kentucky

Laura Spaulding
Yoga East, Inc., Louisville


USA - Louisiana

Melanie Fawer *
Asthanga Yoga Room, New Orleans

Jessica Blanchard
Balance Yoga & Wellness, New Orleans

Jill Ainsworth
Mysore New Orleans



USA - Massachusetts

Dominic Corigliano *

George Whiteside & Jean Cho
Cambridge, MA 



USA - New Mexico

Mary Jo Mulligan
Santa Fe, New Mexico



USA - New York

Eddie Stern *
Broome Street  New York NY

Sarah Plumer
Broome Street #2 New York NY 10013 

Karri Jinkins
Broome Street #2 New York NY 

Barbara Verrochi
The Shala Yoga House, New York

Matt Corigliano
New York

Stacey Platt
Tapovana, Sag Harbor


USA - Oregon

Olaf Kalfas *
Portland, OR 97214

Anne Finstad
 Portland

Kevin Kimple
Eugene, OR

David Miliotis 
Andrea Werner Miliotis
Bend, OR 

Stacey Lee
Bend, OR 97701



USA - Pennsylvania

Mary Flinn
Yoga Sutra School, Philadelphia



USA - Texas

Shelley Washington
Austin



USA - Vermont

Christine Hoar
Bristol Yoga, Bristol



USA - Washington

David Garrigues *
Catherine Garrigues *
Ashtanga Yoga School, Seattle


The current KPJAYI Authorisation list is now the Sharathjois.com list the link below redirects 




↧

January 2018 Newsletter from Srivatsa Ramaswami---2018

December 31, 2017, 3:51 pm
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January 2018 Newsletter from Srivatsa Ramaswami---2018

Warm  New Year Greetings from my "white House", my home for more than 75 years in Madras (chennai), my father built way back  in 1942 soon after I was born. Many good things have happened in the house, the birth of my younger sister (1946), the wedding of my elder sister (1953) the birth of my nephew (1955), almost daily puja of my mother and many vedic rituals performed by my father, learning vedic chants.. More importantly Sri Krishnamacharya would come to our house almost everyday for a few years during the later half of 1950's to teach yoga for my family, it was a great blessing. I have attached the pictures of the house and the yoga room where Sri Krishnamacharya taught . Wish you all a very happy and prosperous 2018.









 However long and strong the bond between an old man and an old house may be , it becomes tenuous over time and something has got to give

In 2018, I am planning to teach a few programs. 

2018

⦁Samkhya Karika

Starting from 3rd January 2018. I will be teaching Samkhya Karika at Yoga Vahini, Chennai. It is a 20 hr program spread over 5 days. Samkhya is one of the six systems of orthodox Vedic philosophies. It is one of the three nivrittie sastras, or philosophies of liberation—liberation from the repeated cycles of birth. The other two philosophies are Yoga and Vedanta. Smkhya Karika, written by Iswarakrishna, is considered the most authentic text on this subject. It is considered to be the theoretical basis for Yoga darsana, and hence, many yogis, including Sri T Krishnamacharya, would urge study of this text in addition to Patanjali's Yoga Sutra. It consists of 72 slokas, or verses, and is considered one of the great Sanskrit works. The author, some consider to be the avatara of the great Sanskrit poet and philosopher Kalidasa. All the slokas will be gone through verse by verse in this program. Samkhyas consider Samkhya as the only darsana or philosophy which is complete. 'Ekameva darsanam samkhyameva darsanam' they would say

http://yogavahini.com/specialized-workshop.html#r2

⦁100 Hr Vinyasakrama Yoga TT Program
 I will be teaching a 100 hr Vinyasakrama yoga Teacher Training program at Yoga Vahini in Chennai-- this will be the third year in a row I will be teaching this program there. Feb 14th to March 2nd.

a. Complete Vinyasa Krama - Asana and Vinyasas (60 hours) 
b. Pranayama, Mudras, Meditation & Yoga for the six internal koshas (20 hours) 
c. Yoga Sutra (20 hours) 
http://yogavahini.com/specialized-workshop.html#r3

3.          Bhagavat Gita

I will be teaching a 50 hour 10 day program of Bhagavatgita at OmYoga in New Delhi from March 6,2018 . Sri Krishnamacharya was a versatile teacher. In addition to yogasanas he taught vedic chanting several texts like the Yoga Sutras, Brahma Sutras, and of course the Bhagavat Gita. He truly lived up to his given name Krishnamacharya, meaning Krishna the teacher/preceptor. His teaching of the Gita had a unique depth and flavor as he was a practicing yogi, not just an academician. In this program the Bhagavat Gita (The teachings of the Lord) will be gone through completely verse by verse chapter by chapter. It deals with the entire range of human experience and endeavors and the Lord’s guidance to everyone to go through life fruitfully and reach the ultimate spiritual state of Yoga. This program is especially designed for Yoga Students. Bhagavat Gita even as it is known as a text of Vedanta it  is also known as Yoga Satra, or a Yoga text.
Om Yoga Shala
D-5/9, Vasant Vihar
New Delhi 110056 
omyogastudio@gmail.com


 



⦁Bhagavat Gita

 I will repeat  Bhagavat Gita program at Yoga Vahini in Hyderabad from March 22nd for 10 days . 



 info@yogavahinihyderabad.com

⦁Germanay

My friend Klaus Koenig from Germany  has arranged an extended  weekend program in Germany sponsored by BDY. It is scheduled between May 25 and 27, 2018. Here is the link

https://www.yoga.de/weiterbildung/veranstaltungen/event/detail/8053d1be-57c8-e711-80ea-1458d043c6c0

⦁East Side Yoga, Austin TX

 In June I am scheduled to spend a week at Eastside yoga in Austin Texas from June 8th

. Here are the details
Weekend of teachings from Sri T Krishnamacharya 
Friday June 8th – Sunday 10th. 10 hours
Cost $180
 or purchase individual sessions.
Mantra Yoga 
Friday June 8th 7.30pm-9.30pm
Cost $25
Vinyasakrama, Ashtanga Yoga of patanjali and the three gunas 
Saturday June 9th 2pm – 6pm
Cost $90
Pranayama varieties and practice
Sunday June 10th 12.30pm-4.30pm
Cost $90
 
Immersion with Srivatsa Ramaswami – 25 hours
Monday June 11th to Friday June 15th.    10.00am-12.30pm and 2pm to 4.30pm
Cost $420 or early registration by April 1st $390.
 
Day I        Tadasana sequence    (forenoon)                 What is Yoga?  (afternoon) 
Day II       Asymmetric seated asanas (forenoon)     Hatayoga and Yoga for Internal organs (Kosas)
DayIII       Supta asanas and sarvangasana(forenoon) Samkhya Essentials 
Day IV      Trikonasana (forenoon)                                 Upanishad Vidyas 
Day V       Seated meditation asanas (forenoon)        Four sutras of Yoga philosophy

Here is thre link
http://www.eastsideyoga-austin.com/product/srivatsa-ramaswami-visit-june-2018/

⦁100 Hr Vinyasakarama Yoga TT program

Last year I was scheduled to teach a 100 hr TT program on Vinyasakrama at Oneyoga Montreal but it had to be cancelled due to lukewarm support. My friend Ryan suggested that we may try again but at a different location. So I am now scheduled to teach 100 hr Vinyasakrama Yoga program between June 29 to July 15, 2018     this time at Oneyoga in Victoria, Canada. It will have 60 hrs of Vinyasakrama asanas, 20 hrs of pranayama and yoga for internal organs and then a 20 hr Yoga Sutra segment. Here is the link for more details



 

http://oneyogavictoria.com/events/vinyasa-krama-teacher-training-with-srivatsa-ramaswami

⦁Samkhya and Yoga

 I have been teaching every summer for more than a decade at Loyola Marymount University. I did 200 hr TT program for a number of years and then did 100 hr TT program for a few more years. Last year it was a 50 hr program of Bhagavatgita and in Summer 2018 (July 28th to August 4) I will be teaching the twin texts of Yoga sutra and samkhya karika, a 40 hr program

Samkhya, yoga, vedanta, buddhism (some schools) all have a goal of removing three fold suffering. Samkhya is a unique orthodox rigorous philosophy that all the above philosophies and also ayurveda refer to. Samkhya is one of the six systems of orthodox Vedic philosophies. It is one of the three nivrittie sastras, or philosophies of liberation—liberation from the repeated cycles of birth. The other two philosophies are Yoga and Vedanta. Samkhya Karika, written by Iswarakrishna, is considered the most authentic text on this subject. It is considered to be the theoretical basis for Yoga darsana, and hence, many yogis, including Sri T Krishnamacharya, would urge study of this text in addition to Patanjali's Yoga. It consists of 72 slokas, or verses, and is considered one of the great Sanskrit works. The author, some consider to be the avatara of the great Sanskrit poet and philosopher Kalidasa. All the slokas will be gone through verse by verse in this program. 

Raja Yoga the subject matter of Patanjali's yoga sutras follows closely the tenets of Samkhya but comes with a methodical approach to reach the goal of Kaivalya the aim of Samkhya as well. Studying these texts simultaneously or in tandem will be very helpful for students of yoga. Hatayogapradipika  characterizes hatayoga as an aid to Rajayoga. Sri Krishnmacharya taught both these texts to his long time students. The 194 sutras in four chapters help to meet the requirements of all levels of Rajayogis, the entry level, the lifelong and the the consummate. The study of both the texts together would be very beneficial to committed yoga students and yoga teachers. The two texts will be taught for 20 hrs each, one in the forenoon and the other in the afternoon over eight days.

The program has not been featured in the University's website yet

⦁YOGA-YÃJÑAVALKYA

 Again I have been teaching every summer at Suddha Weixler's Chicago Yoga Center. For the last couple of years it has been extended weekend programs. Last year I taughr Samkhya Karika. In September (14th to 16th) 2018 I will be teaching  the yoga text     YOGA-YÃJÑAVALKYA  .                           Here is the link

http://www.yogamind.com/workshop-ramaswami-YOGA-YAJNAVALKYA_2018.shtml

⦁In Chile

My friend Andrea Silva from Chile attended a 200 hr teacher training program in vinyasakrama yoga a few years back at Loyola Marymount University. Since then she started  a nice yoga facility, Yoga Kanda in Santiago Chile and is trying to organize a week long program in Chile between Oct 29th  to Nov 3rd  2018. She is still assessing the possible response. You may get some details about it from this tentative announcement


 

 

Again wish you a very Happy Prosperous and Peaceful New Year

Srivatsa Ramaswami
↧
↧

February 2018 Newsletter from Srivatsa Ramaswami--- Newsletter Articles

January 31, 2018, 3:54 pm
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February 2018 Newsletter from Srivatsa Ramaswami---  Newsletter Articles




In January 2018 I taught a 5 day, 20 hour program on Samkhya Karika written by Iswarakrishna. It is considered both a literary classic and a philosophical treatise. We went through this short text of 72 verses word by word. It was nicely organized by Yoga Vahini in Chennai.

Again I taught a four hour workshop again for Yoga Vahini Therapy participants on Yoga for Internal Organs.



In February I am scheduled to teach a 100 hr Advanced Vinyasakrama program at Yoga Vahini Chennai starting from Feb 14th for 15 days, The program includes a 60 hour component of Vinyasas and aasnas, a 20 hour segment of pranayama mudras and yoga for Internal Organs and then 20 hours of Yoga Sutras., I understand that the registration is full. I am scheduled to do the same program for One Yoga at Victoria Canada from June 30th for 15 days. For more details refer to my website

In March I am scheduled to teach 50 hrs Bhagavatgita at Om Yoga in New Delhi and then at Yoga Vahini Hyderabad. Please refer to the Events page of my website.

Newsletter Articles

My good friend Ross Smith created for me a website and a Vinyasakrama Group both of which are functioning flawlessly even now (touch wood) after almost ten years. He did all this for free and I much beholden to him for his generosity and kindness. The Vinyasakrama Group was started in 2009 mainly for me to be in touch with friends who have participated in my programs--2 hrs or 200 hrs. Since I did not have many programs I thought I could write a short piece that may be of interest to yoga students and practitioners. Now about 108 newsletters have been sent having more than 100 articles. I thought I would list them in this newsletter so that some may want to revisit some of the articles and those who joined late may wish to refer to some of the earlier articles. I have listed them under different heads, Yoga Practice, Yoga Philosophy, Yoga Health, Stories and miscellaneous articles.

