Parlez-vous Yoga?
Yoga’s growing popularity is more than just an American phenomenon; it is gaining momentum all over the world. Take the 2007 Global Mala: Yoga for Peace project, which had a stated purpose for the global yoga community from every continent, school, and approach to form a “mala around the earth” on the fall equinox through collective practices based upon the sacred cycle of 108. It takes a lot of yogis to make a project like this work, and according to its organizers, tens of thousands of people in dozens of countries participated.
Kripalu’s connection to this global surge shows up on many fronts. The number of yoga teacher training applicants from foreign countries has slowly grown over the last several years, particularly in the variety of countries represented. Of the 2,414 members of the Kripalu Yoga Teachers Association (KYTA), approximately 360 are living abroad—a combination of Americans and foreign nationals. The 32 countries with KYTA members include Canada, Venezuela, Turkey, South Korea, Iceland, Hungary, and Australia. Additionally, Teaching for Diversity grant recipients have brought Kripalu Yoga to Cambodia, Mexico, Ghana, and Jamaica.
There are regular Kripalu Yoga classes in Paris at the Centre de Yoga du Marais as well as teachers in St. Croix in the Virgin Islands, and you can take classes at Kripalu Affiliate Studios in England, Japan, and Puerto Rico, as well as Joy of Yoga, which calls itself “Montreal’s Home of Kripalu Yoga.” The Dutch magazine Yoga featured a four-page spread on the Kripalu Yoga tradition.
The seeds of Kripalu Yoga have been planted in many countries throughout the world and are beginning to grow—thanks to the groundbreaking teachers who are finding ways to adapt it to new cultural environments.
Rise and Shine in Pakistan
If you turn on the daily Rise and Shine show on the Pakistan Television network (PTV), you can practice yoga with certified Kripalu Yoga teacher Dolly Menezes (Aleya). Broadcast as part of their 10-minute Health and Happiness segment, the initial eight programs were so successful that PTV invited Dolly to continue indefinitely. A very excited Dolly wrote, “Now Kripalu Yoga will be viewed and hopefully followed in the whole of Pakistan—and abroad as well.”
Thanks to satellite technology, PTV reaches a nation of almost 173 million people, with many in remote and rural areas of the country. Dolly was contacted by PTV through a word-of-mouth connection. “Each segment focuses on three or four postures that are done several times to allow viewers to practice on their own,” explains Dolly. “The format of the recordings was tailored by me since the director and producer of the program did not have any previous experience in an endeavor of this sort. I also guide the cameraman for the best angles for a particular posture, taking into consideration the viewers and the culture I live in. And, at my request, it is filmed outdoors to keep us connected with nature.”
A native of Pakistan, 41-year-old Dolly began teaching herself yoga from books and audiocassettes in her early 20s. Her interest stemmed from a lifelong fascination with melody and rhythm, and a passion for dance. She studied at Ghanshayms, an institute for classical and folk dance and the performing arts in Karachi, and she says that through her dance training, she “began to understand the immense potential of yoga with respect to the physical and mental well-being of the whole human person and the integral relationship between the two.”
Many years later, in response to an inner call to share her knowledge of yoga with others, she sought out a reputable teacher training program. While she was interested in studying in India, she explains that between 2002 and 2005 Pakistan and India did not have a cordial diplomatic relationship, making it impossible for her to study there. Searching the Internet regularly for any information she could find, she signed the guest book on American Iyengar Yoga teacher Judith Hanson Lasater’s website, asking for advice. In a twist of fate that Dolly describes as “the universe in action,” Judith responded the next day, saying that her husband was coming to Pakistan the following spring to teach Nonviolent Communication in Afghan refugee camps, beginning a conversation and a connection between the two women that continues today.
Judith later introduced Dolly to Donna Farhi, and it was through Donna that Dolly found out about Kripalu. She read everything she could online, and in 2003, she was granted a full diversity scholarship to participate in the Kripalu Yoga Teacher Training at the campus in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. After many years of searching for the right opportunity, Dolly finally earned her yoga teacher certification on November 20, 2003 (and has been a member of KYTA ever since). After the 27 days of intensive training, she was sure that “a higher power had led me to Kripalu.”
Since that time, in addition to private classes, Dolly has taught yoga to new and expectant mothers, 10th and 11th graders at a girls’ high school, students at the Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture, and employees at Shell Petroleum Pakistan. In keeping with her desire to make yoga accessible to everyone, Dolly says that she begins her PTV classes with the greeting “salaam,” which means “peace,” as “namaste” or “om” might be misconstrued as a religious message. “I keep everything as neutral as I can so that people may easily relate to it.”
Dolly is sensitive to cultural realities on the television program and in her classes and workshops. For the PTV show, for example, she explains, “I am required to maintain sobriety in my dress, and I only wear loose-fit clothing, so as to not reveal my figure much. This is in accordance with the Islamic culture; since PTV is a state-owned channel, the censors are very strict.” As in the United States, yoga is appealing primarily to women. “The majority of participants that express interest in learning yoga are girls and women,” explains Dolly. “If there is a gent interested, I only teach them with their wives or lady partners.”
