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My Teachers
by Carolyn Relei, E-RYT 500
My first yoga teachers
were, by far, the most influential in my life, enabling me to
establish an independent practice that has served me for over 40 years.
As a young woman, in the 1960s, just back from a year abroad,
I was so impressed with the integrity and wisdom of my teachers, that
their influence has never left me. I still daily mentally send my
gratitude to them for the wonderful path through life they revealed.
Shivaram, a direct student of
Swami Vishnudevananda, was my first Hatha teacher, His classes
at the Cultural Integration Fellowship (the early form of the Institute
for Integral Studies) were alive with humor and grace, as he guided us
joyfully through sweaty two hour sessions of Sivananda style yoga.
I studied South Indian Dance with Shivaram, as well. He was a
master dancer who had toured the world before settling in San Francisco to
teach yoga. He taught dance as a spiritual movement. The
graceful gestures of Krishna, of Lord Shiva, of Ganesha, and of the
Buddha, set to rhythmic steps, initiated me into the delights of sacred
dance. I had a small, but delightful, part in a play, in the fall of
1968, which featured Shivaram as Lord Krishna and Sant Keshavadas as the
Indian saint, Tukaram.
Swami Bhaktivedanta, the great disseminator of the
Krishna Consciousness movement in America and throughout the world,
taught Bhakti Yoga in San Francisco in 1967. Going to his
store-front temple on Frederick Street was a lesson in transcendence.
Prabhupada, as he was later called, established a sense of authority,
peace, goodness and wisdom so brilliant that it eclipsed whatever else I
had experienced.
During the 1970s and well beyond, as I applied what
I had learned, my daily yoga practice began well before dawn, as an
ashram-like schedule established itself in my home and life. I read, voraciously, every piece
of literature that was available in bookstores and public libraries,
especially the San Francisco Main Branch, with its "stacks". I read
about yogis, fakirs, and sadhus in 19th century tomes, I read historical
and anthopological texts about India and its yogic traditions,
venerable texts of yoga and Indian philosophy, including the
Hatha Yoga Pradipika, Patanjali's Yoga Aphorisms, the Bhagavad Gita,
Upanishads, and Srimad Bhagavatam, as well as books by western and eastern
Hatha Yoga practitioners and illuminated yogis, such as Vishnudevananda
and Yogananda. Reading and studying enhanced my yoga practice and
understanding of the deep tradition and value of yoga.
I attended lectures given by various well-known yogis,
authors, and philosophers, including Ecknath Eswaran, Yogi Bhajan, Alan
Watts, Swami Kriyananda, and B.K.S. Iyengar. In the 1980s I learned
nuances of Iyengar style yoga from Ramanand Patel, Rodney Yee,
Mary Lou Weprin, Donald Moyers, Richard Rosen, and others, at The Yoga
Room and Piedmont Yoga Studio in the Oakland area. In 1987, I
attended a week long workshop with the late Pattibhi Jois, at the White Lotus Center
near Santa Barbara.
Recently
I was in Bangalore, India, studying Bihar style yoga with Swami Yogaratna.
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I am registered with Yoga
Alliance - E-RYT 500, RYT 500
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