The last time we checked in we were in India in the last quarter of the 18th century, with the British East India Company (EIC) serving as much of the country’s governing body. Unfortunately for India, like most businesses-except Piedmont Yoga of course-the EIC was in business to make money, and when that aim conflicted [...]
Piedmont Yoga Studio News February 2009
Six hundred years ago in medieval Europe pepper was literally worth its weight in gold. That’s because it (along with other spices) was a valued seasoning, but extremely hard to come by. Why? Pepper came from India and the Far East, but Europeans hadn’t yet figured out how to get there by sea. So the [...]
Piedmont Yoga Studio News December 2008
I reviewed my first video for Yoga Journal in 1991, and since then I’ve reviewed at least a couple in every single issue for the last 18 years. Just this year I reviewed my 300th video (though I’ve probably watched at least half again as many that didn’t pass muster), and by some strange alignment [...]
Piedmont Yoga News November 2008
I’m just back from my third annual Yoga workshop in Hailey, Idaho. When I asked the folks up in Hailey what they wanted to work on this year they set me an interesting task: a weekend workshop based on poses named after Hindu gods. After digging through Iyengar’s Light on Yoga (200 asanas), Yogeshvara Paramahamsa’s [...]
Piedmont Yoga Studio News September 2008
After a month’s hiatus, we return to the story of Yoga in the US. In the July newsletter we looked at one of the unsung female Yoga pioneers of the 20th century, Sita Devi Yogendra, and I promised you then more about our female trail blazers. So this month we’ll visit with a woman whose [...]
Piedmont Yoga Studio News August 2008
We’re a little early with our newsletter this month because we have a time-urgent message about our next Advanced Studies program. You might wonder about this: why “study” Yoga, isn’t it more about “doing?” Well, that’s the active way Yoga is mostly presented in the West, but traditionally study is an important element of the [...]
Piedmont Yoga Studio News July 2008
I’ve been intending for a couple of months to pick up our story line with Sri Yogendra, one of the unsung heroes of modern yoga. Born Mani Desai in 1897, he became in his late teens a disciple of Paramahamsa Madhavadasa, who at the time was reputed to be 118 years old. Paramahamsa, which means [...]
Piedmont Yoga Studio News June 2008
My original intention for this month was to write about one of the pioneers of modern yoga, Shri Yogendra. But just this morning I received a newsletter from a yoga school-here unnamed-where I found a short essay, “About Yoga,” that begins with: “Yoga is an ancient science practiced for thousands of years.” Friends, as Joan [...]
Piedmont Yoga Studio April 2008 Newsletter
At the end of February we left off with one foot in the door of the Hatha Yoga Pradipika, one of the oldest surviving Hatha Yoga manuals. Hatha Yoga emerged sometime in the 9th or 10th centuries CE, strongly influenced by both Hindu Tantra and Indian alchemy. The Pradipika was written four or five hundred [...]
News from the Piedmont Yoga Studio Newsletter January 2008
Traditional Hatha Yoga, as it’s described in the school’s oldest surviving instruction manuals, is an odd-looking duck, at least to our modern Western eyes. Take the granddaddy of these books, Svatmarama Yogendra’s Hatha Yoga Pradipika (literally “Light on the Forceful Union-Method”), which is a venerable 600 years old, possibly older. It consists of 389 verses [...]