Like most people in her country, Dolly speaks more than one language and she moves in and out of English and Urdu fluidly as she teaches yoga. She is mindful of using the English names of the postures, saying that “For religious reasons, Sanskrit would not be received well—and it would not be understood.” Making yoga accessible to the average person has always been an important part of her desire to teach. “Among my viewers,” she says, “there are a lot of illiterate people, hence I keep as simple as I can in the use of my terminology and choice of postures so as to keep them on board.”
It’s easy to see Dolly, a woman yoga teacher in a Muslim country with strong patriarchal roots, as a pioneer. Dolly, however, views herself more modestly: “My first priority in life is my family—my husband and I have three beautiful daughters. I try my best to strike a balance between my profession and my home.”
Stress Reduction in Japan
In the middle of Tokyo’s bustling and overcrowded central business district, 200 people a week find their way to Yoga of Life, a Kripalu Affiliate Studio run by Toshiro Miura and his wife, Makiko. Like their counterparts in American cities, the majority of these urban yoga students are women, and they are seeking an alternative to the stress of their daily lives. “Kripalu Yoga offers something that really makes sense,” says Toshiro. “It’s practical and it provides a holistic approach that is very unique.”
Toshiro encountered yoga himself in the late 70s as a 21-year-old agriculture student doing work-study at a greenhouse in the United States. He was curious about meditation, thinking that it would help him address his underlying unhappiness. He found a class at a meditation center, where the teacher, Jim, who also taught Kundalini Yoga, suggested he try it. “I had asthma as a child, and so was not particularly drawn to the physical aspects of yoga. But I quite enjoyed it. So much so that I practiced every day. Especially yoga nidra [deep relaxation]. At that time, I thought I needed to do something hard to change myself, change my life. There was a lot of struggle. Yoga nidra was just the opposite.”
Not finding what he was looking for in agriculture, Toshiro moved to Oklahoma to study history as he tried to figure out what to do with his life. It was then that he decided to learn a practical skill—which took him to Florida to study massage. “There were a lot of Kripalu people in Gainesville,” Toshiro explains, “and I met and married a woman who was a Kripalu Yoga teacher.” Together, they visited the Kripalu ashram in Sumneytown, Pennsylvania, in July of 1980, on a day of celebration when Swami Kripalu spoke to the residents.
Committed to a path of holistic health and healing, Toshiro returned to Japan to study and practice acupuncture. Following a 1991 visit to Japan by Kripalu’s then spiritual head Amrit Desai, Toshiro came to Kripalu in the Berkshires several times, eventually participating in the Kripalu Yoga Teacher Training (YTT) in 1994. He was struck by the educational model of the training. “I was impressed with the way they created safety in their teaching,” he says about his YTT experience, “It was very applicable to daily life because students learned yoga from their own experiences rather than being taught merely by their teacher’s knowledge and techniques.”
Toshiro saw this as something that was needed in Japan, and he is on a mission to “spread Kripalu.” He says, “Yoga has been gaining popularity in Japan and so there is yoga at the gym, and Hot Yoga, and Power Yoga. Kripalu offers something different.” The biggest challenge he has found in getting the word out about Kripalu is language: “People want to know more about Kripalu, they want to read articles and books and use CDs and DVDs, but they aren’t available in Japanese.”
The classes at Yoga of Life are in Japanese; posture names are in Japanese, Sanskrit, and sometimes English. Toshiro acknowledges that cultural difference and preferences play a role in how yoga is taught in Japan. “Certain warm-ups would appear very silly here. The ha’ breath, for example. Japanese students are serious, culturally speaking; formality is important.” He says that once they get going with the practices, though, they really enjoy them. In his intensives, he introduces a lot of sharing, to start students communicating more freely. “It really helps empower them.” When asked about chanting, he said, “Chanting is okay, people are familiar with it from Buddhism. But it does have a slight flavor of religion, and people are nervous about religion here, so we have to be sensitive to that.”
Breaking into even newer territory, Toshiro arranged for the Yoga of Life studio to sponsor the first monthlong Kripalu Yoga Teacher Training in Japan, with senior Kripalu teachers Brahmani Liebman and Jashoda Edmunds traveling there to teach it. Due to its success, a second one is taking place, so by the end of the year, there will be more than 40 Kripalu-trained and certified Japanese yoga teachers. When asked about the dreams he and Makiko have for their future and their studio, Toshiro is clear that he plans to continue growing Kripalu Yoga in Japan: “So far we have come a long way to spread the word of Kripalu in Japan, and now many yoga students are interested in learning directly from Kripalu teachers in Japanese. So we’d like to have more Kripalu teachers all over the country. At the same time, we’d like to support and network with those Kripalu teachers who wish to continue to learn and teach in this tradition. For that purpose, a lot of translation of Kripalu materials, books, articles, CDs, and DVDs from English into Japanese is the most critical and demanding thing that we need to do.”
Yoga for the Whole World
Through the ages, it has been the passion that one individual person has for the yogic path and its practices that carries the teachings along—teachers passing down what they know to students who later become teachers. Yoga is a human legacy, a millennia-old body of wisdom and knowledge that can sometimes be surprising in its modern-day relevance. A well-known quote of Swami Kripalu’s goes like this: “The spiritual path that I teach is called Sanatana Dharma, which means the way of eternal truth. Sanatana Dharma is not a sectarian creed or point of view. It is the performance of skillful actions that lead one to the direct realization of truth. Truth cannot belong to any one race, sect, or nation. It does not recognize such narrow distinctions and makes itself available to the whole world.”
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