Here is the link to all the articles

  1. Yoga Practice
    1. Asana names (July 2016)
    2. 100Hrs (May 2016)
    3.Gurukrupa (March 2016)
    4. Guna (Sep 2015)
    5. Dogpose (May 2015)
    6. Sabda (April 2015)
    7. Namaskara (March 2015)
    8. Vairagya (Jan 2015)
    9. Krama (Dec 2014)
    10. Asmita (Oct 2014)
    11. Vyahriti (Sep 2014)
    12. Dharana (Aug 2014)
    13. Yoga (May 2014)
    14. God-Head (Feb 2014)
    15. Vidya (Nov 2013)
    16. Breath of Yoga (Mar 2011)
    17. Citta Vritti (June 2010)
    18. Vinyasa (Sep 2013)
    19. Duhkha (July 2013)
    20. Surya (June 2013)
    21.Ashtanga (May 2013)
    22. Parinama (April 2013)
    23. Prasadana (Mar 2013)
    24. Mudra (Jan 2013)
    25. Use of Voluntary Breath (Oct 2012)
    26. Sakthi Chants (Aug 2012)
    27.Asana and Vinyasa (June 2012)
    28. VK Videos (April 2012)
    29. Chanting with Krishnamacharya (March 2012)
    30. Mantra Pranayama (Feb 2012)
    31. Chants (Dec 2012)
    32. Iswarapranidhana (Jan 2011)
    33. Mantra Cover (April 2011)
    34. Statics and Dynamics of Asanas (June 2011)
    35. Pancha kosa vidya (Oct 2010)
    36. Yoga Gymnastics (Sep 2010)
    37.Heads and Shoulders Above (Aug 2009)
    38.Sanskrit Chants

II Yoga Philosophy

  1. Maya (Nov 2017)
  2. Sapta (Dec 2017)
  3. Pratyaya (Oct 2017)
  4. Origin (May 2017)
  5. Brahmavit (Feb 2017)
  6. Dream (June 2016)
  7. Adhyasa (April 2016)
  8. Adhyatma Vidya (Feb 2016)
  9. Karma (Jan 2016)
  10. Illusion (Nov 2015)
  11. Ananda/Bliss (Oct 2015)
  12. Bhagavatgita review (July 2015)
  13. Samkhya (July 2014)
  14. Cittavritti-an illusion? (Nov 2012)
  15. Illusion-Really? (Apri 2014)
  16. Viraja (Dec 2013)
  17. Akasa (Feb 2013)
  18. Yoga -knowing the unknown (Jan 2012)
  19. Advaita (May 2011)

  1. Yoga for Health
    1. Sanchara (Free Flow) (July 2017)
    1. Aging (Mar 2017)
    2. Guna Physiology (Dec 2016)
    3. Spine (Aug 2015)
    4. Kosa (Nov 2014)
    5. Yoga Joint (Nov 2011)
    6. Spinal Exercise (Sep 2011)
    7. Meditating on Meditation (Nov 2009)
    8. Yoga for the Heart (May 2009)
    9. Yoga and Ach..choo (Mar 2010)
    10. Yoga Bronchial Asthma (May 2010)
    11. Yoga Nerves ( Feb 2010)

IV Yoga Stories


  1. Story Time (July 2010)
  2. Vyasa and Ganesa (Aug 2017)
  3. Upanishad Stories (Sep 2016)
  4. Muchukunda (Jan 2014)
  5. Patanjali (Aug 2013)
  6. Rishis (Dec 2012)
  7. Yogagate-Viswamitra (July 2012)
  8. Avvaiyar (Oct 2011)
  9. Trivikrama (July 2010)
  10. Durvasa (Dec 2011)
  11. Yagnyavalkya (Nov 2010)
  12. Bhagirata (Dec 2009)
  13. Tirumular (Oct 2009)
  14. Tale of 2 Bhaktiyogis (July 2009)
  15. Vajrasana Story (April 2009)

  1. Miscellaneous

  1. Subhashita (April 2010)
  2. Creative Hypothesis ( Mar 2009)
  3. Wild Yogi Interview (Sep 2017)
  4. Programs (April 2017)
  5. Yoga 2017 (Jan 2017)
  6. Advice (Nov 2016)
  7. Texts for Yoga Students (Oct 2016)
  8. Taboo (Aug 2016)
  9. Facebook Phase (May 2012)
  10. 4 Human Goals (Feb 2009)
  11. Ports (Oct 2013)

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Trikonasana , past, present and future.

February 27, 2018, 4:58 pm
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"Trikonasana (Figure 4.48)
First, stand following the instructions for tadasana krama. Then, keeping the legs spread no less than 3 mozhams apart, take either arm and lift it straight up, lower the other arm while keeping it straight and bring the hand down and place it on top of the foot. Study this carefully in the picture. The inhalation and exhalation of breath must be equal and slow. Practise this on both sides as described here. This asana must be practised for a minimum of 10 minutes. However slowly and patiently we practise this, there is that much corresponding benefit." Krishnamacharya Yoga Makaranda. ( Mysore 1934)


Krishnamacharya teaching Yvonne Millerand , 1960's a few years after leaving Mysore
http://grimmly2007.blogspot.jp/2012/10/yvonne-millerand-student-of.html





Krishnamacharya 1970s in his 80s.




My own practice of Trikonasana.


So hard to find a photo of my practicing Trikonasana, it's as if we are terrified of Iyengar judging us.






Below, one of the only photo's I can find of my practicing trikonasana with my foot to the frount 



And here,following my studies with Ramaswami with my feet facing more forward



Later, after focussing more on Krishnamacharya's Yoga Makaranda instruction, including the longer stays I went back to a more Ashtanga approach but with my hand resting lightly on my foot Yoga Makaranda style.


Moving forward......


Simon Borg-Olivier

More recently I'm questioning whether to do trikonasana at all, or rather, whether to include the traditional presentation of the posture in my practice.  Simon includes an active movement version in his spinal sequence where the principles of trikonasana are still included. In the video and article below Simon is presenting a version of trikonasana that can act as a preparation/training for a more traditional approach but it has me wondering.... Is it necessary or indeed that beneficial to stay in trikonasana for a significant period as Krishnamacharya suggested or indeed only for  a few breaths as Jois presented. Is passing through the activation of the posture in a spinal movement sequence sufficient. Simon teaches both but he seems to be moving more to this "...more of a movement than a stretch" approach. 

See this article perhaps: Moving Actively into Postures Can give Strength and Flexibility Without Tension or Stretching

"Active movements are the traditional way to come into yoga postures. These are movements that are done by the muscles that would be used to enter a posture without the assistance of external forces such as gravity, momentum, or one limb pulling on another limb..... Active movements can give you strength without stress, flexibility without painful stretching, and improved circulation without increasing your heart rate". - from the above article

Are the benefits of trikonasana available without staying in the posture for five breaths or ten minutes, by merely passing through an activation of the posture, and if so is passing through the posture once sufficient or is more than one visit required, or perhaps including several variations of related movement/activation. And if this is the case for trikonasana, then what of something like paschimottanasa, where again Krishnamacharya would recommend a long stay and Pattabhi Jois three or four variations of between five and ten breaths each. Is it possible to achieve the same benefits, perhaps more benefit and less possible strain or negative effects by taking a more ....revolutionary approach - every time I see a new video from Simon of his Spinal movements I'm wondering "...where are you taking this?" It seems radical, exciting and yet perhaps there is nothing really so new, perhaps these movements only appear new from the perspective of the static approach to yoga we have now (we may think of Ashtanga as flowing, a moving meditation, but it's still a quite static approach), in other traditions (China?), such movements are perhaps not so strange or revolutionary but rather, quite traditional.


https://yogasynergy.com/traditional-yoga-for-the-modern-body/









A full presentation of a more approach to traditional trikonasana from Simon and Bianca at yoga Synergy


"Saucha is to clean..., or  for me it's to remove the obstacles that block the movement of energy inside us , we need to tense less, stretch less, or move our bodies more balanced...., breathe less...".



A full class with Simon from Love yoga Anatomy

https://loveyogaanatomy.com/tag/simon-borg-olivier/

from 13:57 - replicating trikonasana

from 3:00 trikonasana 

The video below from Yogaanatomy.com includes instruction





Simon's movements in standing remind me of the vinyasas Krishnamacharya presents back in 1938 in his Mysore documentary footage. I'd always assumed Krishnamacharya was just rushing through the movements as a demonstration but Ramaswami would teach them in a similar way, a ten minute static sirsasana and then another ten minutes of vinyasas/variations....active movements? 





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Dhruva - March 2018 Newsletter from Srivatsa Ramaswami--

February 28, 2018, 3:28 pm
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Durvasana
On One Leg 'Tapas' sequence 


Regular speed version HERE


March 2018 Newsletter from Srivatsa Ramaswami--Dhruva


Dhruva


In the course of teaching my 100 Hr Vinyasakrama Yoga Programs, I have found that even though many are less than enthusiastic about pranayama and one legged standing postures, soon they seem to develop a liking after practising them for a few days. In the course the participants are not only used to a variety of pranayamas but also develop endurance to practice pranyama for many rounds even upto 80 times per sitting taking almost 45 minutes. Since most contemporary yoga practitioners are not introduced to pranayama there is some reservation of doing it, it is not exciting as vinyasas or complicated five star asanas. But once the participants are told the immense benefits of pranayama many start practice reluctantly but soon enough experience the calming and refreshing effects of this important yoga practice. It is said that Hata yoga means pranayama and then in Ashtanga yoga pranayama is a central anga of the eight aspects. Once practice of pranayama is done for a few weeks say a month regularly for a significant number of time daily the yogi gets to appreciate the subtle benefits, develop the positive samskaras and then make it part of regular yoga practice along with asanas and vinyasas. My Guru would never teach me asanas alone, asanas practice will invariably be followed by pranayama. Pranayama removes tamas as mentioned by Patanjali, it also facilitates easy performance of the vital bandhas.



Though I personally like to do one legged poses, I always felt that participants are not particularly pleased to do one legged poses maybe except for a photo op. But the one legged poses are considered poses of tapasvins as many great sages stood on one leg and did penance or tapas. Earlier I wrote the story of King Bhagirata who standing on one leg was able to get the waters of the sacred Ganga flow down to the plains. This asana Bhagiratasana also known as tree pose is a great asana if one could stay in the pose for a reasonable amount of time. So in my earlier TT programs I suggested to the participants who are usually excited doing warrior pose and hand stands, to see if they would stand in these one legged poses (there are quite a few of them). Some started reluctantly but they started liking it. Slowly they would regularly stay in these poses for 5 minutes or even more. These poses give a very good sense of balance (including mental) perseverance and patience.



Dhruva


Here is story of one great yogi who stood on one leg and got the vision and presence of the Lord which I am reproducing from an earlier newsletter.

King Uttanapada had two spouses. The first one was the satwic Suniiti
and, as the name would indicate, she was very pious (dharmic). She had
a son, Dhruva, the steadfast one. Customarily the elder wife of the
King is the Queen, entitled to all the regal rights, and so her son
was the crown prince. The King’s second wife, Suruchi, as the name
would indicate, was extremely beautiful, but highly rajasic, totally
after power, possession and position. Over a short period of time, she
managed to bring the King to dance to her tunes. She became the Queen
herself and manipulated the King to agree to make her son Uttama the
crown prince. Soon Suniiti and her son were banished from the palace
and remained in a secluded place. The toddler Dhruva and his pious
single mother lived without any contact with the King.

To cut the story short, one day the child Dhruva aimlessly wandered
into the court of the King. His father was on the throne, his
stepmother occupied the seat next to the King and Uttama, his half
brother was sitting cozily in the lap of his father. Impulsively the
four year old ran towards his father to sit on his already occupied
lap. Everyone including the King was paralyzed by this unexpected
event. Suddenly the King felt a swell of filial affection towards his
son and stretched his arms to embrace the child. But Suruchi saw what
was coming and did not like it at all. She saw the charming majestic
child running with glee towards the father and felt a tinge of
jealousy. “Why is my son Uttama so dull and tamasic while this child
even though not born to me is so captivating?” She regretted that
Dhruva was not her baby and soon the jealousy grew into an
uncontrollable rage. She stopped the child violently and sternly told
her stepson that only her child could sit on the King’s lap. She
mockingly said that he should pray to God to be born as her son if he
wanted that privilege. The henpecked King did nothing to alleviate the
remorse of the child who could not have the legitimate and simple
desire to sit on the father’s lap fulfilled. Feeling like a total
stranger in his own rightful abode, the child, crying inconsolably,
ran towards his own small apartment and fell on his mother’s lap.
Suniiti became distraught at the plight of her son and tried to
console him. The sobbing child narrated what happened and expressed
his anger at the deeds of his stepmother. Suniiti tried to reason with
him. “Oh my Child! Everyone gets what one deserves depending upon
previous Karmas. Your stepmother and your stepbrother must have done
exceptionally punya deeds in their previous births and accumulated a
favorable karma bundle. No one can enjoy the luxuries of a queen or
the crown prince without having done punya karmas in their previous
births. Wise ones are always content with what they have(santosha).
You should ponder over this and should learn to do great Karmas so
that you also will enjoy the fruits of good deeds. So pray to God.
There is no Karma more pious than worshipping the Lord”, she advised
her son of 4 to5 years. Dhruva, with a renewed resolve, said to his
mother that he does not hanker after what does not belong to him. He
would pray and do penance to God and achieve what none had achieved.
One definition of Yoga is ‘achieving the impossible’ (apraapya
praapanam yogam).

