Hug!

Beautiful images of Indra Devi hugging a tree and Krishnamacharya with Yvonne Millerand (thanks Christophe!) sent to me by Ryan Leier.
Thanks Ryan!

Desmond Dunne

Found this little gem in a second hand book shop on my way to class yesterday!

Breath Of The Gods

I went to see Breath Of The Gods at the ICA this afternoon. It documents Krishnamacharya's life and teachings as seen through the eyes of the film's director Jan Schmidt-Garre on his search for 'authentic' yoga. His journey leads him from the legendary students and relatives of Krishnamacharya's to the source of modern yoga, at the palace of the Maharaja of Mysore.

It is beautifully shot and worth seeing, if just for the archive footage. I enjoyed the taste of someone elses journey into the vast and varied church of yoga and I came a way with a feeling that we are all, even the most well respected of teachers and Gurus, only human.

"It seemed to me now that a lot of people were invested in defining yoga as one particular thing. But for me, to experience yoga was to encounter its very slipperiness. This was the beauty of it. With so many overlaps and falsehoods, yoga's most defining characteristic was not its legitimacy but the very uncertainty of its paternity. Yoga was something we assimilated into our contradictory, multilayered world, something that was never wholly Indian, never one particular anything. "

-- Elizabeth Kadetsky, First There Is A Mountain