Welcome to part two of the history of yoga and philosophy. While going through part one, I noticed a couple of pieces or components I wanted to add, so I decided to make part two. This is more of a compilation than anything else.

I want to go through the four Purusharthas, talk about cultural appropriation in yoga today, and then go through my lineage. 

The Four Purusharthas

We’ll start with the four Purusharthas. Every Indian philosophy deals with these, and Purushartha translates as an object of human pursuit. I loved this definition, so I will read it from a quote that’s in the PDF. 

“Purushartha is a key concept in Hinduism and refers to the four end goals of life. The four Purusharthas are Dharma, which means moral values; Artha, which means prosperity and economic value; Kama, which means pleasure, love, and psychological value; and Moksha, which means liberation and spiritual values.” 

I read Rod Stryker’s The Four Desires, a how-to guide for improving one’s life or finding what is important. Stryker discusses all four purusharthas. I wanted to mention them for two reasons: they are a significant component of Indian philosophy, and I want to know what you think the end goal of human life is. 

Dharma

So, Dharma. So, this article talks about goodness and moral values. In the Bhagavad Gita, Dharma is your contribution to the community or how you give of yourself to the greater world. And it’s a hard one. We always discuss this when we discuss the Bhagavad Gita and the art of sequencing, as well as in teacher training.

How did you know when you found your Dharma? 

They feel fulfilled when they’re doing whatever they’re doing. That is the biggest answer I’ve heard from people when I ask, “What is your Dharma, and how do you know that’s your Dharma?” 

Dharma is how you contribute to your community. And then, Artha, how do you make your money? It’s prosperity and economic value.  

And this is a sweet reminder that this is not always the case. There’s that wonderful saying: Some people live to make money, some live to work, and some work to live. So your Dharma doesn’t have to be how you make your money. It’s how you contribute in a way that is fulfilling for you. 

So, what is your Dharma, and how does it fulfill you? I’ll just add my piece here. My Dharma is building a community. I love people, and I’ve loved people my whole life. When I was a teenager, I used to love to throw parties and invite all kinds of people to come to these parties and have these great mixers; different people who wouldn’t necessarily speak to each other would talk to each other. 

I loved watching connections form. When I started teaching yoga, I realized that it attracted a particular community of people. They started interacting with each other, which was a way of building community. I loved having regulars come and get to know people in a different context. 

For a long time, I’ve known that my Dharma is community, meaning building community or bringing people together. However, my approach to this changed as I grew older. I bring this up because sometimes we think our Dharma has to look one particular way, but it doesn’t. It needs just to be; there must be a thorough line.

ARTHA

Moving to the second Purushartha, Artha, is related to prosperity and how you make money. What are your economic values? Your Dharma correlates to your moral values and how you live your life. Dharma has many different translations. One is the ethical code, and Artha is your economic values. 

So, how do you make your money? Think about it, and spend it. And how you’d like to show up by what you spend your money on.

Kama 

The next one is Kama, which means pleasure. I love this one because pleasure is very, very important. In part one of this lecture, we discussed the history of yoga philosophy and how important desire is in that it pushes you forward toward something.

Moksha

Moksha is our spiritual path, and we seek to connect to the divine.  So, how do you contribute to the world? 

The last piece I wanted to discuss was respecting lineage, so I shared the historical lineage of yoga. What’s so cool is that it’s living and breathing, just as we are living and breathing. The path is still being woven with us. I wanted to pay homage to my teachers and give more context to who they were.

My dad used to date this woman who went to Kripalu. My dad used to go to Kripalu all the time. Kripalu is a New Age center in Massachusetts. She’s the only person I ever saw do yoga when I was young. So, this was before I was 10 years old. I started dancing when I was taking dance classes. I danced my whole life in my living room but started taking dance classes in high school.

I loved it. I love moving my body, not necessarily in terms of sports but just in dance. However, I never loved the competitive nature of dance, especially when I was in New York City. So, when I was 12, I moved out of Montreal where I lived with my father and I moved to New York to live with my mother. I started taking dance classes there and minored in university, but I always just danced for myself. I never wanted to be a professional dancer. I’d taken classes and was working at a Zen Palette.

It was a Buddhist fast-food, vegetarian restaurant. It was kind of a turn-and-burn place, where people wore T-shirts and black baseball caps and reeked of soy sauce by the end of the evening. I met one of the hosts and became vegan at the ripe old age of 17. 

She had just returned from India and was super into yoga, so she invited me to a class at the Sivananda Ashram. I was 18 or 17 at that point—I think—and I wasn’t into it. I had too much energy to burn. I didn’t like sitting on the carpet; it just felt strange. I enjoyed being barefoot. That was the one thing I remember. And I remember when they owned it. I thought this was so weird. 