Pondering deeply over the incidents and his mother’s words, the child
decided to approach the Almighty- Lord. He went out of the house into
the wilderness in search of the Lord. On the way he was met by Narada,
the great divine sage, a consummate devotee of the Lord. Looking at
the prince with an innocent face going into the forest, he stopped the
child and said that he appeared to have lost his way and that he,
Narada, would take him back to his home. Dhruva said that he was
determined to do penance to please the Lord and achieve what none had
achieved. Narada tried further to dissuade him by saying that penance
was very difficult, one should go without food, water, sleep or
shelter for a long time, but  Dhruva which means ‘the steadfast’
hardly budged. Then Narada decided to help the child in its arduous
task. He asked him if he knew how to pray to the Lord, how to
meditate, how to do penance and the child said ‘no’ to everything. The
sage decided to teach the child the practice of rituals and
meditation. He taught him the twelve syllable vasudeva mantra “OM NAMO
BHAGAVATE VASUDEVAAYA”. Narada also explained to him in detail the
form of the Lord to meditate upon as he knew it. The child carefully
heard Narada’s words and started his penance standing on one leg. Then
he closed his eyes and focused his attention on the enchanting form of
the Lord as detailed by Narada. Soon his mind was in total dhyana of
the Lord (Bhagavat dhyaana). He used the mantra effectively to prop
his meditation on the form of the Lord, as if following the classic
instruction of the Raja Yogi Patanjali—tat japah tat arthabhhavanam.

During the several months Dhruva was in Bhagavat dhyana, Indra the
boss of the gods was unnerved. He felt that Dhruva was after his
position and hence tried to distract the child by creating many a
disturbance. But Dhruva remained totally concentrated.

Finally the Lord, so pleased with the penance and meditation of the
child devotee, decided to appear before him. The formless Lord took
the enchanting form the child was meditating on and appeared before
him and called out to him to draw his attention. But the child’s
ekagrata stayed unwavering. Then the Lord decided to get him out of
his trance and withdrew His form from the child’s meditating mind and
absorbed it into His own. Finding suddenly the captivating object he
was meditating upon disappearing, the startled child opened his eyes
only to see the Lord just in front of him. For a moment the child
thought that the Lord was leaving him. He cried out and pleaded to Him
not to leave him. The Lord consoled him and said that he had appeared
before him to answer his prayers and asked what boon he wanted.
Completely captivated by the Lord the child wanted nothing except to
see the Lord in his mind for ever. The Lord reminded him of his
initial resolve to achieve what none had achieved and promised him an
exalted position in the galaxy, a star that never wavered, the Pole
Star or the North Star. But the Lord said that Dhruva should first
complete his obligations. He should return to the kingdom where his
father would welcome him back with all the love and respect due to a
crown prince. He should then succeed his father to the throne and rule
the kingdom justly. Dhruva returned home to a warm welcome from his
father and the whole country. The Lord had by then appeared in the
dream of the King Uttanapada and reminded him of his filial
responsibilities and chided him for his cowardice. Dhruva later ruled
the Kingdom with rare maturity and fairness and was hailed as one of
the greatest emperors. Then he attained his exalted position as the
Pole Star. Dhruva with total dedication and Bhakti to the Lord
attained what was considered impossible to start with.


-- 


I am teaching a 15 day 100 hr Vinyasakrama yoga teacher training at Yoga Vahini in Chennai. 32 hardworking talented participants from several countries are taking part. The program will be over on March 2nd 2018.




Thank you Valentina Tarla, Liz Richards for the pictures



Then I am scheduled to teach a ten day 50 hr program on Bhagavatgita from the 6th March 2018. We will be going through all the slokas of the 18 chapters. It is being organized by Om Yoga in New Delhi. Here is the contact e mail.
omyogastudio@gmail.com

http://groups.google.com/group/vinyasa-krama
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Search

An Asana Tool Chest - The Ten main sequences of Vinyasa Krama Yoga.... in ten minutes.

March 1, 2018, 6:12 pm
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Vinyasa Krama Sequence Overview

Speeded up from around five hours -  
See the playlist of the originals on my channel for the regular speed version. 


Playlists




These are the ten main sequences of Vinyasa Krama Yoga

Filmed around seven years ago. 

Note: In Vinyasa Krama a vinyasa is often repeated three times, each time going perhaps a little further, working into it as it were.

We can learn the full 'sequence' to get an idea of the relationship between the postures, key Asana, preparation, development but in actuality we will most likely only practice a few Asana or subroutines each day along with those from other Vinyasa Krama sequences, our choices might change daily dependent on our needs that day (see the photo montages below accompanying the sequences. These Subroutines, sequences, can thus perhaps be seen as a tool chest, resource for our practice, teaching...., therapy.

I tend to follow an Ashtanga' framework so choose an Ashtanga Asana or subroutines but I may modify by choosing to add or replace an Asana with an alternative from the sequence.

I'm also looking to bring my exploration of Simon Borg-Olivier's active and spinal movements teaching into my practice of seated Asana as well as into standing, to seek to move actively into a posture but this video is from around ten years ago. 

This Sequence was taught to us by Srivatsa Ramaswami, a student of Krishnamacharya's for over thirty years. See Ramaswami's Complete book of Vinyasa yoga.


We can also see 'Vinyasa Krama' variations/subroutines etc. in Krishnamacharya's old 1938 Mysore video - see Appendix




Note on Layout

1. A photo montage of some postures or movements we might choose from a sequence
2. A one minute overview of the full sequence
3. A link to the real time or speeded up x 4 sequence
4. A link to practice sheets on my Vinyasa Krama blog (http://vinyasakramayoga.blogspot.jp/)


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The Ten main sequences of Vinyasa Krama Yoga.... in ten minutes.





The individual sequences.


TADASANA






Practice Sheets - HERE


TRIANGLE





Practice Sheets - HERE


ON ONE LEG






Practice Sheets - HERE


ASYMMETRIC




Practice Sheets - HERE



SEATED




Practice Sheets - HERE


BOW






Practice Sheets - HERE



MEDITATIVE





Practice Sheets - HERE



SUPINE





Practice Sheets - HERE



INVERTED





Practice Sheets - HERE


LOTUS





Practice Sheets - HERE

*

APPENDIX


Resources


My Vinyasa Krama Sequences Site
(Practice sheets and links to videos of subroutines.)

http://vinyasakramayoga.blogspot.jp/


My Vinyasa Krama Practice Site
(this includes all the tips hints, cautions etc that ended up in my book)

http://vinyasayogaathome.blogspot.jp/


How to practice Vinyasa Krama- Srivatsa Ramaswami

http://grimmly2007.blogspot.jp/p/how-to-practice-vinyasa-krama_22.html

My Srivatsa Ramaswami Resource page

http://grimmly2007.blogspot.jp/p/srivatsa-ramaswami-vinyasa-krama.html

Books by Ramaswami on Amazon.com

https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_2?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=Srivatsa+ramaswami



Krishnamacharya in 1938

Krishnamacharya was demonstrating these vinyasa Krama variations in Mysore in 1938, at the same time that Pattabhi Jois was his students, challenging the view that there was an 'early' and 'late' Krishnamacharya, these are sister practices.








This page is a work in progress and will no doubt be added to in the future and become a stand alone permanent page at the top of the blog.

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Current practice, the why and the wherefore of Active Spinal movements.

March 3, 2018, 12:14 pm
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I mentioned Simon Borg-Olivier in the intro to the previous post and added these videos to an Appendix.

"I'm also looking to bring my exploration of Simon Borg-Olivier's active and spinal movements teaching into my practice of seated Asana as well as into standing, to seek to move actively into a posture."

this is an example of what I mean, here is the vinyasa krama side bending poses from seven years ago and below that what I'm working on with Simon.




The full playlist from which the above video is taken....

for the why and the wherefore of Active Spinal movements.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9JyXMCamYWc&list=PLVVKOGsFaNsAhj_OAViaYqdlmdQnXEWpw


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Twenty minute 'short form' from earlier this week, usually I'll tend to include a more traditional Ashtanga half Primary/Half second in between the standing and inversions.



And here's Simon.....


from the notes to the above video

This is a short low resolution segment of the Yoga Synergy Spinal Movements Sequence DVD by Simon Borg-Olivier. More complex as well as simpler versions of this sequence with instructions are also taught on this DVD, which is available at http://yogasynergy.com/main/spinal-mo.... You can do the simple version of this sequence almost anytime and anywhere, standing, on the floor or in a chair. All you need to do is to be able to comfortably lift your arms and/or lift your shoulders. It progresses from simple versions to harder levels depending your level of health and fitness. This sequence is excellent for the relief of back pain and other problems if done carefully. It is also the easiest way to improve your circulation and energy levels. You can watch a simple one minute version of this simple sequence with easy to follow instructions at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2TsvAk... (Preview) This sequence is also the basis of the award winning online yoga course 'Yoga Fundamentals: Traditional Yoga for the Modern Body' by Bianca Machliss and Simon Borg-Olivier, which is available at http://fundamentals@yogasynergy.com This 28 minute video of a series of spinal movement sequences has no verbal instructions, which helps you not to over-think, but if you attempt any of these sequences then it is important to only do what feels good and to not over-stretch, over-tense or overt-breathe. Simple guidelines to attempt part or all of this sequence: 1. make your aim to simply lengthen and relax 2. move your spine starting from the region corresponding to the navel 3. move each vertebrae one at a time 4. always check your fingers and toes can move, your neck can move and you abdomen (diaphragm) can breathe and that you are feeling calm This practice should ideally make you feel warm yet without the heart racing and it gives you energy rather than taking it from you. VideoTimes (minutes and seconds) of the various spinal movements sequences in this youtube video: A. 00m 00s: Pure spinal movements (PURE SPINE: lengthen, lengthen the back (forward bend), lengthen the front (backward bend), lengthen the left side (left side-bend), lengthen the right side (right side-bend), twist to right side, twist to left side) B. 01m 24s: Pure spinal movements in different LEG POSTURES C. 10m 54s: combined spinal movements (BEACH BALL: side-bend plus twisting) (like turning a large beach ball) D. 14m 12s: Combined spinal movements into one arm (PLATE SPIRAL (like holding a plate in your hand to turn it in spirals): Starting with right hand: twist left (move navel to left), lengthen the front (move navel forward and upwards), twist right (rotate navel to right side), lengthen the right side (move navel to right side and upwards), lengthen the back (move navel forwards and downwards then softly backwards and upwards), lengthen the left side (move navel to left side and upwards) E. 15m 44s: Stepping movements with the hips F. 16m 25s: PLATE SPIRAL with LEG POSTURES SEQUENCE G. 19m 38s: FREE FORM SPINAL YOGA DANCE (Optional - only smooth flowing, no jagged movements of arms legs or spine , so safely at your own pace) H. 21m 19s: Cool down PLATE SPIRAL with LEG POSTURES SEQUENCE I. 24m 27s: Cool down PURE SPINE LEG POSTURE SEQUENCE J. 25m 20s: Cool down PURE SPINE SEATED SEQUENCE For further information please see http://blog.yogasynergy.com or join our online courses at http://anatomy.yogasynergy.com and http://fundamentals.yogasynergy.com
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NEW KPJAY SHALA (K. Pattabhi Jois Ashtanga Shala) Authorised Teachers Page

March 13, 2018, 5:43 pm
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This post will end up as an update on my Ashtanga Authorisation 1980s to present post and page.



http://www.kpjayshala.com/australia-and-new-zealand.html


The new KPJAYI (not the Sharathjois.com) list is up. 

There seems to be some consternation that this list, while reinstalling many of the names clumsily removed by Sharath, is at least one year old. 

If it's the case that Sharath wasn't a director, as is being suggested ( we need actual confirmation of this from Saraswati), but merely an employee, then the list, all the names on it and the fees received surely belong to the KPJAYI, having the original link to direct to sharathjois.com is, I imagine, misappropriation. 

Sharath is surely legally bound to release all information regarding teachers he has authorised on behalf of the KPJAYI and thus allow them to update the list ( that's probably still the case if he was a director) and remove the redirect from kpjayi.org to Sharathjois.com. 

Generally it's good practice to stay out of the way of families as much as possible and allow them to sort things out in their own time. Sharath and Saraswati still seem to be able to work together at some level, Sharath taught for a couple of months at the shala last year and is supposedly teaching there this June, nobody (except perhaps Manju) seems to be prepared to relinquish the income Sharath is able to generate at this time by teaching at the shala. 

If Sharath and those seeking to publicise him were to stop using the, what many consider,  offensive and hubristic 'Paramaguru' title, that seems to have been acquired through promoting tourism more than anything else and, along with the financial aspect, perhaps one of the main reasons tension division and defensiveness have coming to a head.

If Sharath intends to go his own way with sharathjois.com (the appropriation of the Jois name rather than his own family name is another question altogether) then I perhaps he needs to be starting from scratch and ‘authorise’ teachers in his own name rather than in that of the KPJAYI, it's messy. 

There are more than enough lawyers in Ashtanga to confirm if this is the case. 

No doubt many teachers, who consider Sharath their teacher will prefer to be on the sharathjois.com list rather than the KPJAYI list. 

