Yoga Luminaries
T.K.V. Desikachar
By Jeanne Ricci
T.K.V. Desikachar, born in 1938, son of the great yoga master Sri Tirumalai Krishnamacharya, grew up immersed in the yoga tradition. Although as a child he apparently found hatha yoga so boring he once climbed a coconut tree to avoid practicing, he enthusiastically began formal training with his father in his 20s, shortly after completing his bachelor’s degree in engineering. In 1976 he founded the Krishnamacharya Yoga Mandiram, a yoga center in Madras, India. Drawing on his father’s teachings, Desikachar went on to develop Viniyoga, a highly individualized approach to yoga that tailors the practice to each student’s specific physical condition, emotional state, age, cultural background, and interests. In addition to offering teacher training and individual instruction in asana, pranayama, meditation, yoga philosophy, and Vedic chanting, Yoga Mandiram has pioneered research into the impact of yoga on people suffering from schizophrenia, diabetes, asthma, and depression. “Yoga is basically a program for the spine at every level-physical, respiratory, mental, and spiritual,” says Desikachar.
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Indra Devi
By Helen Kitti Smith
Indra Devi, or Mataji, was often called “The First Lady of Yoga.” In 1937, Krishnamacharya admitted her into his school-making her the first woman chela (pupil) and the first Western woman ever at an Indian ashram-and personally supervised her asana and pranayama training. Towards the end of the year he told her that she must teach.
From the 1930s until her death in 2002, she was instrumental in the global diffusion of yoga, teaching in China, India, Mexico, Russia, and the United States. In 1982, Devi was invited by a group of Sai Baba devotees to teach in Argentina and did so for 15 years.
Today, Fundacion Indra Devi, whose six studios are scattered throughout greater Buenos Aires, has seen some 25,000 students pass through its doors. The IVth National Yoga Convention May 13-14, 2000, coincided with Mataji’s 101st birthday. “You give love and light to everybody-those who love you, those who harm you, those whom you know, those whom you don’t know. It makes no difference. You just give light and love,” said this yoga luminary whose practice toward the end of her life consisted only of Padmasana, Janu Sirsasana, Ardha Sirsasana, and Ardha Matsyendrasana, but whose light has shined on the whole world.
May/June 2000; This story was updated in May of 20
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Mircea Eliade
The Romanian born scholar of religion and author of more than 1,000 works, wrote his doctoral dissertation about yoga.
By Phil Catalfo
Born in Romania in 1907, Mircea Eliade became one of the twentieth century’s preeminent scholars of religion, writing some 1,300 publications, including dozens of books, during his 60-year career. In 1928, after completing a master’s degree in philosophy at the University of Bucharest, he went to India for three years. There, while studying Sanskrit and Indian philosophy with Surendranath Dasgupta at the University of Calcutta, he also encountered Mahatma Gandhi as well as Rabindranath Tagore, and lived six months at Rishikesh ashram of Swami Sivananda. Returning to Romania, he wrote a dissertation, Yoga: Essay on the Origins of Indian Mysticism, which earned him a 1933 doctorate and a professorship at Bucharest, where he spent the rest of the 1930s. He also began writing fiction in which ordinary people come to terms with the sacred. During World War II he worked in several diplomatic posts in England and Portugal. After the war, he fled the Communist regime in Romania, lived in Paris 10 years, then accepted a position with the University of Chicago, where he taught from 1956 until his death in 1986. He helped launch the field “history of religion” and authored such major works as Yoga: Immortality and Freedom (Princeton, 1970), The Sacred and the Profane (Harvest, 1968), and the fascinating multivolume Autobiography and Journals.
January/February 2003
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George Harrison
The “Quiet Beatle” found musical and spiritual inspiration in Eastern philosophy.
By Phil Catalfo
After George Harrison’s passing last fall, the press noted his long involvement with Eastern spirituality, the Indian musical touches he lent to Beatles’ albums, and the publicity surrounding the group’s time with the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. But one remarkable story was overlooked: how Harrison himself was introduced to yoga and Eastern philosophy. In The Beatles Anthology (Chronicle Books, 2000), we learn that while on location in the Bahamas for their 1965 film Help!, the band was approached by a “swami in orange robes” who gave each of the Fab Four a signed copy of The Illustrated Book of Yoga. The author turned out to be Swami Vishnu-Devananda, founder of Sivananda Yoga, and this encounter began Harrison’s lifelong fascination with Eastern philosophy. Soon the musician became a vegetarian and studied sitar in India with Ravi Shankar, who gifted Harrison with Paramahansa Yogananda’s Autobiography of a Yogi. He eventually composed numerous songs, including “My Sweet Lord,” which express Eastern mysticism more keenly than perhaps any other work by a popular Western artist. “In many ways he was more Indian than many Indians,” said Shankar. But it was his special genius to fuse East and West, philosophy and music, for which we are all the richer.
March/April 2002
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Krishnamacharya
By Jeanne Ricci
If you’re fairly new to yoga, you may not recognize the name Tirumalai Krishnamacharya, but you’ve probably heard of three of his students: B.K.S. Iyengar, K. Pattabhi Jois, and T.K.V. Desikachar, who went on to develop Iyengar Yoga, Ashtanga Yoga, and Viniyoga, respectively. Born in 1888 in Mysore, India, Krishnamacharya received his first instruction in Sanskrit and yoga from his father. He went on to attend the Royal College of Mysore and later spent seven years studying in Tibet. He returned to Mysore in 1924 and later opened a yoga school. In 1976, Krishnamacharya’s son and closest disciple, T.K.V. Desikachar, founded the Krishnamacharya Yoga Mandiram, a yoga center in Madras. Krishnamacharya worked there until his death in 1989. Drawing on his father’s teachings, Desikachar developed Viniyoga, which tailors a yoga practice to the needs of the individual student. In 1995, Desikachar told Yoga Journal, “The way yoga is taught nowadays often gives the impression that there is one treatment for every illness. What makes my father’s yoga teachings unique is his insistence on attending to each individual and to his or her uniqueness.”
