Thursday, August 08, 2002


must read

let me direct your attention to your local newstand. there you'll find master coffee roaster don schoenholt of gillies coffee, with a spectacular article on the recent coffee price depression i've written waaay too much about. it's in the summer 2002 whole earth review. while i don't always agree with don, understanding his expertise and point of view is a crucial part of being an informed coffee lover.

to change the subject radically, yesterday i had the great privilege to speak to that fascinating yoga teacher, mark whitwell (here and here). he was calling to say that he liked what i had written here about his recent viniyoga workshop in brooklyn. for those of you who missed it, mark is returning to new york oct. 12-13 at yoga zone. since his workshop at yoga people was such a success, i know that wendy, the owner, plans to beg him for another appearance there too this fall.

the best part of my conversation with mark was when the subject turned to krishnamarcharya, the master yoga teacher from whom 90 percent of the yoga taught in the u.s.a. today derives. no matter whether you are doing ashtanga, iyengar, vinyasa, jivamukti, viniyoga, power yoga -- it's all basically krishnamarcharya's yoga. i asked mark whitwell about some of the mahadevi mantras we had chanted, where they came from, how he had come by them. this is how we got onto the subject of krishnamarcharya, who chanted such mantras for as much as three hours a day and apparently felt a personal devotion to the mahadevi in the form of lakshmi. this surprised me somewhat because it is often said that krishnamarcharya had a famous ancestor who a well-known saint devoted to vishnu. not that one would necessarily determine the other, of course. it's just a curious factoid.

as i have said before, yoga itself is nearly empty of any religious content. particular deities or the concepts they represent are at best footnotes to the overall practice and philosophy. it's just interesting to learn more about the roots of the yoga we all practice; and certainly the majority of the 16-18 million americans who now pratice yoga have little if any knowledge of krishnamarcharya or the general history of yoga.

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