Holding the Pose

This article was originally published in 2008, in celebration of Kripalu's 25th anniversary at our retreat center in Stockbridge, Massachusetts.

In the quarter-century since Kripalu opened its doors in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, much has changed—and much has stayed the same. From the constant heart of Kripalu—its original mission and core curriculum—many new tendrils have unfurled, spreading our unique fusion of yoga, health, and personal growth throughout the United States (and around the world). Here’s a glimpse back at how we’ve gotten to where we are—and a look ahead.

Setting the Intention

Through various yoga experiences, a seeker intensifies his faith, courage, knowledge, zeal, and devotion. In this way, he progresses on the path of yoga, gaining the knowledge of yoga through the practice of yoga.
—Swami Kripalu

They came in vans, in school buses, in rusty Dodge Darts, and in beat-up pickup trucks. The caravan of vehicles trundled up the drive and stopped in front of the looming building—a former Jesuit monastery, empty for 13 years, that had only recently escaped the dour fate of becoming a state prison. Now it belonged to them—an enthusiastic, idealistic group of twenty- and thirtysomethings who for the last dozen years had been quietly building a yoga community in the Pennsylvania countryside.

“The move to the Berkshires changed everything,” says Richard Faulds (Shobhan), a former resident, one-time President of Kripalu, and former Chair of its Board of Trustees. He has vivid memories of the first time he saw the Stockbridge property, not long after the sale went through in December 1982. “I was just staggered by the change,” he recalls. “In Summit Station, [Pennsylvania], guests literally slept in a barn, on tarpaulins laid on top of hay bales. The shift in structure and setting transformed Kripalu in a huge way. We went from being an alternative, fringe, hippie gathering to a mainstream organization, handling this big building and a big business practically overnight.”

Kripalu started life as the Yoga Society of Philadelphia (later renamed the Kripalu Yoga Fellowship), founded in 1966 by Amrit Desai, a close disciple of Swami Kripalvananda, who gave Kripalu Yoga its name. Born in India, Desai came to the United States in 1960 to attend the Philadelphia College of Art. He began teaching yoga classes in the Philadelphia area, attracting a group of young people who would later become the faculty and directors of his nonprofit organization dedicated to advancing the science and philosophy of yoga.

Within a few years of the Yoga Society’s founding, Desai had trained numerous Americans as teachers and the Society was offering 150 yoga classes a week. In 1972, Amrit and a handful of dedicated students established a small, residential yoga retreat in Sumneytown, Pennsylvania; three years later, the group purchased a larger facility in Summit Station and began offering yoga, holistic health, and self-discovery programs. Swami Kripalu, planning a short visit, joined them in 1977 and ended up staying until just a few months before his death in 1981. His presence galvanized Kripalu, which began to outgrow both Pennsylvania centers.

Meanwhile, the five-story, 160,000- square-foot building known as Shadowbrook had sat empty for 13 years on a scenic stretch of acreage overlooking Lake Mahkeenac and straddling Lenox and Stockbridge, Massachusetts. Its early history reads like a Gilded Age gossip column, full of bold-faced names. The first Shadowbrook was a 100-room mansion built in 1893 by merchant, banker, and publicist Anson Phelps Stokes; with a 410-foot facade, it was once thought to be the largest home in the United States. Stokes hired world-famous landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, known for his work on Manhattan’s Central Park, to design the grounds.

In 1906, Spencer Shotter, a wealthy turpentine magnate, purchased Shadowbrook and later leased it as a summer resort to Gwynne Vanderbilt. The next owner was steel tycoon and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie, who bought the property in 1917; according to the Berkshire Eagle, Carnegie wanted a retreat where he could lick his wounds after his failed efforts toward world peace following World War I. He died two years later, and in 1922, his widow sold Shadowbrook and its property to the Catholic Society of Jesus—the Jesuits—as a novitiate.

After three decades as a hub of Jesuit spiritual activity, fire destroyed the original building in 1956, killing four Jesuit fathers; a year later, the order erected the building Kripalu now occupies, also known as Shadowbrook, and remained there until 1970, when the monastery closed in the face of rising costs and declining enrollment.