July/August 2000
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Neem Karoli Baba (Maharajji)
Though he never set foot in America, his spiritual influence manifested in the work of many American devotees, including Ram Dass.
By Phil Catalfo
Neem Karoli Baba (circa 1900-1973) never set foot in America. But he would prove to be as important a figure in the coming of the Dharma to the West as many swamis and lamas who set up temples and ashrams here. His influence was felt in the work and lives of his many American devotees, especially former Harvard professor and psychedelic pioneer Ram Dass.
Introduced to Baba in India by an American devotee, Dass later returned to America, where he began lecturing and writing about his experiences with his guru and the yogic teachings he studied while in India. For many American seekers, his talks and books, including the now classic Be Here Now (Lama Foundation, 1971), provided the first exposure to yoga in particular and Eastern philosophy in general and helped touch off a spiritual reawakening.
Maharajji (as Neem Karoli Baba is also known) wrote no books and had no formal doctrine beyond urging his followers to “Love everyone, feed everyone, remember God, tell the truth.” Instead, devotees say, he was simply a realized being who radiated love. “He’d bop people on the head and pour grace into them,” remembers one woman who first met him in 1970. “God was always singing in his heart.” For more information on Maharajji, visit www.nkbashram.org or www.neemkarolibaba.com.
December 2001
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Swami Radha
By Jeanne Ricci
Sylvia Demitz, born in 1911 in Berlin, was a successful concert dancer. During World War II, her dancing career was put on hold as she and her first husband helped those under persecution to leave the country, an act which cost him his life in 1942. In 1947, she married Albert Hellman, a composer. Eighteen months after their wedding, Albert died suddenly of a stroke. Grief-stricken, Demitz emigrated first to England in 1949 and then to Montreal in 1951. After experiencing such tragedy, she questioned the purpose of life.
During meditation, the image of her guru, Swami Sivananda Saraswati, appeared to her, beckoning her to travel to Rishikesh, India, to study with him. She was initiated into the sacred order of Sanyas in 1956, returned to Canada in 1957 as Swami Sivananda Radha (radha means “cosmic love”), and opened the Sivananda Ashram Vancouver in Burnaby, British Columbia, which was relocated in 1963 to its present location on Kootenay Bay in the Canadian Rockies and renamed Yasodhara Ashram.
Yasodhara trains students in the Kundalini Yoga system’s “hidden language” approach to hatha yoga, which explores the symbolic meaning of postures and their effect on the psyche and spirit. Swami Radha died of heart failure in 1995.
November/December 2000
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Sri Swami Satchidananda
A monk for more than 50 years, Swami Satchidananda galvanized the peace movement of the 1960s and created the path known as Integral Yoga.
By Nora Isaacs
Sri Swami Satchidananda-monk for more than 50 years, author of a dozen books, student of Swami Sivananda, founder of Integral Yoga, and world-renowned spiritual teacher-died this August in his native country at the age of 87. Born in a small village in South India, he studied agriculture and science before starting his full-time spiritual pursuit at age 28. He shared his signature blend of practical wisdom, spiritual insight, and humor with American presidents, Catholic Popes, and throngs of youths at Woodstock looking for lasting peace during the turbulent 1960s. Finding that Americans responded to his simple method of teaching ancient practices through storytelling and puns, he extended his two-day trip to America for the rest of his life, and with the slogan “Truth Is One, Paths Are Many,” he became a major figure in the ecumenical movement. Spreading his main teaching-our true nature is happiness-Satchidananda taught hatha yoga, meditation, prayer, selfless service, chanting, and cleansing techniques that would later become known collectively as Integral Yoga. He touched the lives of millions of people-followers and nonfollowers, atheists and the deeply religious-by gently guiding them on a conscious journey. “Liberation is not for the remote future or for when we die,” he said. “It is to be lived in the very midst of the world.”
November 2002
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Swami Vivekananda
This disciple of Ramakrishna is credited for “introducing yoga to the West” and founding the Vedanta Society.
By Phil Catalfo
When the learned but shy disciple of the great Hindu saint Ramakrishna, Swami Vivekananda (1863-1902), rose to address the first World’s Parliament of Religions in Chicago, he not only introduced yoga to the West, he also created a sensation. “Sisters and brothers of America,” he began, prompting thunderous applause from the nearly 7,000 attendees; his brief speech, rapturous in its profession of “toleration” and the essential truth of all religions, went on to decry “sectarianism, bigotry, and its horrible descendant fanaticism,” which, he said, “have filled the earth with violence, drenched it often . . . with human blood, destroyed civilization, and sent whole nations to despair.” The date was September 11, 1893-exactly 108 years to the day from a tragic event that would underscore the truth of his words. He won great praise in the American press-the New York Critic called him “an orator by divine right”-and toured the country for four years, lecturing on Hindu philosophy, especially jnana ,bhakti ,karma, and raja yoga. He became a national hero in his native India and went on to establish the Ramakrishna Mission there as well as the Vedanta Society in the United States. Today there are presently 13 Vedanta chapters located in America and more than 125 around the world. For more information, visit www.vedanta.org and www.ramakrishna.org.
May/June 2003
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