MY YOGA STORY

So, at the end of 1989, I escaped. I spent a month at the Kripalu Center in Lenox, Massachusetts where I received the 200-hour Yoga Teacher Certification. This program offers formal training in the instruction of Yoga's physical poses and breathing (Hatha Yoga).

To know me it is important to know that my exposure to Yoga originated around the time of my conception, in 1956, with my American Dream on Madison Avenue father's newly-found Yoga practice. Watching television with my mother he found Nehru and Huxley discussing Yoga practices. Impressed, he went out on lunch break from his job as a charismatic advertising executive, and bought a book on the subject. Quickly tuning in to his subtle energies during his practice, he decided to follow the book's advice to find a teacher. Upon dialing the "wrong number" from a selection of Yoga centers in the New York City Yellow Pages, he found his instructor of the next 44 years, Sachindra Majumdar, the Yoga Institute of New York.

Sachindra Majumdar

Majumdar instructed my father, Ralph Brockway, in Hatha Yoga, the physical poses and breathing, for six months, which he practices to this day. The rest of their years together they focused on meditation and philosophy, drawn from the tradition of Bhakti (love and devotion) devotee of the black goddess Kali, Sri Ramakrishna. Sri Ramakrishna, a mystic and saint near Calcutta, India (1836-86) is considered an avatar, God-Conscious from birth.

Sri Ramakrishna

After my Yoga Teacher Certification it took three years to establish a teaching practice, a gift of sorts from the teachers at Swami Chetanananda's Cambridge ashram when they moved out to Oregon in 1993, which has an interesting story of its own.

For 11 years I taught 6 - 8 times per week, with classes evolving into two specialized formats, Yoga for the Mature, and Prenatal Yoga. My slow flowing (Vinyasa) approach to instruction gives care to alignment, progressing to the next level of practice only when the student is ready.

In 2004, the Yoga Industry began to catch up with the exploding popularity of this fine discipline, and studios began to pop up on the main streets of Every Town, including the greater Cambridge area. After three years of struggling to maintain a profitable student base, my one-person operation housed in a church on a back street of Harvard Square closed down.

Among other things I moved on to teach for the next two years with three organizations, specializing in:

• work with anorexic and bulimic women at a residential clinic;
• restorative Yoga and Meditation offerings for mature women;
• Yoga and Yogalates offerings to primarily young people