The idea of turning the building into a state prison, the brainchild of then Governor Michael Dukakis, arose in the mid-1970s. Berkshire County’s State Representative, William “Smitty” Pignatelli, remembers traveling to Boston with his father, John J. Pignatelli, then a Lenox selectman, to hand-deliver to the governor a petition containing 10,000 signatures of local residents opposed to the idea. “Dukakis looked at it, set it aside, and said, ‘What else have you got?’” Smitty remembers.

The effort to defeat the governor’s proposal was led by the Shadowbrook Committee, which was instrumental in setting up a public hearing on the issue on March 12, 1977, recalls Joan Kopperl, who served with John Pignatelli on the committee. At that hearing, Seiji Ozawa, then the director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra (BSO), and Arthur Fiedler of the Boston Pops spoke about the disastrous effect a prison would have on nearby Tanglewood Music Institute. Their testimony and the committee’s work, along with Dukakis’ waning popularity (the Democratic party refused to renominate him for the 1978 gubanatorial election), eventually killed the proposal. The Shadowbrook Committee was active in promoting an arrangement through which the BSO and Berkshire County’s Krofta Engineering Corporation would divide the property, Kopperl says, but that deal ultimately fell through.

Enter Kripalu. “By 1980, we had outgrown our Summit Station property and had come to the conclusion that it made much more sense economically for us to try to find an existing facility to move to rather than to try to build the necessary amenities at Summit Station,” says Garrett Sarley (Dinabandhu), a founding member of the community who was on the original search committee for a new site and later served as Kripalu's CEO. “Finding the Shadowbrook facility was a blessing—it matched a location of great natural beauty and accessibility with a place that was large enough to house both the resident community as well as programs for guests.”

Warming Up

After first learning to love our own family, it will become very simple for us to love the entire world. If we devote our heart to loving the family, then the heart will be totally engrossed in love.
—Swami Kripalu

Once the sale had gone through, a crew of 50 people from Kripalu’s Pennsylvania community—which then numbered about 150—moved into the building and began a massive renovation that included re-insulating, putting in a waste-water treatment system, laying down two acres of carpet, painting seven acres of wall space, repairing 694 windows, and removing rows of pews from what is now the Main Hall. Eventually the rest of the Pennsylvania group followed, along with truck after truck containing all of the community’s belongings.

“I still walk around the building and look up at the ceiling and think, ‘I put that tile in,’” says Kate Feldman, who in 1971 became the first woman to join the Kripalu community. Like Shobhan, she remembers the first months at Shadowbrook as incredibly exciting and energizing. “We just rallied together,” she recalls. “We were having a load of fun and we were working really hard. At night we were totally exhausted, and we’d sing and dance and chant and then get up again the next morning and do it all over again. There was this dream we had, a dream of service and spirituality and community and bonding together and working things out.”

“The amount of work was astounding, but it was done with such a good spirit, it truly didn’t occur as work,” Shobhan says. “I washed pots 10 hours a day, but I wasn’t washing pots—I was feeding my friends.

“We felt as if we were creating a model for a new society,” he continues. “Everything we did, we made up a new way to do it. There were no vegetarian institutional recipes at that time, so we made them up. There were no holistic or yoga programs, so we made them up.”

While renovation of the physical plant continued, a team of curriculum developers brainstormed ideas for programs, retreats, and teacher trainings. Vidya Carolyn Dell’uomo, who joined the community in 1974 and later became Director and Developer of Personal Growth Programs, says that the expansion from yoga on the mat to yoga “off the mat”—holistic health, communication and relationships, and right-service programming—began in Pennsylvania, when Kripalu briefly became known as the Kripalu Clinic for Health and Healing.

“At Shadowbrook, there was more physical space to let what was already seeding itself down in Pennsylvania grow and expand, to let those earlier departures from straight asana and pranayama flower and mature,” she says. The programs developed in the early 1980s by Vidya and half a dozen other team members—including Don Stapleton (Brahmanand), now Kripalu’s Dean of Yoga Education—came out of the 10 years of self-exploration, yoga practice, and personal growth they had experienced in community.

