Remembering Guruji B.K.S. Iyengar by Peggy Kelly Iyengar appeared in a dream I had in about 1968--this was our first meeting. I had recently started taking yoga classes at the suggestion of my boss at work (how can you refuse your boss?). We were living in Cambridge, Massachusetts then, and I was working at Harvard while my then husband attended school. We had a young son and Mrs. Katz, my boss, recognized my need for some grounding. She had been attending a lunch time yoga class with Sandra Merrihue in Porter Square, and I happily tagged along. One day Sandra pulled out a copy of one of what she called her yoga bibles. It was one of the earliest editions of Iyengars Light on Yoga. I stared at the now iconic black and white photographs and went right after class to the Harvard Coop to purchase my own copy. So perhaps it would be more correct to say that I first met B.K.S. Iyengar in a book. But the dream was what kept me going back to classes and getting on my mat (well, I didnt have a mat in those days, so I was probably on the floor or a carpet). In the dream, Guruji approached me in the kindest possible way and said Come to Yoga. It was an invitation, and I accepted it. In 1984, thanks to Manouso Manos efforts, and Im sure the efforts of many others in the San Francisco Iyengar Yoga community, the first International Convention of Iyengar Yoga took place. Iyengar himself attended, so this was my first experience of him in the flesh. The demonstration at Davies Hall, his unannounced visits to the classes the senior teachers were teaching, the brilliance of the gathered community there were all overwhelmingly inspirational for me. After the excitement of the convention, I was determined to get to India. But by that time I had two children and had left the marriage and was struggling to make a living as a young, just-out-of school lawyer doing public defense work and working for the Womens Advocacy Project. These were not jobs that paid a...
Posted on: Wed, 10 Sep 2014 21:55:04 +0000
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