Lineage
Krishnamacharya
Tirumalai Krishnamacharya (November 18, 1888 – February 28, 1989) was an Indian yoga teacher, ayurvedic healer and scholar. Often referred to as “The Father of Modern Yoga,Krishnamacharya is widely regarded as one of the most influential yoga teachers of the 20th century and is credited with the revival of hatha yoga. Krishnamacharya held degrees in all the six Vedic darśanas, or Indian philosophies. While under the patronage of the Maharaja of Mysore, Krishna Raja Wadiyar IV, Krishnamacharya traveled around India giving lectures and demonstrations to promote yoga, including such feats as stopping his heartbeat. He is widely considered as the architect of vinyāsa,in the sense of combining breathing with movement. Underlying all of Krishnamacharya’s teachings was the principle “Teach what is appropriate for an individual.While he is revered in other parts of the world as a yogi, in India Krishnamacharya is mainly known as a healer who drew from both ayurvedic and yogic traditions to restore health and well-being to those he treated.He authored four books on yoga—Yoga Makaranda (1934), Yogaasangalu (c. 1941),Yoga Rahasya, and Yogavalli (Chapter 1 – 1988)—as well as several essays and poetic compositions. Some of Krishnamacharya’s students include many of yoga’s most renowned teachers: his son T. K. V. Desikachar (born 1938), Indra Devi (1899–2002), his brother-in-law B. K. S. Iyengar (1918-2014), K. Pattabhi Jois (1915–2009), A. G. Mohan (born 1945), and Srivasta Ramaswami who studied with Krishnamacharya for over 32 years.
Pattabhi Jois
Yogacharaya Shri K. Pattabhi Jois (Guruji) was born on the full moon of July 1915, in Kowshika, a small hamlet located 150 kilometers from Mysore in the southern state of Karnataka. His father was an astrologer and a priest in the village of nearly seventy families. Guruji was the middle of nine children, and from the age of five, like most Brahmin boys, began to study the Vedas and Hindu rituals. At 12, he attended a yoga demonstration at his middle school that inspired him to learn more about the ancient practice. He was so excited about this new discovery, he arose early the next morning to meet the impressive yogi he had seen, Sri T. Krishnamacharya, one of the most distinguished yogis of the 20th Century.
R Sharath
Sharath was born on September 29, 1971 in Mysore, India to Saraswathi Rangaswamy, daughter of ashtanga master Sri K. Pattabhi Jois. Growing up in a house full of yoga practitioners, Sharath learned his first asanas at age seven and experimented with postures from the primary and intermediate series until he turned fourteen. Though he spent the next three years focused on his scholastic education, earning a diploma in electronics from JSS in Mysore, Sharath knew that he would one day follow the ashtanga path blazed by his mother and legendary grandfather. Sharath embarked on his formal yoga study at the age of nineteen. He would wake every day at 3:30 a.m. and cross the town of Mysore to his grandfather’s Lakshmipuram yoga shala. There, he would first practice and then assist his guru, Pattabhi Jois, a routine of dedication he has followed for many years. Today, Sharath’s sincere devotion and discipline to the study and practice of yoga compels him to rise six days a week at 1:00 a.m. to complete his practice before the first students arrive at the K. Pattabhi Jois Ashtanga Yoga Institute, where he serves as Director. Sharath is Pattabhi Jois’s only student who has studied and continues to practice the complete six series of the ashtanga yoga system. He presently resides in Mysore with his wife Shruthi, daughter Shraddha, and son Sambhav.
R. Saraswathi
Born in 1941 to Savitramma and yoga master, K. Pattabhi Jois, Saraswathi played with yoga postures at an early age. At 10, she began her formal study of ashtanga yoga un-der the guidance of her father, and eventually became the first woman admitted to the Sanskrit College in Mysore, where she studied Sanskrit works and yoga. At the age of twenty-two Saraswathi’s mother became ill and Saraswathi took on all household responsibilities along with caring for her mother, father, and younger broth-ers. Leaving aside her asana practice, Saraswathi grew strong in other areas of yoga. In 1967, she married M.S. Rangaswamy and had two children, daughter Shammi in 1969 and son Sharath in 1971. Saraswathi assisted her father at his Lakshmipuram yoga shala from 1971 until 1975. She then began teaching yoga to local Indian women on her own at the Balaji Temple in V.V. Mohalla. At the time, yoga teachers were treated no differently than the cleaners and sweepers of the temple grounds and she was paid only twenty fives rupees a month. In 1984, she began teaching yoga to both men and women together in her own house in Gokulam. When her father moved his Ashtanga Yoga Research Institute from Lakshmipuram to Gokulam in 2002, Saraswathi returned to teaching with her father. Today, she is a constant presence at the K. Pattabhi Jois Ashtanga Yoga Institute. Saraswathi welcomes all yoga students who come to Mysore.
Ashtanga Yoga is an ancient system of Yoga that was taught by Vamana Rishi in the Yoga Korunta. This text was imparted to Sri T. Krishnamacharya in the early 1900’s by his Guru Rama Mohan Brahmachari, and was later passed down to Pattabhi Jois during the duration of his studies with Krishnamacharya, beginning in 1927.
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