My path to yoga began in the gym, at the University of San Francisco where I graduated with an MA in education in 2005. I had to find some respite from a stressful corporate job back then. The Koret gym offered some hatha yoga classes which opened up a space so different from the life of mad rush I had become accustomed to.
Fast forward a few years later after the housing mortgage crash in 2008, I found myself wanting to do more yoga. I enrolled in the 200-hr Yoga Teacher Training at SF’s biggest yoga studio chain, Yoga Tree. There, I found 2 teachers amongst the 50+ whose classes I attended, who offered the most steady and grounded presence, Karl Erb and Darren Main. Karl, I learned years later was once the Director at IYISF. Darren, while not an Iyengar Yoga teacher, had recommended Usha Devi in Rishikesh for first-time India-bound travelers. Usha is a long time Iyengar Yoga teacher, who I eventually studied with 3 years later.
In 2011, I left the corporate world and eventually attended Usha’s Iyengar Yoga Intensive at the Omkarananda Ashram. That was only after a whirlwind saga during my first 6 days in India. I ended up in Srinagar, Kashmir, where I was tracing the footsteps of Paramahansa Yogananda, the spiritual guru of the Self-Realization Fellowship who brought yoga to the West in the early 1900’s. Shortly after my fiasco in Srinagar where I ended up staying in a hospital in New Delhi, I made my way to attend 2 month-long intensives with the Chanchani’s, long-time Iyengar Yoga teachers in Old Rajpur, at the Himalayan mountain foothills. “Long time” in the Iyengar Yoga world, I came to learn means someone who has been immersed, whether teaching or practicing, for over at least a couple of decades. There at the Chanchani’s, a gigantic seed was planted in me to continue this path of Iyengar Yoga and uncover why practitioners in their 70’s were doing headstand with ease while I, in my youthful 40’s at that time was struggling and sweating after a minute in the pose. As I inch closer to their age, I am finding more ease and steadiness in and through sirsasana (headstand), and life in general.
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