This is one reason I've supported the Ashtanga.com list http://www.ashtanga.com/html/classes.html and championed the idea of a non profit foundation, perhaps along the lines of the KYM ( Krishnamacharya Yoga Mandiram) with a public audit. 

The Ashtanga Yoga Confluence last week did a good job I thought of dismissing lists altogether (I'm hoping to transcribe some of the comments from Richard, David, Dena, Tim and Manju if no videos appear sharable on YouTube) but also of showing how hurtful it was to be removed, a betrayal of the decades of devotion and dedication to practice and the passing along of the practice as well as the personal blessing of KPJ. 

See this post for the backstory.
http://grimmly2007.blogspot.jp/2016/03/ashtanga-authorisation-1980-present.html


*

I'm not an Ashtanga teacher, recently I'm not even sure I'm an 'Ashtanga' (in the sense of a postural method) practitioner, so jaded have I become of late. I'm blogging here, as I have done for ten years as an outsider, a distant observer and a mostly cynical, and yet curiously also idealistic, home practitioner.  For a perspective from someone 'inside' with much to say that I agree and struggle with, try here


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Bhagavad Gita as taught to Srivatsa Ramaswami by his teacher T. Krishnamacharya.

March 20, 2018, 7:30 pm
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Ramaswami just finished teaching a fifty hour course on the Gita

"Just returned to Chennai from New Delhi after teaching a 50 hour (almost) Bhagavat Gita program to a compact dedicated group of yogis at Om Yoga. In 2018 I have been able to teach three important texts taught by my Guru Sri Krishnanacharya: Samkhya Karika of Iswarakrishna at Yoga Vahini in Chennai in January, Yoga Sutras of Maharshi Patanjali as part of 100 hr teacher training program at again Yoga Vahini in Chennai in February and now in March the Gita at Om Yoga in Delhi. We were able to go through the entire texts wotd by word or sutra by sutra. These three are important texts of the three nivriti sastras from the vedas Samkhya, Yoga and Vedanta. 
Feeling good". Srivatsa Ramaswami





*


".....A few years back when I was teaching the 200 hr TT program of Vinyasakrama yoga at Loyola Marymount University, my friends Arun Deva and Sarah Mata-Gabor arranged a 25 hr program during weekends on Bhagavat Gita in Los Angeles. I managed to teach about 10 of the eighteen chapters and Sara had arranged to have the whole program videographed. Last year my friend Jacquelin Sonderling professionally edited the II chapter Samkhya Yoga in two parts and lat me add to my playlist on Youtube. She added all the slokas into the video and meaningful captions enhancing the value of the videos which many viewers found very useful. It is lot of work, very time consuming and I am beholden to Jacquelin Sonderling for the trouble, time and professional skill she has put into this work Thank you Jacquelin. Now she has completed the editing of the Third Chapter Karma Yoga. Here is the link https://www.youtube.com/watch…The other two earlier Bhagavat Gita videos can also be accessed from the following link"Srivatsa Ramaswami


Bhagavad Gita, Chapter 2, Part 1, as taught by my honored teacher, Srivatsa Ramaswami. July, 2015, Santa Monica, California



The awesome Srivatsa Ramaswami teaches the Bhagavad Gita. Chapter 2, Part 2, verses 2.50-2.72 July, 2015 - Santa Monica, California


The awesome Srivatsa Ramaswami teaches the Bhagavad Gita. Chapter 3
July, 2015 - Santa Monica, California



See too perhaps, this guest post on the course

Workshop Review: 70 hour sloka by sloka, Bhagavad Gita... as taught by Srivatsa Ramaswami (Guest post)

Thank you to my friends Chiara and Oscar for agreeing to share their thoughts on Ramaswami's recent (almost two week sloka by sloka Bhagavad Gita Intensive with Srivatsa Ramaswami.



My Srivatsa Ramaswami resource page 




Note:
Ramaswami recommended the Annie Besant version for the course, which can be downloaded free from the internet.




*


I just checked, nothing on Ramaswami's event page (http://vinyasakrama.com/Events) on another upcoming Gita course as yet but these two might be of interest.


July 28, 2018 to  Aug 4,2018Samkhya Karika and Yoga Sutras (20hrs each)Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles, CAVenue:
Loyola Marymount University
Los Angeles

14-Sep-2018- 16-Sep-2018YOGA-YÃJÑAVALKYA

The Chicago Yoga Center
Address: 3047 N Lincoln Ave #20 • Chicago, IL 60657 • USA
Map: GoogleContact: Suddha Weixler
Email: info@yogamind.com

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Reflecting on Spinal Sequence footwork and how to improve/develop it. - Ankle bandha

March 28, 2018, 7:57 pm
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Focussing on the feet in Simon Borg-Olivier and Bianca Machliss' Yoga Synergy Spinal sequence.... or any other approach to asana come to think of it..





I find this a highly Meditative practice with a lot of freedom of movement and expression available, I want to be sure my ankles and knees are as protected as possible as well as to consider how to make the movements as efficient and beneficial as possible.


A more detailed blog post to come  perhaps, to focus more on what's going on with my feet in the spinal sequence and elsewhere, referencing perhaps chapter six of Simon Borg-Olivier and Bianca Machliss' Applied Anatomy & Physiology of Yoga book and Yogasynergy online course, on the ankle joint complex ( what they call Kulpha Bandha), as well as perhaps looking to dance traditions. Paying attention to toes, arches, ankles.





Video: practicing a little faster than usual for the camera.


"Tha-kulpha bandha is an expansive co-activation (simultaneous tensing) of antagonistic (opposing) muscle groups around the ankle joint complex. In this case I create this ankle bandha by: 

*** pressing into the base of the big toe which activates the muscles behind the ankle, 

*** pulling back my big toe itself, which activates the muscles on the front of my ankle and,

*** pulling the outer foot towards the knee, which activates the outer ankle.

These activations not only stabilise the ankle but also encourage blood flow to the ankle. This ankle bandha can more simply be used in almost any posture that has the foot off the floor, such as niralamba virabhadrasa, niralamba padangusthasana, sirsasana and also postures where the feet are on the floor but are not taking full body weight such as baddha konasana and janu sirsasana.
Tha-kulpha Bandha and ha-kulpha Bandha (which also uses the outer ankle muscles but includes gripping with the toes to activate the rear ankle and lifting the top of the foot to activate the front of the ankle) are really great to use for the prevention and healing of ankle sprains". 
Simon Borg-Olivier 2015


See perhaps this earlier post on the nine joint complexes as bandhas

http://grimmly2007.blogspot.jp/2011/11/nine-bandhas-yes-nine-in-applied.html

from the post...

'The concept that bandhas are co-activations of opposing muscles can be extended to the major joints of the upper and lower limbs. Co-activation of opposing muscles around joint complexes (bandha) provides the strength and stability to safely perform advanced yoga postures, and to assist in the Àow of energy throughout the body.' p60



Here then are their nine bandhas

1. kulpha bandha  ankle joint complex.

2. janu bandha  knee joint complex.

3. kati bandha hip joint complex

4. mula bandha lumbar spine joint complex

5. uddiyana bandha  chest and thoracic spine joint complex.

6. jalandhara bandha  cervical spine joint complex.

7. amsa bandha ishoulder joint complex.

8. kurpara bandha elbow joint complex

9. mani bandha  wrist joint complex





Appendix




Here's a full class with Simon from Love Yoga Anatomy






And below, part of the 28 part youTube series of videos that first made me attracted me to Simon and Bianca's approach to practice and how it can be applied perhaps to however we approach our own practice





Video Transcript:

“In the beginning I am standing with legs hip width apart as it gives a slightly wider base of support. I lean further forward with my hips and my armpits. This gives a reflex activation of the abdominal muscles so now if I breathe into the abdomen it will hardly move. Whereas if I lean back where one normally stands and breathe into the abdomen you will see a noticeable expansion in the abdomen. This same diaphragmatic breathing if you lean forward, the abdomen draws inwards naturally. If I breathe into the abdomen now, it’s firm but calm. Diaphragmatic breathing will allow you to feel calm.”


Simon in London.

For my friends back in the UK, Simon will be coming to London in June to teach at Triyoga

8 - 10 June 2018
SBO YS Workshop, London, UK (Host/Venue: TriYoga, London)
https://triyoga.co.uk
https://triyoga.co.uk/workshop-events-schedule/…


Here's Simon's full 2018 calendar and an outline of what he teaches,



My Calendar for the rest of 2018:
The main reason I practice is to encourage the circulation of energy and loving information through my body. In physiological terms this means to encourage blood flow and to generate energy, while remaining completely calm, peaceful and loving. And although circulation is enhanced it is done without increasing heartrate or stimulating the sympathetic nervous system, but rather encouraging the activities of the parasympathetic nervous system, which helps to increase the function of my immune system, digestive system and reproductive system. This type of practice also helps to send messages to my subconscious that I am in a safe place and that love, peace, trust, gentleness, sharing and giving are the dominant paradigms. Following my physical practice therefore it is these type of feelings that I want to share with the people in the world around me.
I have a simple practice of posture, movement and breathing, which in its simplest form involves me mainly moving actively and fluidly from my centre (Kanda, Dantien, Hara). Sometimes the movement is external but often the movement cannot be seen externally and can only be felt on the inside as the movement of blood and consciousness. My practice is such that I can:

• improve flexibility without feeling intense stretch

• improve strength without feeling tense or stressed

• become more relaxed without needing to be completely passive

• improve energy levels without having to breathe more than normal

• promote circulation without needing to make heart rate increase

• improve the intelligence of body cells without having to over-think

• satiate appetite and feel nourished without having to eat as much

• feel rested and rejuvenated without having had to sleep as much

*******
Calendar of Yoga Synergy (YS) Workshops (WS) and Teacher Training (TT) with Simon Borg-Olivier (SBO) 2018:
I would love to share some of this with you. Here is where I will teaching over the next few months in case you can come and we also have lots online at www.yogasynergy.com if you cant see me physically...
*** 4 February - 4 March 2018
200 hour TT Intensive Training, Goa India
Main Teacher: Simon Borg-Olivier (Host: Yoga Synergy)
www.yogasynergy.com

*** 7 - 8 March 2018
Simon Teaching at The International Yoga Festival; Rishikesh, India

*** 23 - 24 March 2018
History and Philosophy of Yoga Lectures For Teacher Training Course at Ihana Yoga Melbourne (Closed) (Host/Venue: Ihana Yoga)

*** 25 March 2018
SBO YS Workshop; Melbourne, Australia (Host/Venue: Ihana Yoga)


*** 24 April - 9 May 2018
Yoga Synergy Teacher 100 hour Training Japan (Closed)

*** 11 - 20 May 2018
SBO YS 10 day Course on the Applied Anatomy and Physiology of Yoga
Teacher: Simon Borg-Olivier
Sydney, Australia (Host: Yoga Synergy)
https://yogasynergy.com/…/interactive-applied-anatomy-phys…/

*** 19 May 2018
SBO Public Lecture on Yogic Nutrition
Sydney, Australia (Host: Yoga Synergy)
https://yogasynergy.com/…/eat-less-live-longer-yogic-diet-…/

*** 25 - 27 May 2018
SBO YS Workshop; Byron Bay, Australia (Host/Venue: Kristen Boddington) https://www.livingyogasanga.org/events

8 - 10 June 2018
SBO YS Workshop, London, UK (Host/Venue: TriYoga, London)
https://triyoga.co.uk
https://triyoga.co.uk/workshop-events-schedule/…

*** 15 - 17 June 2018
SBO YS Workshop; Laussane, Switzerland
https://coloresens.ch/stages/
https://www.facebook.com/events/147003492681109/

*** 22 - 24 June 2018
SBO YS Workshop; Barcelona, Spain (Host/Venue: NowHere Yoga)
http://nowhere.yoga/…/simon-borg-olivier-masterclass-series/

*** 25 - 27 June 2018
SBO YS Workshop; Paris, France
https://www.facebook.com/events/182241519038859/

*** 29 June - 1 July 2018
SBO YS Workshop; Milan, Italy (Host/Venue: City ZEN Milan)
http://cityzen.it/event/

*** 27 - 29 July 2018
SBO YS Therapy Workshop
Hamburg, Germany
(Host/Venue: Power Yoga Germany)
https://www.poweryogagermany.de/events/workshops.html…

*** 30 July - 5 August 2018
SBO YS Intensive Course Dusseldorf Gemany (Host/Venue: VishnuVibes)
http://www.vishnusvibes.de/event_simon_borg-olivier.php

*** 10 - 12 August 2018
SBO YS Workshop London (Host/Venue: Yogarise Peckham_
http://www.yogarise.london
*** 14 - 26 August 2018
SBO 100 hour Intensive, Barcelona, Spain (Host/Venue: NowHere Yoga)
http://nowhere.yoga/en/portfolio/ttc/

*** 7 - 16 September 2018
YS 10 Day Yoga Therapy Intensive, Sydney
Teacher: Simon Borg-Olivier
Sydney, Australia (Host: Yoga Synergy)
https://yogasynergy.com/upc…/yoga-therapy-vinyasa-intensive/