I didn’t go back to yoga for a long time. Then, my friend, Homie, found the Jivamukti yoga studio. It was very challenging, but they started with singing. We then listened to cool music, moved our bodies, and rested. I was going a bit. At that point in 1998, it was expensive for me. It was 20 a drop-in, which was a lot of money for me, so I would go when I could. 

At that point, I was still dancing in the dance program at Hunter College, where I went to university. And they offered yoga.  And this woman, Mary Flynn, was teaching it.  And there were, no joke, like 60 people in the room. And it was open to everybody, so it wasn’t just dancers; it was all kinds of people. 

And I liked the simplicity of the way that she taught.  And I remember she offered a yoga retreat in upstate New York, so I decided to go.  I was probably 20 at this point and I go to this Buddhist retreat center. 

I had to share a room with somebody. I think the guru was somebody like a bigwig in town, at the ashram, giving a speech. 

Mary explained that there would be an altar when we entered the room. We should not put our feet on it because that’s a form of disrespect in India. So, in India, you never put your feet on an altar. When you lie in Shavasana, you always put your head towards the altar and your feet away from it.

On this retreat, I learned that she was a Kundalini teacher. She didn’t teach Kundalini at the Hunter School, but she taught Hatha yoga because it was an intro class. I got to do all this Kundalini with her; that was my introduction to Kundalini, and I loved it.

It was intense. If you’ve never done Kundalini, you essentially do what’s called a kriya. Kriya means purification, though technically, all forms of yoga are kriyas. In the Kundalini tradition, kriyas are usually repetitive motions that you do with one part of your body or with pranayama and a mantra for an extended period, essentially to break through or move through discomfort.

You stick with something until it’s uncomfortable, and then keep doing it. It teaches you how to work with discomfort. It’s wonderful. I always cite her as one of my root teachers because she was there and introduced me to different kinds of yoga. 

After I took her course, I decided to invest more of my time and effort into the Jivamukti Studio. My two favourite teachers were Uma Saraswati and David Life. I saw David Life on Thursday mornings and Uma I would see every other day. 

Saraswati has the voice of an angel. One of the things that I love about Jivamukti—and didn’t realize I loved it until I went to other places—is that they always do mantra at the beginning, so they pull out everyone, everybody plays harmonium, and sings. Call and response. 

I liked that about her. She just went through the same sequence every single time. Then, Jivamukti kept to a set sequence, followed by David Life. David Life reminded me of my dad. He played a lot of Ram Dass, which my dad did a lot when I was growing up, specifically when he was dating Charlotte, the yoga person from Kripalu. 

He made philosophy accessible, so I felt at home and inspired. The two things I love most about Jivamukti are its spiritual component and its incorporation of philosophy. Sometimes, I find them dogmatic, which is my only feedback.

You don’t need to be dogmatic about the philosophy; you can offer it. My friend Alex Dawson was about to take teacher training at Sonic Yoga in Hell’s Kitchen, the neighborhood where I worked. I used to work at the Hudson Hotel in midtown Manhattan.

Sonic Yoga was a couple of blocks away, where Alex was taking the teacher training. At that point, I had graduated from film school and was lost. I was untethered. It was the first time I’d been out of school since I was four, and I didn’t know what to do with myself.

I went to school for film and minored in dance, but I didn’t want to do either to make money. What should I do? I just did a lot of yoga and worked at the hotel, which is what I was doing. So I said I’d do this teacher training with Alex.

So, a little context on Lauren Hanna from Sonic Yoga – she studied with Shiva Ray for many years, the creator of Prana Flow. Jonathan Fields (who helped Lauren host the teacher training) studied with Baron Baptiste, not the creator of power yoga but somebody who made it very popular. They were a wonderful combination because he had the Yang, and she had the Yang Yin in that power yoga.

If you’ve never done power yoga before, it’s a very strong style. They say Beryl Bender Birch is the one who created power yoga or the term power yoga, but it’s usually a lot stronger of a practice focusing on arm balances and core. 

And, when I took a workshop with Baron Baptiste at a yoga conference, it was very competitive and, yeah, just significantly picked up, like, whoa, which was not where I was at that point. Jonathan Fields had been a lawyer; he was a corporate lawyer before that.

He’s a motivational speaker with an excellent podcast called The Good Life. But at that point, he was teaching teacher training and running the studio with Lauren. Lauren is a surfer and a lover of prana, which means energy moving through.

She took me under her wing, and I would call her one of my mentors. So, I took their teacher training there. There were six or seven of us in the class. It was great, and we had a great time. I was blown away when I discovered that I loved teaching. 

