As we begin our second year of philosophy discussions, I want to express my deep gratitude to Aretha McKinney of Iyengar Centers of Nashville and Rachel Mathenia of South 11th Yoga for their support.  We are so fortunate to have South 11th as a meeting space, and to be embraced by a community of Nashville yogis and yoginis who love yoga’s philosophical tradition as much as we do.  Namaste, guys!  We bow to you.

I was brought up, you might say, in the raja yoga tradition, although my teacher also encouraged asana practice.  As a psychiatrist in New York City’s infamous Bellevue hospital, he was helped some of the city’s most distracted and disoriented citizens by teaching them to meditate when more medical-model methods failed.  Guruji knew from experience the value of training the mind through dhyana (meditation) and svadhyaya (the study of sacred texts), and all his life he conducted study sessions of yoga’s great texts for any who cared to attend.  His enthusiasm made philosophy seem fun and attainable, not abstract, dry or academic.  He conveyed his own delight in engaging the minds of ancient sages, and inspired us to reflect on their words as practical guides for our own lives.

Hatha Yoga Pradipika
We begin this session of Yoga Phil with a discussion of  Swami Svatmarama’s Hatha Yoga Pradipika, a fifteenth-century classic yoga text which – unlike the Yoga Sutra and the Bhagavad Gita – focuses on hatha yoga - asana and physical practice - as the gateway to raja yoga, or meditation.

A free download is available here:

http://www.yoga-age.com/ pradipika/part1.html

The introduction to this edition is written by B.K.S. Iyengar, and the translation itself is by Elsy Becherer, the German scholar who once presided over Greenwich Village’s Orientalia bookstore.