“One thing that has always been a constant in the Kripalu classroom curriculum is a fierce commitment to the transformational power that love is,” says Vidya, who continues to direct programs and yoga teacher training at Kripalu. “That always lived in our curriculum because we were devoted to it in our lives, and that bedrock has stayed solid—the thread of love, the thread of service.”

Kripalu Center for Yoga & Health officially opened at Shadowbroook on December 1, 1983. “In the beginning, it was a very strange, mysterious place,” says Berkshire businesswoman and philanthropist Nancy Fitzpatrick, who was one of the first local residents to come to Kripalu on a regular basis. The Berkshire Kripalu Community (BKC), founded in 1992, helped to change that image by inviting community members to become part of the organization, through volunteering as well as attending classes. “It was a vehicle for people in the community to have a role in Kripalu—to do seva, take programs, and have access to the facility,” says Diana Felber, a founding member of the BKC.

But Shobhan notes that “even during those periods when Kripalu was fairly unknown in the Berkshires, it was not unknown to the larger world. Deepak Chopra came long before he was on anyone’s radar screen. Buddhist rinpoches came, Zen masters, Indian teachers, spiritual groups from Europe and from China. We had catalogs, but it was mostly spread by word of mouth through an alternative layer of society. People would see a flyer in a local health-food store and they would come and have a powerful experience and then take the catalog and tell their friends about it. It was really new—no one had seen anything like it.”

Hitting the Edge

Struggle keeps us from growing sluggish. It transforms an ordinary human into a spiritually awake person. In fact, it is proper to welcome struggle, for its arrival is always auspicious.
—Swami Kripalu

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Kripalu flourished, at least by all objective measures. The resident community had grown to more than 300, with an additional 50–75 hired staff, the number of guests arriving each week had never been higher, and Kripalu’s reputation was steadily growing throughout the country and the world.

Then, in 1994, Amrit Desai was asked to give his resignation after it came to light that he had conducted and concealed inappropriate sexual relationships with several female disciples. Financial improprieties on his part were also discovered. Stricken by confusion and betrayal, the community was plunged into a spiritual, and then economic, crisis.

“The fact that the organization still exists is pretty amazing,” says Kate. She attributes Kripalu’s survival to its heartfelt dedication to service: “From a deeply spiritual view, love always prevails.”

From a psychological perspective, says Stephen Cope—a former resident and longtime Kripalu faculty member who founded the Kripalu Institute for Extraordinary Living—Amrit’s fall from grace precipitated “a shift between an atmosphere where all the positive things are projected onto the charismatic leader to a much more cocreative, democratic, empowered group where the wisdom holder is the community itself and each one of us individually, rather than one idealized person.”

Shobhan, who had left Kripalu in 1993, returned to help handle the legal fallout and then agreed to serve as President; his role at that time, he says, was to help Kripalu “make the transition from residential community to dynamic retreat and program center.” To make ends meet, Kripalu closed down its resident community, creating hundreds more guest rooms, and sold an additional Berkshire County property, Foxhollow, that it had acquired in 1990. Finally, in the spring of 1998, guest attendance ticked upward. Kripalu continued to stabilize under the leadership of Jonathan Foust (Sudhir), who succeeded Faulds as President. In 2004, Garrett Sarley (Dinabandhu) and his wife, Ila Sarley, after spending nine years as directors of Omega Institute in Rhinebeck, New York, returned to Kripalu to take on roles as CEO and President, respectively.

“At that time Kripalu was struggling on many fronts,” Dinabandhu recalls. “Not only was it losing money, but the energy of the practice was also waning, and the original dynamism of yoga that was part of Kripalu from the beginning was gradually wearing away. This was happening during a time of unprecedented growth and popularity of yoga in general, so many aspects of the institution needed attention.”

The Sarleys reenergized Kripalu with their vision and commitment to create, as the organization’s vision statement describes it, “a new kind of educational institution dedicated to the inquiry into what creates a fulfilled human life”—an institution where people from every walk of life, on any kind of spiritual path, are welcomed and embraced.