*** 21 - 22 September 2018
History and Philosophy of Yoga Lectures For Teacher Training Course at Ihana Yoga Melbourne (Closed) (Host/Venue: Ihana Yoga)
https://ihanayoga.com.au/workshops/

*** 23 September 2018
SBO YS Workshop; Melbourne, Australia (Host/Venue: Ihana Yoga)
https://ihanayoga.com.au/workshops/

*** 29 - 30 September 2018
SBO YS Yoga Therapy (Weekend 1 - limbs and anatomy focus); Brisbane, Australia (Host/Venue: Kaya/Yoga Bones)
http://yogabones.net.au/events/

*** 4 - 10 October 2018
SBO YS Intensive Training; Perth, Australia (Host/Venue: Sydel/Home of Yoga)

*** 13 - 14 October 2018
SBO Yoga Therapy (Weekend 2 - trunk and physiology focus); Brisbane, Australia (Host/Venue: Kaya/Yoga Bones)
http://yogabones.net.au/events/

*** 19 - 28 October 2018
YS TT Paradise One 10 day Intensive; Byron Bay, Australia (Host: Yoga Synergy)
Teachers: Simon Borg-Olivier and Bianca Machliss (Host: Yoga Synergy)
https://yogasynergy.com/…/200hour-teacher-training-sydney-…/

*** 4 November - 2 December 2018
SBO YS TT Bali, Indonesia
200h and 300h Teacher: Simon Borg-Olivier (Host: Yoga Synergy)
https://yogasynergy.com/upc…/teacher-training-bali-nov-2018/

*** 10 - 13 December 2018
SBO YS and Master Yang Workshop; Gold Coast, Australia
http://www.masteryang.com.au/events/

*** 29 - 31 December 2018
SBO teaching at Lost Paradise Festival Glenworth Valley, Australia

*** 3 February - 3 March 2019
200 hour TT Intensive Training, Goa India
Main Teacher: Simon Borg-Olivier (Host: Yoga Synergy)
www.yogasynergy.com


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April 2018 Newsletter from Srivatsa Ramaswami-अक्लिष्ट akliṣṭa

March 31, 2018, 5:54 pm
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In March I taught a ten day fifty hour program on Bhagavat Gita for a compact nice group of participants. It was in New Delhi organized by Mini Shastri of Om Yoga. It was very satisfying experience

I am planning to return to USA end of April. In May I have a short extended weekend program scheduled in Germany. It is organized by BDY the German Yoga Association. Here is the link for the program


It is from May 25th to 27th 2018 and near Frankfurt Germany.

In June I will be teaching for a week at East Side Yoga Center in Austin Texas and then a 15 day 100 hr Vinyasakrama Yoga program at Victoria in Canada, sponsored by One Yoga. For more details please refer to the Events page of myweb sitewww.vinyasakramayoga.com/Events. You may be able to find details about other programs scheduled for the rest of the year in this link.



अक्लिष्ट akliṣṭa

In this article I would like to discuss the use of the terms अक्लिष्ट

akliṣṭa and kliṣṭa used by Maharshi Patanjali early in the work of Rajayoga. or yogadarsana. He refers to vrittis and groups all vrittis into five. Vritti is activity (vritti jivane). Here it refers to the activity of the brain or citta or more specifically the visesha vrittis or the activities of the citta that manifests to the individual and to the individual only. The five vrittis are pramana or activity of the brain in ascertaining the truth. The second set of vrittis are activities of the citta where it comes to a wrong conclusion, then we have activities of the brain which are purely imaginary. The fourth will be deep sleep and finally we have smriti vritties or remembering or recalling information from memory.


What is equally intersting is that Patanjali also classifies differently the vritties as klishta or leading to pain and akslishta or not leading to pain. Klishta comes from the root 'klis' to cause pain as in klesa. Klishta vrittis are those vrittis or activities of citta that lead to pain and sorrow whereas aklishta vrittis are those that help lead the yogi to the favourable state of flowing peace. The vedas also refer to anukula and pratilula or activities that are favourable and activities that are unfavourable.


Then what citta vritties or activities are favourable or aklishta and what are unfavourable or klishta? The answer is simple All activities that lead one to the desired goal is aklishta vrittis and those that divert away from one's goal is klishta. So it is clear one sholuld know what is favourable or aklishta and what is unfavourable or klishta to reach one's goal. Since Patanjali used the terms klishta and aklishta we have to know what is the goal of yoga. The goal of Patanjali's yoga as all of us know is citta vritti nirodha or ultimately a complete cessation of all cittavrittis. Then the question is if all cittavrittis should cease then no vritti is favourable.


But then the citta vritti nirodha can not be achieved by all nor at once. One has to train the citta to shed more and more vrittis before the cittavritti nirodha can be achieved. How can it be done. Using the cittavrittis appropriately. Find out those vrittis that are helpful to overcome all the vrittis in the end. These Patanjali would call as aklishta vritti and anything that does not lead to the goal will be klishta vritti.


What are the vrittis then that can be termed aklishta vrittis. They are the yogic activities.Yogic activities are said to be nonbinding while all other good and bad activities give good or bad results but still keep the individual under bondage. Distinctly different are the yogic activities which give neither good results like wealth fame and heaven nor bad results like ill health poverty or a place far away from heaven . What do yogic activities do? They reduce, step by step, the multitude of distracting vrittis and ultimately help the citta transcend all the vrittis - good, bad and yogic- in a stae of kaivalya.


Patanali succinctly puts all activities or karma as of four types. White or good karma, black of bad karma, mixed or karmas that are part good and part bad and fourthly yogic activities that are none of the three. They, the yogic vrittis only lead to cittavritti nirodha. So the yogi picks and chooses the appropriate vrittis like kriya yoga, ashtanga yoga, samadhi yoga dependig on the stage the yogi is in. In the Bhagavatgita after listening to Lord Krishn's discourse on Samkhya where the individual self is explained as non changing pur awareness, and then His advise to do appropriate activities, Arjuna asks why should he do activity why not become a sthitapragna or one who is established in the true nature of the self. The Lord implies that one has to still act appropriately. He says that wise people give up both dharma or good karmas (sukrit) and also bad karmas dushkrit). Among all activiteis yoga is the one that will give salvation (kausala) Therefore the Lord urges Arjuna to become yogi and do the appropriate yogic activites.


If I am lost in a new place (every birth, one is born in a new place) and lost my way to go back home I keep searching until I get the right direction to go home. But the journey has one more leg that is travelling back home. Here home is one's own real self. Yoga is the activity that delivers one to one's home one's self. These activities of the citta are the aklishta vrittis. Aklishta vrittis are yogic vritties or yogic activities that lead to kaivalya or cittavrittinirodha.

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see also perhaps...

My Ramaswami resource

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I'm sure there's still an Ashtanga practitioner buried within me somewhere but......

April 15, 2018, 2:07 am
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I'm sure there's still an Ashtanga practitioner buried within me somewhere but more and more I feel...at a distance, only occasionally, when I see old friends practicing, Kristina, her shala in Rethymno, do I feel like finding my way back.... out of fondness.

I heard Ashtanga subscriptions have been down of later.

The long long overdue outing of the Jois abuse scandal and the mostly unsatisfactory response  acknowledgement from senior teachers and the community.

Sharath's lack of respect for lineage re the list- however apt perhaps in these supposedly Post-Lineage times - and what else have we been writing about in the home practitioner blogs, pages, forums and groups if not Post-Lineage, Post-Guru.... if we weren't so Post-Post.

And then there's the whole Aloe/Codi/Kinoh noise that makes me want (almost) no part of yoga anymore let alone ashtanga (Qigong anybody?).

I mentioned a while back that I found yoga as product/personality grotesque and was censored for it, but what other word captures the blind distortion of all that we glimpsed as perhaps having value and meaning. The heart of yoga, if there is such a thing, has I suspect nothing to do with any product or ego, quite the opposite, surely these are all distractions.

Away with it all, back to the primary sources (which are of course always secondary), there is some semblance (pleasing illusion?) of purity there at least....perhaps, or better still rediscover our own traditions, or the spirit that still lies there within, we may as well distract and deceive ourselves there as elsewhere.

I wash my hands of it all and practice whatever the hell it is that I practice, seek to tread lightly,be kinder, move my body, explore my breath (perhaps through blowing long tones on an old flute) and Sit (or stand by my four million year old lake) and merely 'be' for a time and that feels.... something.

Practice?


Pranayama?



Appendix.


Simon Borg-Olivier demonstrating this approach to practice that captivates me.






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Simon Borg-Olivier on Kino's Omstars channel.

April 20, 2018, 2:44 am
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I came across a trailer for a new course by Simon Borg-Olivier on Kino MacGregor's, Omstars channel (https://omstars.com/) , a channel she describes in their mission statement as "Netflix for yogi's". Following a link to the Omstars fb page I also came across a coupon (CELEBRITYONE) for the month of April, one month for $1, result.

I can't say, much about the channel, all I've watched thus far are Simon's videos but it's certainly as easy to subscribe as Netflix, an email address, make a password and you have an account. Fill in your credit card details, add the coupon and you're all subscribed and watching videos in minutes.

As with Netflix, this is an unlimited viewing subscription channel, you don't get to download and keep anything, although of course, you can always capture streaming content, a favourite clip or video playing on your screen, with the likes of the 'New Screen recording feature on the free Quicktime program that come with your mac ( I'm sure PC's have something similar).

There are a list of 'hosts', some I'm familiar with. Kino of course, Laruga, David Robson, Mark Robberds, Tim Feldmann, Eddie Stern, Ajay Tokas is there, also Alexander Medin. The others I'm not familiar with but all are in a sense hosts of their own channel under the Omstars umbrella offering one or more playlists (courses). There are Led Ashtanga series, breakdown of asana within series, anatomy classes and much more besides. A few years ago, back when I was hunting through YouTube in search of tutorials, I would have been very excited, these days I'm kind of over asana tutorials and led Series. However, I may well watch Alex Medin's Yoga Sutra series, before my subscription runs out.

This may not be my kind of thing currently but I imagine, to the home practitioner in the first few years exploring their Ashtanga practice (or yoga practice generally) this channel/website would be a godsend. It may not be free like YouTube but seems reasonable, with a lot of useful content. i believe there is another coupon available for April $80 for the year, that would be a bargain I imagine.

It was Simon I came for, I'm fascinated by how his practice, or rather what it is he chooses to teach, seems to be metamorphosing of late, each video i see seems to come at it from a slightly different angle, each demonstration of his practice slightly different,I couldn't resist a recent, up to date presentation.

And it is fascinating. After a trailer we get a twenty minute introduction/lecture (Learn the fundamentals), the science behind what he's doing, why he waves his arms about as he does, undulates his spine as he does, breathe naturally as he does. In the next video



The following video, just over an hour is Simon with two other practitioner's going through the key movements, alternative, active movement approaches to the surya namaskar and standing postures.



He even includes his active handstand approach, where the breath takes you up relatively effortlessly.


The next video is the Led actual practice, again it starts off simply, the same eight basic movements we had broken down in the first video. alternative foot positions are introduced, in the last ten minutes it becomes more improvisational, shifting the weight first here, then there. For me. having practiced this approach for a year or so now this and the previous video were revelatory, I feel I have a much better understanding of what is I'm actually doing or trying to do and how I can introduce this sense of play into my own practice of Simon and Bianca's Spinal sequence and active movements.


The final video is Simon practicing ( more practicing than demonstrating perhaps), he makes his 'clicking' sound to cue movements but that's about it. It's like playing along to one of your favourite sax players, (or trying to flollow a transcription) occasionally you get a little lost so just go off on your own for a bit until you kind of get back on track. Once you have the basic movements under your belt there really aren't any rules, just go, as they say, with the flow and your practice will no doubt be all the better for it.


Thank you Kino for bringing Simon to your platform, for the high quality production and excellent editing, was it filmed by who I think it was?


APPENDIX


Details


http://simonborgolivier.com/


I also want to recommend Simon's own video/download of the Spinal Sequence, slightly different approach to the way he's presenting it on Omstars, equally excellent.

https://yogasynergy.com/shop/spinal-movements/






















At the end of the practice, simon settles into this classic qigong tree posture, a meditative posture that you can hold for five minutes as Simon does here or fifty, a whole practice in itself..


Update - a response to an fb comment.

We get to choose our concepts, another one might be the concept of bringing together useful tutorials and led classes from accomplished practitioners and communicators. A few years ago I used to scour Youtube for those who could explain how best to get in and out of a certain asana. In that sense this is nothing more than an extension of my early youtube playlists of certain teachers content. I have profound distaste for celebrity, yoga 'lifestyle' and yoga and business used in the same sentence but if you are at a stage of your practice where youyare into tutorials then this may well be useful.


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"Yoga's Culture of Sexual Abuse: Nine Women Tell Their Stories".

April 28, 2018, 6:35 am
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We can love our practice yet still question it's context. 

My own inspiration for practice, comes not from the Jois family or from those teachers who looked the other way, or excused or justified but from the thousands of practitioners who continue to practice daily with sincerity in their homes and shalas. 


