Hrih Forum: View topic - Taking Yoga Seriously -
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Published on: 6/1/1989
Last Visited: 11/1/2005
We meet with Shri Yogendra in the Institute's garden.He is twenty-two years older than the school he started.That makes him 92, a witness to two World Wars, the independence of India and every invention from the car to the computers that control the Voyager space probe now voyaging outside our solar system.Shri Yogendra is a small, gnome-like man with a striking profile of a prominent, craggy nose and a white beard that catches the sun.Weathered, but not old and leathery, he walks loosely with a straight spine.In short, he's a human billboard for his own yoga training.Like many yoga teachers, he can quickly turn stem, demanding, critical.But for those who know him, he's a genuinely warm man.It turns out he put in this garden himself.As we walk, he points out a tree and muses, "Look.This nagachampa tree has blossomed for the fast time, 32 years after planting, my boy.So wait and watch patiently for achieving great results in yoga."Not earthshaking advice, but as a life-long teacher he is fond of sprinkling such bromides into his conversation, and he definitely has the years logged to know that patience is a key virtue of yoga.
Some of his in-residence students are drifting through the garden - they come from abroad and various areas of India for a nine-month teacher-training course.
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Shri Yogendra and his wife, Sitadevi, live in the middle building called Yoga Bhavan where the main office is housed and an auditorium opens out into the garden.There's a large library dedicated to the arcana of yoga, and here Yogendra plans and writes his many books, the latest being the first volume of a Yoga Encyclopedia.Some of his books were selected as part of a time capsule project called Crypt of Civilization to protect valuable human wisdom and thought from nuclear or natural destruction.Seven hundred books were entombed in a cell in the US under the supervision of the Archives of the Ogalthorpe University.Yogendra and his wife, who has been a helpmate in both yoga and home, don't actively teach anymore, though Yogendra still gives seminars and lectures on occasion.
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Sitting down for an interview with Shri Yogendra is tough.He doesn't like to talk about himself past or present.Understandable, but we're left with little sense of biography.Inside the neuronic mesh of his brain is a prodigious knowledge of yoga and the memories of umpteen adventures in acquiring that knowledge, not to mention the collection of artifacts, texts and yoga science displays arrayed in the Yoga Museum in the building to our right.Yogendra is outspoken on what he calls the commercialization of yoga, but he overlooks the fact that even his institute is a commercialization compared to a little over a century ago when yoga was a truly Hindu occult art.He has carefully bred any Hindu genetics out of the Institute, choosing, as have many yoga instructors, to use Western science as the background for yoga.
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Yogendra started The Yoga Institute of America on Bear Mountain outside New York City.Working with avante garde American doctors, he ran the institute for four years, but his guru, Yogi Madhvasji, persuaded him to return to the Bombay mission.He returned with more medical knowledge, experience in treating diseases peculiar to the Western culture and a burst of industriousness that established his institute as a yogic/healing haven.Over the decades world class medical scientists have toured the facilities, including Dr. A. Vishinvisky, the first heart surgeon in America and Nobel-winner Dr. Jonas Salk, famous for developing the polio vaccine and who is currently engaged in brain/mind research.Perhaps in moments of memory he touches into his visit to Yogendraji's pioneering yoga school.
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