InDepth Yoga Studies...Weekend 9

This weekend  our training focused on the history and philosophy of yoga.  Friday night we watched Yoga Unveiled--which is an in-depth look at where yoga started and how it got to America.  I really enjoyed seeing the video clips of some of the famous yoga masters like BKS Iyengar, Indra Devi and TVK Desikachar.

I actually bought the book that Indra Devi published in the 1940's called Forever Young, Forever Healthy. She was such an incredible woman that I wanted to read her words. She broke geographic and cultural boundaries gracefully in a time when few women were living adventures of their own. What surprised me is just how close what I've been taught follows what she wrote--and she learned from one of the greats.

We talked about how yoga in the US has become a product more than a discipline.  We also got into the variety of schools of thought within yoga.  Some of them feel very dissonant to me, yet there are one or two that resonate deeply--which is probably why I so enjoy the practice.

As always it was a weekend of ideas, which fuels me.  Now to get back to the daily discipline of the practice.