"Jois’s host for the Hawaii event (2002) asked not to be identified but did tell me about the incident. After hearing about the behaviour that was taking place in class, the host intervened by calling a meeting with Jois, his daughter, Saraswathi Rangaswamy, and his grandson, Sharath Rangaswamy (who’s known more commonly as Sharath Jois). Saraswathi and Sharath often travelled with Jois and are now the lead teachers of his shala in Mysuru, now called the K. Pattabhi Jois Ashtanga Yoga Institute. Today, the Ashtanga community calls Sharath “Paramaguru,” a name that implies he now holds his grandfather’s “lineage”—a putative combination of ancient techniques and inherited authority. “It was not my intention to shame him,” the host wrote in an email, referring to Jois. “But to delicately inform him that in the West, such behavior could result in a law suit.”


The host writes that Saraswathi interjected: “‘Not just the West, but anywhere!’” Sharath, the host adds, then said that if Jois continued such behaviour, he would not teach with his grandfather anymore. (The Walrus has reached out to Sharath multiple times about these allegations and his response to them. He has yet to comment.) Up until then, it had been an accepted practice for Jois to squeeze the buttocks of women who lined up to greet him after every class and kiss them on the lips. According to the host, this behaviour stopped after that confrontation and Sharath and Saraswathi no longer allowed Jois to say goodbye to practitioners at the end of class".  
- Matthew Remski: Yoga's Culture of Sexual Abuse: Nine Women Tell Their Stories


***

Background to this post (links to articles etc. ( by Mary Taylor, Karen Rain etc. ) can be found on this post 
'Ashtanga Yoga: Inappropriate adjustments/Sexual abuse'.



***

Matthew Remski isn't someone I tend to read but this article is too important I feel for the testimony of the nine woman abused by Pattabhi Jois, skip past the narrator perhaps to the actual accounts as I have done here.


Yoga's Culture of Sexual Abuse: Nine Women Tell Their Stories
Full article by Matthew Remski here
https://thewalrus.ca/yogas-culture-of-sexual-abuse-nine-women-tell-their-stories/

The nine testimonies from the article.

1. Katchie Ananda was thirty-five and living in Boulder, Colorado, when she encountered Jois at a yoga intensive held there in 2000. She told me about being both physically and sexually assaulted by Jois over the span of several days. In one encounter, she says, Jois wrestled her into a deeper standing back bend than she was ready for. Her hands were on her ankles—already an extreme position. Jois moved her hands sharply up to behind her knees until she heard an internal rip. Later, an mri showed a disc herniation, to which she believes Jois contributed.

During that same event, Jois leaned into her and pressed his groin directly onto hers while she was on her back with both legs behind her head. “I remember registering that this was wrong,” she wrote in a public Facebook post. “But I was also completely absorbed in the sensation of having my hips opened, probably past what they could handle.”

2. Charlotte Clews’s experience at an event in Boulder followed the same arc. At twenty-seven, Clews was living in Boulder and felt she’d found a home in the yoga community’s athleticism and was progressing toward the most demanding postures. During one practice, Jois tore her hamstring attachment as he stood on her thighs and pushed her torso into a deep forward fold, with her legs open in a wide V. She persisted through the pain until Jois again approached her to hold her steady as she bent over backwards into a series of “drop backs.” He pressed his groin directly against hers as he supported her as she arched up and down. She had never been touched in that way in that posture before.

Clews tells me that she was trained to believe that pain in practice was irrelevant and that injury was a risk in Ashtanga. But part of her also believed that a “good” student—who properly submitted to the teacher—would not get hurt. The group considered it to be a special honour when Jois assisted them. Clews remembers no impulse to tell her friends about the pain she was in, nor to resist Jois, in part because he was supporting her lumbar spine, which made resistance nearly physically impossible. She says Jois later insisted that she fold her right leg in lotus position despite her ankle being sprained. When she didn’t comply, she says, he aggressively torqued her legs into position and badly reinjured the ankle. It didn’t occur to Clews at the time to blame Jois for the pain, she says. She felt she was choosing the experience.

3. In November 2017, Karen Rain published a #MeToo statement to her Facebook page. She described being regularly assaulted by Jois between 1994 and 1998. Like other women I spoke with, Rain says that Jois assaulted her when he was adjusting her. In her case, the assaults occurred in various postures, including one in which she was lying on her back with one of her legs pulled up straight alongside her body and with her foot over her head. “He would get on top of me,” she says, “as he did with many women, in the attempt to push our foot down over our head, and he would basically hump me at the same time.”

4. Marisa Sullivan remembers sitting on the stairs outside the open door of Jois’s shala on her first day in Mysuru in 1997 and seeing him put his hand on a woman’s buttock and stare off blankly into space. She watched, aghast, as he kept pawing the women. As the days stretched into weeks, she commiserated with two other American students who were also appalled. When it was her turn to practise in the room, she was hypervigilant, trying to time her postures to avoid vulnerable positions whenever Jois passed. When he did touch her, she froze.

But she had also prepared for years for this opportunity, had come a long way from New York City, where she lived, and felt socially invested. “I feared my position in the community if I spoke out,” Sullivan says. “But much more than that—I had lived through sexual abuse at home and my truth was denied. I did not want anyone taking away my truth that the way I and other women were being touched was wrong. I heard too many devotees support Jois’s actions with varying excuses.” She made a choice to stay. “I said, ‘I’m here. I’m just going to dive in. Enough with this questioning.’ I’d always been on the outside of communities.”

After that moment, she began to let Jois physically adjust her. Suddenly, he began showering Sullivan with attention. She felt that she blossomed. Soon, she would either kiss his feet or bow down at the end of each session. But, a few weeks later, he assaulted her while she was standing in a forward bend, her legs spread wide and her arms raised up and over with her hands reaching toward the floor. First, he pushed her hands to the floor, which she found agonizing. In that position, she was immobilized. Suddenly, she says, Jois walked his fingers over her buttocks, landing on her groin, where he began to move his fingers back and forth over her leotard.

5. Hawaii-based Michaelle Edwards describes a similar incident that took place in 1990 at an event with Jois on the island of Maui. Edwards was in Paschimottanasana (an intense seated forward fold) when Jois laid down on top of her, pushing her deeper until she could barely breathe. He then reached underneath her hips to use his fingers to grope her. “I was shocked and thought maybe he was confused about what he was doing,” she says. “And then I really felt molested and very uncomfortable to have his weight on me.” Edwards told Jois “no” repeatedly. Then she tried to move him off of her. Finally, she was able to stand, only to see Jois smiling. “He began to call me a ‘bad, bad lady.’” At the end of the class, she saw people treating him “as though he was some kind of deity or enlightened being.”

6. In 2000, says Anneke Lucas, Jois sexually assaulted her during a yoga intensive in the ballroom of the old Puck Building in downtown Manhattan. Lucas, a New York City–based writer and now the executive director of a non-profit, had come to Ashtanga practice as part of her path to healing after surviving sex trafficking as a child. Jois groped her a few days into the workshop. “I sensed that if I were to respond in public, he would have experienced the humiliation he’d just made me feel. He would be angry, and send me off,” Lucas wrote in an article first published on a prominent New York yoga website in 2010 and reissued in 2016. “I thought I might be banned from my community that had come to feel like home. I felt confused, felt helpless, and held my tongue.”

7. Michelle Bouvier told me that Jois groped her groin twice at a 2002 event in Encinitas, California. Then twenty-four years old, she remembers at first being shocked and then trying to ignore him by syncing up her energy with that of the older woman beside her. “I thought, ‘This is not really real anymore,’” Bouvier tells me. “[But] if I had thought there was anything spiritual about this scene, that feeling was gone.”

8. Maya Hammer visited Jois’s Mysuru shala in the late ’90s, at the same time as Sullivan (the two later travelled together). She was twenty-three at the time and living in Kingston, Ontario. Early into her practice at the shala, Jois groped Hammer’s breast. At first, she thought it might have been an accident. By the third day, he was leaning forward into her buttocks and groin region. She was shocked. After a call home to her father, Hammer set out to confront Jois. She told me that he denied groping her, then promised that he wouldn’t keep doing it, and then waffled when she demanded a refund. She stood her ground until he reluctantly fetched $200 in cash from the back room and thrust it at her. She left the shala soon after.

9. At another event, in 2002, Micki Evslin, who was then fifty-five, attended an event with Jois in Hawaii, where she lives, as part of his American tour that year. Evslin remembers being excited by the prospect of meeting the master. She was in a standing forward fold when she saw Jois’s feet approach from behind. He then penetrated her vagina with his fingers. “He had to use a lot of force,” says Evslin, in order to stretch the fabric of her clothing. Before she could react, Jois moved on down the line of bent-over practitioners.


***


I wouldn't normally listen to J Brown's podcast either or to Kino Macgregor for that matter, but I did listen to most of this one (https://www.jbrownyoga.com/yoga-talks-podcast/2018/4/kino-macgregor) and I too was frustrated with Kino's response to Pattabhi Jois' sexual abuse, as I have been to much of the response in the Ashtanga community. This article from Karen Rain, one of the nine contributors in the above article, addresses the problem head on and is important I think,however uncomfortable.
http://www.decolonizingyoga.com/responding-to-kino-macgreg…/


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Fly - May 2018 Newsletter from Srivatsa Ramaswami

April 30, 2018, 6:08 pm
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May 2018 Newsletter from Srivatsa Ramaswami--Fly

Note: The Fly, by Blake is my addition not Ramaswami's.

I returned to USA after almost a five month stay in India. The stay was nice in part, I taught for about 30 days teaching verse by verses or sutra by sutra three important texts, The Bhagavat Gita, the Yoga sutras as part of the 100 hr teacher training program and also Samkhya Karika. The rest of the time in Chennai was rather rough but came away in one piece. In May I am scheduled to teach for 3 days for German Yoga Body.

Fly

When I was very young I used to like a story in the form of a poem about a fly which is called "e" in my mother tongue Tamil and who forgot its identity and name and was keen to find it out. It was living its short life around a cowshed. It was sitting on the ear of a fat lovely little calf when this question of identity came up in its little mind. The fly asked the calf "Do you know who am I, my name". The calf shook its head indicating that it does not know and also throwing the fly off. The fly then flew to the mother cow, sat on its right ear and asked the same question "Do you know...?"  Again the cow shook its head vigorously indicating it does not know and also to drive away the annoying fly on its ear. The fly flew a short distance and sat on the ear of the cowherd who would tend the cow, take it for grazing and asked the same question. The cowhead knew nothing of it and again shook his head to answer in the negative and to shake the  fly off.

The little fly then sat on the stick in the hand of the cowherd and asked the cane the same question,"Do you know who I am, my name please?" The stick did not even hear what the fly asked and kept mum. Desparate the fly flew from the stick to the nearby tree from which the can was taken out. Again our litlle fly asked the huge banyan tree if it would know who the fly was, its name. Then there was a stiff breeze and the leaves and branches shook as if to indicate that the tree is ignorant. It also forced the fly to go off a little. But it  return to a crane (lark?) sitting on the tree. The fly got close to the crane again got near the ear and asked the same question. Annoyed at not knowing the answer, the crane flew off to a nearby waterbody, a pond as if to have a bath. The fly flew off from the crane and stood on the waters of the pond and asked the quest. "Oh dear pond on whcih the crane bathes, do you know who I am?" The pond kept quiet without answering and that time the fly saw a small fish busily swimming in the waters.Our little fly chose to ask the same question to the fish whcih ofcourse did not have the answer. By then the fly saw  a fisherman also known as valaya because he uses a net (valai) to catch fish and put it in an earthern vessal to keep the fish catch. Then the fly again got to the right ear of the fisherman and asked the simple question "Who am I ?" The fisherman said that he did not know. Then it landed on the small earthern fish container the fisherman was having and asked "I am desparate you know who I am?' The earhern pot said nothing. Desparate our fly flew to the  potter who made the clay container of the fisherman. It asked him the same question which all of us know by heart now."Who am I, what is my name?" The potter busy with his work waved off the fly without addressing the genuine concern of our little fly. The persistent fly then sat on the lump of clay that the potter was placing on the wheel to make another pot. The fly asked the same question and again got no reply. Then the fly flew further away on the grass that grew from the dirt. "Hello my dear green gras pray tell me who am I?"  The grass gently waved off with the breeze. And in a last desparate attempt, the fly got to the ear of the horse which was about to eat the grass and asked the question for the last time "Oh dear grass eating horse , tellme who am I, what is my name?". With the fly tickling its ears the horse made its unique sound -a neigh a whiny, a bray  or whatever. It gave  a few throaty sounds 'e' the exact name of the fly in Tamil. The fly having learnt its name , identity flew  away happily. It was self-realization for the small fly.
This story written after watching a fly fly short distances and sitting on different objects. It also parallels and brings a very important question the upanishads yoga and samkhya try to answer about each one of us.

