My name is Bill. Yoga came into my life thirty years ago, on the Big Island of Hawaii -- a tranquil beautiful setting for a transformative experience. My wife Karen initiated this transformation, as she had discovered yoga many years earlier. I had been involved with traditional sports, including racquet sports (tennis & racquetball) and weightlifting, but I finally assented to attending beginners yoga classes outdoors by the warm ocean. The view and environment were marvelous. My attempt at yoga was humbling. I realized I had a great deal to learn.
Over the next two decades, hatha yoga became my primary instrument for physical fitness and mental discipline, as I learned different yoga styles from various teachers. I acquired an extensive library of yoga material. Yoga in total was deeply satisfying, but no particular yoga style gave me everything I needed. I was a True Believer without a church, an itinerant yoga devotee wandering from church to church, looking for a home.
I needed to develop a coherent yoga practice for myself, principles implemented through activity. I formalized my study, delving into the teachings of both elder and contemporary yoga masters. I discovered two things: 1) basic yoga principles do exist -- from concepts through performance, 2) yoga ideally is tailored to the individual.
People are different. They have different DNA, different bodies. Their life experiences are different. They exist in different circumstances. Their ambitions, goals, expectations are different. Some are guided by Divine will, others by the Tao/Universe/whatever, others by karmic reincarnation from past lifetimes, still others by themselves alone. Each person’s particular approach to body, mind, and spirit health will necessarily be different.
Individuality is true for yoga masters as well as for yoga students & practitioners. The masters developed their own blends of spiritual, mental, and physical yoga. Students and practitioners are free to draw from the masters and incorporate their own individuality to develop a personal practice. Yoga is like music. The particular notes are essentially fixed, but they can be combined into an infinite variety of melodies; nobody is worried that someday we will run out of new songs. Each of us can compose our personal yoga practice.
I practice Hatha Yoga to be physically and mentally prepared for life. My spiritual program is a combination of Taoism, Buddhism, Zen, Christianity, and a meditation school called Actualism, all filtered through my life experience, seasoned by Joseph Campbell and other sources of wisdom. And I have been on his planet for a long time, so I also know something about Reiki, Feldenkrais, Egoscue, and other stuff that has stuck in my brain cells over the decades. The experience and perspective of age are worth its disadvantages.
My hatha yoga practice is derived from the founding texts Hatha Yoga Pradipika, Gheranda Samhita & Yoga Yajnavalkya plus the work of yoga masters T. Krishnamacharya and A.G. Mohan, the user-friendly style of Indra Devi, and a dose of B.K.S. Iyengar, T.K.V. Desikachar, and K. Pattabhi Jois. To these I have added 20+ years of personal yoga experience and study.
See the Author's Practice page for details of my yoga practice.