That said, I come from a long line of teachers. My mother, father, and grandmother were teachers. Teaching is in the blood. Because I loved Lauren so much and Shiva was Lauren’s teacher, I went to see her when Shiva came to town.

There was a yoga journal conference at a random hotel in midtown Manhattan. Shiva had a live sitar player, and it felt like we were dancing the sacred dance of life. I walked out of there inspired, uplifted, and connected to my creative force, Shakti. I followed her around the world for a long time, just studying here and trying to find out who and what she was. 

One thing that I loved about her is she studied dance. She has a PhD in world dance and studies all kinds of movement. She’s a lover of movement. And then she brings it into vinyasa, which I found refreshing. Just having been to Jivamukti, which has more of an Ashtanga, Jivamukti both David Life and Sharon Gannon, the creators of Jivamukti, studied directly with Pattabhi Jois. 

But with Shiva, you never knew what you would get, and I love that about her.  And at the same time, I met a woman, I think, at Sonic, and she was like, oh my god, you have to go to Laughing Lotus.  And Laughing Lotus was a tiny little studio in the West Village on Christopher Street.

And they, I found out later, Dana Flynn studied at Jivamukti.  So there was chanting and a lot of reading of poetry. And to me, there was a very large emphasis on the Kama, meaning the pleasure. The enjoyment of it all was very lightweight, and their sequencing was out of this world, like just all over them, all over the map, and very, very super dancy and very challenging.

I loved it and practiced the Jivamukti and Prana Flow styles for a long time. My two teachers at Laughing Lotus, Stacey Brass and one of my other mentors, also studied a lot of Iyengar yoga.

I liked that she added a strong anatomical component to the Laughing Lotus sequencing. It felt very integrated. Then Dana Flynn, the co-owner of Laughing Lotus, was a VJ on MTV before all of this, and she had this energy that made you smile.

It’s engaging—that’s not the word—but it pulls you in. She has a lot of charisma and a love for the practice, so both greatly inspired me. Yeah, those were my teachers for quite a few years. Then, I moved to Vancouver in 2005, and I got lost for a while because there were no senior teachers; it was a very young scene when I got here. 

At the same time, many of my colleagues had fallen in love with Anusara yoga. Although it was never my practice, I liked many of its components. John Friend, who created Anusara Yoga, studied with Iyengar for many years, so many elements of Iyengar were also present in Anusara.

And then their focus on theming, philosophical theming, got me. And so I didn’t study much with Anusara certified teachers, but a lot of my friends Nico Luce, I’m running, Suzanne Sloc Gorey, and Christine Price Clark. All three of them I found very inspiring in terms of my peers and the way that they worked with the Anusara lineage and made it their own and add their components and knowing them before they had studied Anusara and then afterward it was like cool to see what had shifted and evolved.

Ana Forrest is the next person in my lineage. I met her in  2011. One of my dearest friends, who used to live in Hong Kong, had studied with her maybe 10 or 15 years before that.

And for her, the idea is to get the center of you strong so that the rest of you can move. And that being said, the core is, uh, deep work. She works a lot with your transverse abdominus and your pelvic floor muscles, as well as a lot of your stabilizers.  And to me, I found it all very manageable.

The shapes didn’t feel crazy, and you weren’t doing many things with your legs. It was tiny movements to get those stabilizers working. It just changed everything for me. It changed everything in my practice and what I would bring to my classes. And then, the work that she’s done.

So she’s broken a lot of bones and has had a hard time in her body. And so her therapeutics, the way you can do particular shapes to create a healing component, are out of this world. And so she brought that into my practice and then into my teaching. And then the last person that I want to talk about today is Rod Stryker.

He studied at the Himalayan Institute, and again, their focus is meditation. And so, his style of Asana practice is very similar to classic Hatha, which prepares you for seated meditation.

I’ve sat with quite a few meditation teachers. I didn’t talk about them today. I’m just talking about the yoga people. But when you sit with somebody who’s been meditating for a long time, you can feel it off them. There’s like a different energy? And Rod had that, Rod has that. 

He brings a quiet that I appreciate. I remember being in class with my friend Nico, and we turned to each other. He said, “This is the real deal.” I said, “It is the real deal.” We came out of that so happy. So, I’ve mainly studied philosophy and yoga nidra with him.

Yeah, he didn’t necessarily feed my asana practice, but he fed me the last piece, the meditation component of how to weave that into the class.  Or, yeah, I’d wonder how do I weave it into my class? I’d been sitting for a long time already but hadn’t necessarily brought it into my teaching. 

I am deeply grateful to the teachers I mentioned today and to all the other teachers whose classes I have taken over the years.