A few people, very few get concerned about who he or she is, what is one's real nature like our litlle fly different from other flies. Many such people spend their entire lifetime trying to  find an answer to this question. This question is said to be answered by the upanishads especially four great saying from the four vedas that contain the upanishads.  The student asks the father/teacher about the ultimate reality to whcih the father/sage replies  "You are that ultimate reality or tat tvam asi" as per sama veda. To the next question what is Brahman, its essntial nature, comes the answer from Rig veda "Brahman is absolute consciousness or Pragnyanam Brahma". Since the individual atman or self is pure consciousness, the next statement from atharva veda says that the self in each of us is Brahman or ayam atma Brahma or This Atma or self is brahma. With this knowledge the individual mind settles down with the last great saying from the Yajur veda "I am Brahman or aham brahmasmi"

The fly wanted to know who it was and the truth came from the horses's mouth
The truth seeker wanted to know the true nature of oneself and the answer came from the rishis or the truth speakers
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Upanishad Vidyas - June 2018 Newsletter from Srivatsa Ramaswami-

May 31, 2018, 6:21 pm
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I was for three days in Germany teaching a workshop on yoga.The program was organized by BDY (German Yoga Body)( my translation). About 50 yoga teachers and practitioners attended the program.
On pranayama I had indicated that exhalation or racaka is perhaps the most important factor in learning pranyama practice. With a thorough exhalation making use ot the rectal, pelvic abdominal muscles and a flexible strong diaphragm the yogi is able to achieve exceptional racaka. And this facilitates a very good inhalation next taking in considerable fresh air. A few times say about 40 such pranayama everyday is refreshing as it helps to remove stale air from the lungs and take in fresh oxygen. My Guru would day that with recaka bala or strength of recaka or exhalation a hatayogi achieves a lot.

The whole program was arranged by my 20 year long friend Klaus Koenig.He translated the talks, demonstrated many postures. His young son 9 year old Hagen also was there helping his hard working father. A lovely kid.

On the way to the airport, Hagen gave a 'riddle'. How do you get a cow into a refrigerator? I could not imagine a cow in a  refrigerator like the one in my house. I said I did not know. He said, just open the door and put the cow in and close the door . Oh yes if the refrigerator was large enough it could hold the cow. Then he went on and asked, "Now, how can get a horse into the same refrigerator. I thought I knew the answer and said "Open the door, put the horse in the refrigerator and close the door"?He smiled and said, "No, you first get the cow out of the refrigerator and then put the horse in".

Klause continued. In the same way you exhale completely and then inhale for pranayama. Remove the stale air (cow) with recaka from the lungs (refrigerator) and then fill the lungs (refrigerator) with good inhalation or puraka(the horse)







In June I will be teaching a weeklong program covering a variety of yoga related topics at East Side Yoga in Austin Texas. Here is the link for more information

http://www.eastsideyoga-austin.com/product/srivatsa-ramaswami-visit-june-2018/

From June 30th to mid July I am scheduled to teach a 15 day 100 hour Vinyasakrama yoga teacher training program at One yoga in Victoria, Canada. Though I had not planned any more of this TT program, because my last year scheduled program at Oneyoga at Montreal was cancelled, we agreed to do it in Victoria for Oneyoga of my friend Ryan Leir. It will have three components A sixty hour segment will cover more than 700 vinyasas centered around more than 120 classical asanas in 10 major sequences,following the Vinyasakrama methodology with breath orientation as taught by my Guru Sri Krishnamacharya. Then there will be 20 hour segment consisting of a variety of pranayama methods and practice of some important pranayama procedures. It will also include the bandhas. In addition we will also cover yogic procedures that have a direct bearing upon the health of six internal organs or koshas viz., the heart and the circulatory system, the lungs and the respiratory system, the stomach and the digestive system, the kidneys/bladder and the urinary system, the intestines  and the uterus and  the reproductive systems. The third component  will be for 20 hours in which we will go through all the sutras in the fourt chapters of Patanjali's yoga sutra.

I understand that there are still a few spots available even as the registration so far has been good. Here is the link.

http://oneyogavictoria.com/events/vinyasa-krama-teacher-training-with-srivatsa-ramaswami


Of course I should also mention about another important program I will be doing at Loyola Marymount University in July/August 2018. It will be 8 day program of yoga related text studies. I will be teaching the twin darsanas or philosophies of Samkhya and Yoga one in the morning and one in the afternoon. We will go throug all the 72 slokas or verses of Samkhya Karika of Iswarakrishna and then in the afternoon all the sutras of Patanjali. Since these texts complement each other it will be very useful to study them together. Here is the link for registration.
https://academics.lmu.edu/extension/crs/yoga/programs/vinyasa/

http://www.vinyasakrama.com/Events

Upanishad Vidyas

(Photo is my addition to the newsletter - Grimmly)

Sri Krishnamacharya after teaching in detail both Samkhya Karika and Yoga Sutras started teaching several upanishads and upanishad vidyas. One day I asked my Guru why there are so many upanishads and upanishad vidyas if they all have one goal of teaching one Truth principle called the Brahman. He replied that since there are several teachers and students with different abilities it would be necessary to adopt different methods, discussions and arguments to arrive at the same Truth. Here I will take up a few such Vidyas and how they help the reader to understand the nature of Brahman

Perhaps  the most studied upanishad is Mandukya Upanishad wherein the Rishi author endeavours to explain that reality through our daily experiential states of waking dreaming and deep sleep to arrive at the fourth state of Brahmanhood.  The Vedas refer to that ultimate reality by the pranava mantra “OM” which is made of  the vowels 'a'. 'u'. and  the consonant 'm'  and It represents the three states we experience daily. We all agree that each one of us experience these three states daily. But are we able to identify this entity that goes through, experiences all these states. That is what this upanishad does.

We usually say that  an individual acts  during the waking state, then lies down and has a dream and then deep sleep before waking up again to go through activities in the waking state. But what exactly is the nature of the individual who goes through all  the three stages? What are the differences among the three states and what is common in all the states? What is common in all the states is the Self and what is experienced in each state because they vary will not be the self. So the Upanishad identifies the waking state observer as pure consciousness or Brahman which is known as Atman at the individual level and is represented by the syllable 'a' of the pranava. Then the same atman is experiencing the dream state and is represented as 'u' and then deep sleep as 'm'.

Am I, Ramaswami.  not the one who has experience of waking state and then I lie down and have a dream and then deep sleep? There is a big difference. In waking state Ramaswami is the person identified commonly as the subject. But in dream we have another world the dream world, the dream objects. We all agree that the dream world and dream objects are different from the waking state world and objects and persons. In addition it is easy to see that the waking state subject Ramaswami is different from the dream state subject which the mind identifies as the subject which looks and acts differently from the waking state individual. It is also said that when one has a dream there is a partial temporary paralysis of several motor functions  and so the dreamer does not walk when the dream self does all activities. So the upanishad indicates that what we commonly talk about as the subject during waking state, it is different from the the subject in the dream state and the waking state dreamer is not the one who experiences the dream but the unvarying consciousness or Atman which is none other than Brahman. The upanishad wants us to see that the waking state Ramaswami is also an object for the Atman as the outside world and objects. Likewise for the Atman --and not Ramaswami-- the dream objects, the dream world and the dream self are all objects for the dream watching Atman identified by the Upanishad as 'u'. And one can extend the arguments to the deep sleep state as well. Then there is the pure state of the Atman/Brahman consciousness which yogis and liberated vedantins are said to be in, called kaivalya or brahma nirvana or the fourth state or turiya represented by the complete syllable 'AUM'

The Taittiriya upanishad looks at the ‘seen person’ as one made up of
five kosas, and exhorts the spiritual seeker to transcend the ‘five
kosa seen person’ by deep step by step contemplation and understand
the nature of the atman. These five kosas are envisaged, each one of
them as made up of the five parts of a bird,  and each one of the
kosas more subtle than the outer one. The five kosas start with the
one made of food or matter, the physical body. It is made of physical
matter  consisting of five distinct portions as the head, the right
and left wings, the body of the front and the tail or the back. It
gets energy from anna or food/matter. This kosa should be kept pure
and yogasanas are said to help one achieve this goal. There is a vedic
prayer which helps one pray for the pure satvic quality of the
physical body made fully of anna(annamaya) or matter.

This physical body is identified by everybody, including a child, as
the person, the self. But the self by definition is the innermost,
subtlest principle in every human being. Is there anything more subtle
than the physical body?  The upanishad begins to investigate.

And it finds out that there is an inner self to the physical body made
fully of life force called prana, in the same mold of the physical
body. This pranamaya permeates the whole physical body and is
visualized as the self of the physical body or annamaya kosa. It also
is visualized with five distinct parts, the head, the two wings, the
chest and then the tail. The Prana, the main life force is the head
of  vyana and apana are the right and left wings, then udana is the
body or heart of this kosa and then samana is the tail or support of
this system. A regular pranayama workout will help maintain this kosa
in good stead.

There is an inner self, of the shape of the person, to this prana maya
kosa which itself is a sheath or a kosa called mano maya. It is
permeated with an aspect of the chitta called manas. Manas coordinates
all the senses and instruments of action. Interestingly the most
important sense for a vedic scholar is the sense of hearing. Hearing
the vedas from the teacher the vedic student learns by heart the
vedas. Also this vedic student has his mano maya kosa full of vedic
knowledge. The head of this mano maya  is the yajur veda, the right
and the left wings are the rik and sama vedas. The body or the chest
is the vedic injunctions (adesa or the brahmana portion) and the tail
is the last veda, the atharva veda. It therefore actually refers to
our entire memory kosa. This kosa according to yogis can be kept in
good condition by pratyahara. The vaidics would say chanting of the
vedas  keeps the manomaya kosa in good shape.

Is there anything subtler than this? Yes, says the Upanishad. Subtler
than the mano maya is the vigyana maya or the kosa of intellect. This
is the self of the previous kosa, of the human form but is visualized
with a head which is shraddha or faith(in the scriptures). Since the
vedic scholar is doing this self analysis and investigation, he uses
this kosa towards the spiritual end. So the right wing is
righteousness or straight forwardness(rtam) and the left wing is satya
or the ultimate spiritual Truth. Then the heart or the atma of this
sheath is yoga or the ability to remain concentrated or go into
samadhi. The whole kosa is supported by mahat or universal
intelligence. The upanishad sadhaka has to have this kosa in good
stead to clearly understand the nature of the self using this kosa
diligently. And dhyana or meditation is the means of keeping this kosa
unpolluted.

The soul of this kosa is another subtle kosa called ananda maya which
is translated roughly as the bliss kosa. Again this kosa is  in the
human form but is visualized as a bird. The head of this kosa is
affection (priya), the right wing is glee (moda), the left wing is
ecstasy (pramoda) and the heart is bliss (ananda) and the support of
this is Brahman, the ultimate reality. The ultimate reality, the Atman/
Brahman which is defined (swarupa lakshana) as pure consciousness
unaffected by either time or space (satyam, gnanam anantam brahma) and
whose realization is possible by the path shown (tatasta lakshana) by
the knowledge called the pancha maya (kosa) vidya is what is to be
known to end the evil of transmigratory existence.

The first step is to  consider the human body, called the annamaya, as
part of the outside matter of the universe as it is that which is made
up of five elements, earth, water, etc., returns to the earth/universe
after death. During the lifetime, the annamaya body is sustained by
anna or food/matter, itself drawing the energy from it. The subtle
self of the human body which is the inner sheath known as pranamaya is
the one that keeps the body alive. The force that maintains it is
called prana sakti. It is said that udana, one of the five forces
keeps the balance between prana the inward life force and apana the
outward life force under balance. Once the udana loses that control at
the time of death, the apana with  prana and  other life forces leaves
the body. The other three sheaths , the manomaya, its inner core/
atman, the vigyana maya and the subtlest sheath the ananda maya are
controlled by the power of veil or ignorance called the avarana
sakthi. This is the power which prevents the individual from realizing
the true nature of one’s core or atman which is pure consciousness and
beyond the five kosas. This power when it operates in the subtlest or
the ananda maya kosa is known as ichha sakti or the power of desire.
When it operates in the vignyana maya kosa it is known as gnana sakti
or power of discrimination and then when it operates in the mano maya
it is known as kriya sakti. The desire for the desirable object arising
in the ananda maya leads the vignyana maya to contemplate the means
for fulfilling it and thereafter the manomaya directs the physical
body to do the necessary physical work to achieve the goal, which it
succeeds in sometimes and not some other times leading to the feeling
of happiness or unhappiness in the ananda maya self. Thus even though
the spiritual nature of the self is clearly discernible from the
pancha maya vidya of the Upanishads, it is obscured by the power of
the avarana sakthi or the power of spiritual ignorance which gets more
and more strengthened by the operation of this sakthi, life after
life. Hence the upanishad not only explains the nature of the real
self as opposed to the mistaken self (mithya atma) made up of five
kosas but also gives a step by step approach to strengthen the
spiritual knowledge leading to transcending the evil of endless
transmigratory existence.

