yoga

I was 5 when my mother came home one day and without much explanation, handed me a copy of the Bhagavad Gita and The Complete Illustrated Book of Yoga by Swami Vishnudevananda, the founder of the Sivananda Yoga--a global network of practices and centers. my mother was not a particularly spiritual woman, and did not do yoga or practice Hinduism herself, and the bright orange cover with the ovular image of the most foreign individual and position that my semi-rural midwest eyes could imagine was burned into my memory long after the book was lost to time. I remember long periods spent alone as a child, practicing meditation, staring at rings in the wooden wall panels for drishti, and attempting the various postures before yoga had mostly faded to a fitness regime in my college years. 

25 years later, while on pilgrimage to holy sites across the southwest after giving away all of my belongings, I ended up by total chance at the Divine Grace Yoga Ashram—an affiliate of the Sivananda centers—south of Sedona in Cornville, Arizona, where I spent time studying under the Swami Sankarananda. I have lived for times in spiritual communities with practitioners of Sivananda Yoga, Bhakti Yoga, Zen, and Dzogchen.