The Full Expression of the Posture

Seekers who believe they must practice yoga only in the meditation room are under a great illusion. They must practice yoga in society as well. Practicing yoga in the meditation room is easy because there are no external disturbances. The true yogi is one who can successfully protect his mental steadiness while in society. 
—Swami Kripalu

In 2007, nearly 30,000 people came to Kripalu to attend one of some 750 educational programs and retreats, led by world-renowned teachers, authors, artists, and inspirational speakers as well as experienced Kripalu faculty. A new 30,000-square-foot, six-story building now under construction on the 125-acre Stockbridge campus will provide additional program rooms as well as 80 new guest rooms. What began as a little retreat center on a farm has become the premier yoga center in the country—if not the world—at a time when approximately 15 million Americans practice yoga.

“Kripalu was one of a handful of organizations that prepared the field,” Shobhan reflects. “We brought so many people to yoga and pioneered the interface of yoga, psychology, and health science. Now, we’re in this time when yoga has become totally mainstream, and our challenge is to continue to be leaders in the field and to help yoga be expressed at the highest possible level, serving from a place of collective wisdom and a sincere desire to help people.”

This desire is made tangible in the Kripalu Schools of Yoga and Ayurveda and the Kripalu Institute for Extraordinary Living, which studies and promotes states of thriving reflected by qualities such as resiliency, creativity, mastery, authenticity, compassion, and happiness. In doing this cutting-edge research, the Institute is making connections with a wide range of institutions and populations, from Kripalu’s closest neighbor, Tanglewood, and the Boston University Tanglewood Institute to prominent members of the scientific and medical community, including Harvard Medical School, Massachusetts General Hospital, and Brigham and Women’s Hospital.

“Most important for Berkshire County is our relationship with the schools here,” says Stephen Cope. “We have worked with Muddybrook Elementary School and Lenox High School and we have a new relationship with Monument Mountain High School in Great Barrington, where we hope to have a long-term look at what happens in the life of someone who is introduced to yoga and meditation early.”

Throughout the country and the world, Kripalu Yoga is spread by thousands of graduates of Kripalu Yoga Teacher Training. The Kripalu Yoga and Ayurveda Association (KYAA), founded in 1991 as an alumni organization for the teacher training program, now has 2,400 members. KYAA also administers Kripalu’s Rachel Greene Memorial Fund, which awards grants to train yoga teachers to bring yoga to children in Title I schools, and its Teaching for Diversity Fund, a grant program that supports Kripalu teachers who bring yoga to underserved populations around the world, from cancer survivors to teenage mothers.

“The vision of Kripalu as a model for thriving, offering integrated living and training for all kinds of people, is quite extraordinary,” Kate says. “It’s a way bigger model, a way bigger vision, than ever before—and it makes my heart sing, because all those core programs and principles and practices are what we were originally doing.”

Meanwhile, Kripalu’s relationship with the local community is thriving. Kripalu employs more than 400 staff members who live in the region. “Everyplace you see people clustered, there are people who came to the Berkshires because of Kripalu,” Nancy Fitzpatrick says. “Kripalu has brought fabulous people to the Berkshires to live and work, people who have a sense of the beauty and specialness of the area.” The Berkshire Kripalu Community now numbers more than 500 and has its own schedule of yoga classes and events.

Kripalu remains a linchpin in Berkshire County’s tourism industry. “It’s a unique destination for us—not just the programs they offer, but also the setting in which it sits,” says Laurie Klefos, Director of the Berkshire Visitors Bureau, which is positioning Berkshire County as a destination location for health and well-being. The 2.5 million people who visit Berkshire County each year include an estimated 10 percent who come to the area to attend a program at Kripalu.

“The mystique Kripalu held for local residents is changing to a growing understanding of Kripalu, its mission, and its place in the community,” Joan Kopperl says. “Kripalu has turned into one of the best uses of the land and the building that we could have imagined.”

“Swami Kripalu always taught that centers of yoga had historically been places where culture and consciousness could be enlivened and uplifted,” Dinabandhu says. “We strive to keep the mission of Kripalu focused on the deeper practice and truths of yoga so that we can be such a beacon for enlivenment and consciousness renewal. As the future unfolds, our work is to bring the energy of Kripalu and of yoga in general to society at large so that we can contribute to the many pressing issues facing the world today.”

© Kripalu Center for Yoga & Health. All rights reserved. To request permission to reprint, please e-mail editor@kripalu.org.