Since the human body returns to earth and other elements the entire
universe including the human body is considered one virat one whole
universe of anna or matter of  the five elements. The prana which is
the subtle self of the human body is considered the subtle self
therefore of the universe and then regressing further one arrives at
the individual soul or atman as the self. And since now it is also the
Self of the Universe it is called Brahman and the advaitins proclaims
the oneness (advaita) of the individual self (atman) and the supreme
self (brahman) as one and the same. This pancha kosa vidya episode
I am reproducing from an earlier newsletter.

Once a seeker is able to directly experience the Brahman the seeker's happiness is immeasurable. This is described beautifully in the anandamaya vidya of the taittiriya upanishad.The Bliss of one good youth well versed in the Vedas, firm, strong, healthy, quick, to whom the whole earth with all its wealth belongs, is one kind of bliss. Hundredfold and hundredfold greater in bliss in the order of succession are the states of Manushya-Gandharvas, Deva-Gandharvas, Pitris, Ajnanaja-Devas, Karma-Devas, Devas, Indra, Brihaspati, Prajapati, Brahma.

The bliss of Brahman is not to be considered as equal to a result mathematically arrived at by multiplying human joy by many hundred folds but it is the Bliss that is indescribable and infinite, the eternal the only existence. Every time it is asserted that the Veda-knower enjoys all these degrees of Bliss pro­vided he is untainted by desire and passion. A person who realizes the Brahman also knows that the individual atman or purusha in each individual creature and the one in the Sun yonder are one and the same. Such an individual never returns to be born again after leaving the layered body.

There are many such vidyas that the variety of upanishads boast of. Satvidya, pratardana vidya, panchagni vidya, dahara vidya, sandilya vidya, upakosala vidya, pratardana vidya are some of them.  The Bhagavatgita refers to the atman/brahman as the constant witness of the experiences of the childhood, then adulthood and old age and even death. The Mandukya refers to the same atma/brahman as the unvarying witness of the waking state, dream state and the deep sleep experiences of daily life and then the state of moksha or the transcendental state, the fourth or turiya. The panchagni vidya of Brihadarnyaka upanishad explains the state of five transformation the atman witnesses that take place in an individual between death and being reborn as a member of another species

Wish you Happy reading of Upanishad Vidyas

Srivatsa Ramaswami
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No longer identifying as an Ashtangi..... or a 'yogi' for that matter.

June 3, 2018, 7:01 pm
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I saw this expression recently  'I no longer identify as...', it's not ideal perhaps but it struck a chord, it seemed a convenient way to encapsulate my thinking (feeling?) of late and certainly as a conceit in trying to write this difficult post.


"I no longer identify as an Ashtangi".

Update: Somebody just commented "Who cares". They make a good point, but after eleven years of daily practice and ten of writing about it, feeling that I (and I'm assuming I'm no alone) no longer want to be identified with this practice.... well, I care, clearly.

Practicing Qigong by Lake Biwa. I have this lake two minutes from my door,
can't help wanting to make the most of it.

Identifying as anything is probably not a good idea in the first place but it's easily done and more often than not just convenient, especially when writing a blog.

From early on I seemed to have identified my daily practice as Ashtanga, and as we so often end up fitting our life around our practice we end up identifying ourselves by said practice. I don't think I ever identified as 'a yogi' however.

Those who run each morning, whose diet changes on account of their running, who go to bed early because they know they will be getting up early the next morning to run, who become fascinated by the technique of running and read all they can as well as at some point any anatomy that relates to the occasional aches and pains they develop. They no doubt end up with friends with similar interests, the only people perhaps who can understand a commitment to a practice that seems to feed into all areas of their lives. They too no doubt often identify themselves with their practice, as 'a runner'.

Though I didn't perhaps follow the expected or indicated path of practicing at shalas and going to Mysore, preferring to practice at home alone, I still seem to have ended up identifying myself as an Ashtangi, a home Ashtangi perhaps but an Ashtangi all the same.

As the years went on and I explored and practiced with Ramaswami and looked more deeply into that which Krishnamacharya shared with him, I still considered my practice Ashtanga. My Vinyasa Krama would fall naturally into the shape and format of the Ashtanga practice I was most familiar with. Likewise, when I went back to Krishnamacharya's own early Mysore texts and practiced for a couple of years as he indicated in his texts it was still, in my mind, Ashtanga. We could see the table of asana in Krishnamacharya's Yogasanagalu (Mysore 1941)  that, with minor modification, became Jois' presentation of his teacher's practice, it was all essentially Krishnamacharya's practice, somewhat simplified perhaps in Jois but essentially the same, the philosophy was the same, the goal supposedly the same.

This year I have moved further away from straight ashtanga than ever before. I would start my practice with some of Simon Borg-Olivier's spinal movements, do a few standing postures then four or five seated asana before moving into shoulder stand and headstand sequences (Note: Jois indicated in Yoga Mala that we would/could/should adapt our practice after reaching 50). Most Ashtangi's wouldn't perhaps have recognised it as Ashtanga but to my mind it was still essentially Ashtanga. If I had thought about it I probably still identified as 'an Ashtangi'.

So what changed.

A month ago I stopped practicing asana, Simon Borg-Olivier's Spinal movements no longer led into standing and seated asana but into other Qigong sets and exercises, the sets came together into a practice. I liked that I could do my whole practice standing up and that I could stroll down to the lake and practice beside it, just as I was, without a mat or thinking too much about what I happened to be wearing. I liked that I wasn't binding, laying on my back, standing on my head. I liked that I could do my meditation practice standing as well as my active practice. I liked how my practice became somewhat more of a part of the nature I have surrounded myself with here ,between the lake and the mountains. I liked the way my body felt, alive from toe to crown, energised rather than physically tired.

Ashtangi's will often tend to suggest that those who leave Ashtanga couldn't handle the boredom or the physicality of the practice. I can honestly say that I don't remember a single practice in which I felt the slightest bit bored. I loved the physicality of the practice too. In the early days, the sweat and exhaustion was exhilarating but latter too when I would practice more slowly with calmer, slower breathing in a cooler room I loved the physicality of that too.

I still believe Ashtanga is a delightful practice. Practiced well, mindfully, humbly...., modestly it can be a wonderful way to build discipline and focus, especially if these are something one has always struggled with. The naysayers of Ashtanga often have an extreme form of how it is occasionally, unfortunately, taught and practiced. Taught and practiced mindfully it's fine.

So why....

Well you know why or can perhaps guess.

I have written here that all that has gone on concerning Pattabhi Jois' historic sexual abuse need not concern our practice and I still stand by that. Besides, Krishnamacharya has been more of a focus for me in my practice than Pattabhi Jois. Not going to a Shala daily, not practicing regularly with a teacher who practiced with Jois directly. Not going to Mysore, the Jois family has been of less concern or interest than it might have been. I did though go to Manju to try and get an idea of how Jois taught his son before the western students came, to try and get as close to Jois' time with Krishnamacharya as I could. I went back to Manju though because I loved him not because of whose son he was. Sharath has always been somewhat of a disappointment from afar. His was always a difficult gig, taking over from his grandfather as he chose to do, but if the Paramaguru title wasn't the last straw for me then his treatment of others during the teacher's list debacle certainly was. Perhaps if I had practiced with him directly I would be more.... tolerant, kinder.

Jois' abuse is in the past, or at least it is for those of us who luckily never suffered it directly, but the response to that abuse is of the present. It is NOW. Still people turn away, make excuses, dismiss or vilify those brave enough to speak up at last. Some of my own friends and loved ones still post photos of a smiling Jois while those who can't hep but re-live aspects of the trauma they experienced through speaking up are revealing their scars. Videos that include, as we can clearly see now, Jois abusing others, not as explicitly perhaps as in some other videos but still there to see, are still being pointedly shared on social media. I find it shameful and have quite frankly wanted nothing to do with the practice or community, wash my hands on the whole thing.

Nobody is damaging Jois' reputation, he did that himself through his behaviour.

We saw the photos and made excuses
We heard testimony but didn't listen.
Finally one of the most widely respected teacher in our community spoke up.
Victims/sufferers broke silence.
We heard reports that Sharath and Saraswati saw the abuse themselves and tried to stop  it.
We read more direct testimony from those who were also abused.
We heard from other respected teachers what they had themselves seen, we heard the shame they expressed in not speaking up, in not doing more.
We read a brief apology, later disappointingly deleted, from Jois' own Son.

See this post for details http://grimmly2007.blogspot.com/2017/12/inappropriate-adjustments.html

And still there are those making excuses, looking the other way, vilifying, and STILL posting smiling photos of Jois along with videos of his abusive teaching.

It's not the past that made me want to unidentify myself with Ashtanga, it is the present.

Kino/Alo/Cody is just one more disappointing sideshow.

I didn't intend to write so strongly, triggers.

And yet......

And yet M. still practices her Primary, there beside my Qigong on the weekend. And I stumble upon photos and videos of Ashtangi's practicing, photos and videos that are about the practice itself rather than about them personally, unlike so many other photos and videos on social media. I choose to believe that most have a sincere relationship with the practice, that it's not about looking good though perhaps feeling good, that it's about the work, the discipline and focus, that there is a sincerity in this practice. I know that there several teachers who seek fame, recognition, monetary rewards but again, I choose to believe that most teachers are rarely heard about outside their own circle and put themselves there at the service of their students. Many may perhaps be too strongly influenced by Sharath and have a heavy hand in their teaching but the hope is that the more they teach the lighter their hand will become.

It was for this reason, this more hopeful feeling and resilient fondness for the practice that I brought my Manduka back out of the cupboard and practiced Primary along with M. on Saturday and am planning to practice once a week beside her.

And it was a delightful practice. I was surprised that I could still bind Marichi D and Supta kurmasana, Qigong seems to be maintaining some flexibility at least. However, if Ashtanga is often thought to be about upper body strength then qigong is about the legs, I'd lost a lot of strength in my shoulders and across my chest, chaturanga and upward facing dog were killing me by the end of the practice. I also found my hamstrings were a lot tighter and I had almost lost Urdhva Dhanurasana altogether. At the end, after a little pranayama and a short Sit, I was reminded why I fell in love with this practice in the first place.

Will I go back to it? Perhaps one day if/when I lose this taste in my mouth.

I notice that I'm coming up to ten years blogging about Ashtanga, July 9th 2008 was my first post, it was on Jumping back when this blog was still called Ashtanga Jump back.... at Home.

***

Qigong

One of the things that charms me most about Qigong is that it seems impossible to look 'cool' on social media (see below), there seems no chance that Qigong will go the way of Ashtanga or Yoga generally, I suspect that it's unlikely to be a five billion $ industry anyday soon. That said there is clearly still the same nonsense regarding what is and isn't 'authentic' practice as well as the rabbit hole of texts to get lost in and the inflated ego's of many teachers. Just as with Ashtanga though, I suspect it ultimately it comes down to the practice. Learn an outward form then practice it for a long long time and if it's of any value it will no doubt start to do it's work and you will develop enough subtly to perhaps be able to do something with it, I hope so.

A case in point, Qigong is hilarious speeded up and nothing to get po-faced about.



Note: I was asked on Instagram what it is I'm practicing above.

The first part is mostly Taiji Qigong Shibashi (set 1), I keep going back to it as it’s so nice to practice. Basically I’m doing some 'Whole body breathing', the Shibashi set, 'Bone Marrow cleansing', Standing meditation (Zhan Zhaung - four postures only hinted at here but this is for me the most important part of the practice), walking meditation, a few exercises from Calligraphy Qigong (Simon’s teacher), some of Simon’s Spinal movements and finish with a little self massage. At home I include the Five animal form (Not the fir Animal 'frolic' form) before the self massage. I was doing an old classic called the 8 brocades and later 18 Luohan at the beginning but went back to the Shibashi set (5-20 million Chinese practitioners can't be wrong.....can they?). I found Ken Cohen's Book The Way of Qigong helpful in bringing all these available exercises into some kind of a shape for daily practice. It's a beginning, I have no idea where this is all leading.



Qigong links

As I'm not sure if I'll continue posting for some time, here are some video links if you are interested in exploring some of the above to get started.

Whole body breathing (begins at 4:46)  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7qZanIByNhE&t=1s  

Taiji Qigong Shibashi Set 1 ( this is my favourite presentation, there is a cheap online course if you want more guidance) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aAwbJ9MO91I

Bone marrow Cleansing (love this) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0LrrXeykNnI

Standing Meditation and Walking meditation (starts at 45:00 but early for some more basics on standing but just google Zhan Zaung) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KtdGniKSQJk&t=3965s

Calligraphy Yoga/Qigong ( This is a useful introduction - no need to do it all- but search 'Calligraphy yoga' for more) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=akvfg06tLXM&t=369s

Simon Borg- Olivier Spinal Sequence (no need to do all of this)  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A-sui6UedWo&t=454s

Five Animals Qigong ( Not shown in my video but I tend to practice along to this at the end of my practice) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I4RBTpdSjqI&t=694s

Self massage (1:10.34) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KtdGniKSQJk&t=2712s


*

Practiced at regular speed, it has a certain charm.



Wearing a climacool Japan FC shirt, go Samurai Blues.

Note: Only Elvis can pull off gold Lame
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