Who Is The Father Of Ashtanga Yoga?
Ashtanga Vinyasa Yoga is the classic form of hatha yoga that Sri K. Pattabhi Jois of Mysore, South India, popularized (1915-2009).
It has its origins in the Yoga Korunta, an ancient treatise penned by Vamana Rishi. In the early 1900s, Sri T. Krishnamacharya received this scripture from his mentor, Ram Mohan Brahmachari. Later, it was transmitted to him during Pattabhi Jois's studies with Krishnamacharya beginning in 1927.
In Ashtanga Vinyasa Yoga, the union of breath, movement, and awareness produces a contemplative and purifying type of yoga. As a result of long-term, continuous practice, bodily and mental illnesses vanish, and emotional health and self-awareness emerge.
Ashtanga Vinyasa Yoga is the origin of the vast majority of vinyasa, power, and flow-style yogas practiced in the West today.
Mysore-Style Ashtanga Yoga is a traditional practice in which students practice at their speed under the supervision and adjustment of a teacher. As the student's strength, competence, devotion, and humility improve, they are taught successively new postures.
Commonly, a teacher will guide a group of students through the typical sequence of postures in a led class. Students are moving and breathing in harmony in this format.
About K. Pattabhi Jois
K. Pattabhi Jois was an Indian yoga guru who created and popularized Ashtanga vinyasa yoga, a flowing type of yoga as exercise. Jois founded the Ashtanga Yoga Research Institute in Mysore, India, in 1948.
Pattabhi Jois, along with B. K. S. Iyengar, another disciple of Krishnamacharya in Mysore, is on a select list of influential Indians who helped create contemporary yoga as a practice in the 20th century.
Jois sexually molested several of his yoga pupils by improperly touching them during adjustments. Sharath Jois has publicly apologized for his grandfather's "inadequate modifications."
Krishna Pattabhi Jois was born into a Kannada Brahmin family on Guru Purnima, 26 July 1915, in the South Indian hamlet of Kowshika, near Hassan, Karnataka. The Father of Jois was an astronomer, a priest, and a landowner.
Pattabhi Jois was the fifth of nine children, five girls, and four boys, that were cared for by his mother. His father began teaching him Sanskrit and rituals when he was five years old, as is customary for Brahmin males. No other member of his family practiced yoga.
The Maharaja of Mysore occasionally visited courses in which Jois was assisting and offered him a teaching job at the Sanskrit College in Mysore, along with a salary, lodging, and board.
Jois taught yoga at the Sanskrit College from 1937 to 1973, achieving the rank of vidwan (professor) in 1956 and serving as Honorary Professor of Yoga at the Government College of Indian Medicine from 1976 to 1978.
In 1948, Jois founded the Ashtanga Yoga Research Institute in their Lakshmipuram residence. In 1964, he expanded the house's rear to accommodate a yoga hall.
In 1964, a Belgian called André Van Lysebeth studied the primary and intermediate series of the Ashtanga Vinyasa Yoga curriculum with Jois for two months.
Not long later, van Lysebeth published J'apprends le Yoga (1967, English title: Yoga Self-Taught), in which he mentions Jois and provides his address.
It prompted Westerners to learn yoga in Mysore. [18] After Manju Jois demonstrated yoga at Swami Gitananda's ashram in Pondicherry, the first Americans arrived.
In 2002, he founded a second school in Gokulam to handle the growing number of pupils.
Jois continued to teach at the Ashtanga Yoga Research Institute in Mysore, near Gokulam, with his only daughter Saraswathi Rangaswamy (born in 1941) and grandson Sharath for the remainder of his life. In 1958, he released Yoga Ml in Kannada; in 1999, an English version emerged.
In 1974, he made his first travel to the West, to South America, to deliver a Sanskrit lecture at an international yoga conference.
In 1975, he spent four months in Encinitas, California, initiating the practice of Ashtanga Vinyasa Yoga in the United States. [33] Norman Allen, one of his first western pupils, assisted Jois on his excursions to the United States.
He has said several times that there may have been just twenty or thirty individuals practicing Ashtanga Yoga in the United States at the time, but that "slowly, slowly, in twenty years, it will be widespread."
Over the next twenty years, he returned to the United States many times to teach yoga in Encinitas and beyond.
Parampara, the transmission of knowledge from teacher to student (traditionally, guru to shishya), is reportedly at the core of Jois's Ashtanga Yoga.
To become approved "lineage holders," teachers must complete a lengthy period of daily practice and extensive travel to Mysore, India. Having studied under Krishnamacharya for many years, Jois demanded the same of his pupils, establishing some of the strictest conditions for yoga teacher training anywhere in the world.
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