Here's some Easter Sunday wisdom from Bryan Kest:
Not long after I moved to Maui (6 years), I then moved to India for a year to get a stronger hit of this yoga. This was not a common practice for a 21-year-old Detroit boy to move to India to study yoga, so it was very exciting. My destination was Mysore, a medium size town in deep southern India. I wanted to meet and study ashtanga yoga with its main and only proponent (of this variety of ashtanga), Pattabhi Jois.
This was not such an easy and fashionable thing to do back then. The nation’s economy was not booming yet, and there wasn’t the Internet that seems to have shrunken the planet. And of course, yoga seemed odd to most people. But yoga not being fashionable yet was a good thing for me. I didn’t have to deal with any trendy energy, and it all seemed very unexplored, strange, interesting and esoteric. I was following my gut into new territory. So new, that when I found the ashtanga teacher, Jois, there was only one other student there practicing. All the better! I had him all to myself and could absorb as much info as I wanted.
As well as practice every morning with Jois and having tea with him and his wife in the afternoons, I immersed myself in the culture and sought out other yogis and teachers. India was an amazing experience, and I still look forward to another journey there.
Once I returned from India, I continued practicing the yoga I had learned from David and Brad and continued to make an effort to study with teachers and instructors whom I heard good things about.
Now here I am, 26 years into this journey, still just a child (maybe a teenager) on this spiritual journey. Where do I find myself? What have I learned? What is the point of this article?! What I’ve learned, I couldn’t find words to explain, although I am always trying, and some people understand.
The point of this article is this. Looking back over my experiences in yoga, any and all of the spiritual information I have acquired has not come from someone else. I am not parroting what a great yogi or saint has said; the teachings, the message and knowledge come from me. I find the knowledge that I have congruent with most of the teachings from yoga philosophy as well as that of many great saints. It makes me feel I am on the right track when my understanding parallels that of great teachers and saints. And the parallels make sense because truth is truth.
Not long after I moved to Maui (6 years), I then moved to India for a year to get a stronger hit of this yoga. This was not a common practice for a 21-year-old Detroit boy to move to India to study yoga, so it was very exciting. My destination was Mysore, a medium size town in deep southern India. I wanted to meet and study ashtanga yoga with its main and only proponent (of this variety of ashtanga), Pattabhi Jois.
This was not such an easy and fashionable thing to do back then. The nation’s economy was not booming yet, and there wasn’t the Internet that seems to have shrunken the planet. And of course, yoga seemed odd to most people. But yoga not being fashionable yet was a good thing for me. I didn’t have to deal with any trendy energy, and it all seemed very unexplored, strange, interesting and esoteric. I was following my gut into new territory. So new, that when I found the ashtanga teacher, Jois, there was only one other student there practicing. All the better! I had him all to myself and could absorb as much info as I wanted.
As well as practice every morning with Jois and having tea with him and his wife in the afternoons, I immersed myself in the culture and sought out other yogis and teachers. India was an amazing experience, and I still look forward to another journey there.
Once I returned from India, I continued practicing the yoga I had learned from David and Brad and continued to make an effort to study with teachers and instructors whom I heard good things about.
Now here I am, 26 years into this journey, still just a child (maybe a teenager) on this spiritual journey. Where do I find myself? What have I learned? What is the point of this article?! What I’ve learned, I couldn’t find words to explain, although I am always trying, and some people understand.
The point of this article is this. Looking back over my experiences in yoga, any and all of the spiritual information I have acquired has not come from someone else. I am not parroting what a great yogi or saint has said; the teachings, the message and knowledge come from me. I find the knowledge that I have congruent with most of the teachings from yoga philosophy as well as that of many great saints. It makes me feel I am on the right track when my understanding parallels that of great teachers and saints. And the parallels make sense because truth is truth.