Tirumalai Krishnamacharya

And I think that means people are slightly less concerned about timelines, what's new, what's old.

The question is much more, is it helpful? And does it somehow cohere with the rest of the body of knowledge that's being presented? And so somebody like Krishnamacharya, who has a very well-established foundation in Indian philosophy, is pulling together all sorts of information to serve his purposes as a promoter of yoga in the early 20th century.

And at the same time, doing a really sort of meticulous job of ensuring that that is aligned with other things.

And I don't think he really cares where he's getting his raw materials from as long as they serve that objective.

There was Kuvalayananda, a swami, a contemporary who established the Kaivalya Dhamma ashram.

um who when he saw krishnamacharya with some of his young students giving a demonstration of what we would now think of as flow yoga um said basically i would in fact he wrote to krishnamacharya's boss the maharaja of my saw and said i would recommend that in the future the These exercises, if to be given to the general population, should be toned down a bit and also to take care not to mix all this non-yogic stuff in there.

So it was clear to Krishnamacharya's contemporaries that he was drawing on something a little bit more than what was there in previous yoga practice texts.

um but to be honest kuvalayananda was doing the same thing they were all at it so to speak uh mixing and matching and doing their best to try and make things relevant and helpful so they weren't admitting it as such because they didn't really see anything to admit they were engaged in the you know ever-existent project of trying to keep yoga relevant um but every now and then you do get astray admission and that really does shine a light on some very important dimensions to this and it comes back to the observation about green smoothies and wellness culture and everything else So there's another teacher, another contemporary of Krishnamacharya and Kuvalayananda Yogendra, who we could perhaps even think of as the first modern yoga teacher in that he taught the, as far as we know, certainly from what's been documented, first public drop-in yoga class.

Yeah.

Um, and, um, he did in fact study with the great, uh, yoga master, uh, Krishnamacharya in India- Yes, he did.

Yeah ... who was the, uh, who was the, uh, father-in-law of, uh, BKS, uh, Desi- uh, Iyengar, and the, I think the father- Mm-hmm ... of Desikachar, and, um, uh, the, the, the kind of the initiator of a long lineage, a, esteemed lineage- Mm ... of Hatha yoga.

And, uh, so he inco-incorporated the asanas into his approach- Mm ...

Um, and BNS taught very similar to Pattabhi Jois.

I think that he claims that, BNS claims that he was taught by Krishnamacharya as well, along with Pattabhi Jois.

Pattabhi Jois, I believe, claims that he taught BNS Iyengar.

The differences are not massive.

That was something.

What I'm gonna say, again, is to conclude this podcast, is it really was something.

What Pattabhi Jois created from what he learnt from Krishnamacharya really was something unique, something quite powerful, something that really drew out a lot in people as well.

It drew out the best, it drew out probably some not so good things, but it did draw out consistency, and what you need in any practice is to be consistently doing it for quite a long period of time.

Absolutely.

So in the United States, I would say, what the main idea most people think of when they think of yoga, um, is, comes from a certain lineage called Krishnamacharya.

He was a teacher, and then he had several star pupils like Pattabhi Jois, and B.K.S. Iyengar, Desikachar.

These teachers then developed their systems.

Anything that you're doing that's called Hatha yoga, Flow yoga, Vinyasa yoga, Ashtanga yoga, Iyengar yoga, any of those type of words, they all come back to this one man, Krishnamacharya.

And so that's the lineage I'm in.

Mama studied directly with B.K.S. Iyengar in the eig- se- I think '70s already, but definitely the '80s, 1980s.

Mm