Leslie chats with one of his oldest yoga friends, Gary Kraftsow about their personal and mutual origins in yoga therapeutics.

Gary is one of the key students of T.K.V. Desikachar and has been a true pioneer in the development of yoga education in the West. This free-ranging discussion covers a variety of topics about the origins, methods and history of yoga as a therapeutic practice and profession.

American Viniyoga Institute (viniyoga.com), founded by Gary at the behest of his teacher, T.K.V. Desikachar

Gary's latest, up-to-date offerings via The Shift Network

Speaker B: About towards the beginning of this discussion.

Speaker A: How he really became my entree into the world of desiccachar and his teachings. Our previous two guests, Libby and Robin, also have studied in this tradition. Gary has been studying longer than just about anyone I know, and he has been a pioneer in the field of yoga therapy and yoga education, as well as playing a major part in the original discussion of standards for training for yoga therapists. And all of that gets covered, plus so much more in this discussion. So without further ado, here is my.

Speaker B: Talk with Gary Kraftso. I hit the record button. So now we're not going to say anything that we would consider to be off the record. And Lord knows, considering we've known each other for so long, there could be a lot of that if we wanted to.

Speaker C: We were co teaching with the Big Island. Not Maui, but the Big Island. We were co teaching along with Dr. Vassantlad, Amanda Morningstar, and I think his name was Dan Houghton. I forgot a massage guy. And we all just appeared at this retreat center on the Big Island, and me and David just connected. And it was like, oh, my God. We were up all night talking.

Speaker B: First time meeting David, considering your background, must have been kind of a mutual brain dump.

Speaker C: Yeah, I remember what he told me. He was in Mokulao Barnacidas, which is a bookstore. He reached up and a book fell on his head.

Speaker B: Yes, I heard that.

Speaker C: Some story like that. And there was something about the samaved, I think. I don't remember very well any story, but that's how he got no, that was me. That's how I had heard of David. Sorry. I was in multi loud Barnazi Das in Madras, which now is called tonight, obviously. And I reached up for a book, and Salmobated book fell in my head and not hurt me or anything, but just like, fell down, and it was David's book, and that's how I heard them. And then I returned from India, and I was scheduled to teach from the Big Island, and that's when I met him.

Speaker B: And that would have been what, early in 87.

Speaker C: I think. I was in India. I'm old now. So now you're challenging my age related memory loss. But no, it was before that because I was in India. I can't be sure. I could check. I have to do that.

Speaker B: And that would make sense because it takes a while for the thing to get written and then published, and then for me to read it and then to show up. Tracking you down in 87, and then in 88, of course, is when I met Deskar for the first time at Colgate, because you're the one that told me that's where I am.

Speaker C: And the rest is history.

Speaker B: Yes, but just to back up a bit, because some of the people who are listening to this may, believe it or not, never have heard of you, which is inexcusable. But just for those folks, and to just clarify a little bit where I'd like to take the conversation, we all have origin stories that we've told over and over again from various perspectives into different audiences. But since this is clinical corner and the focus is on the kind of work that folks like you and I do and other people like us who are interested in this sort of thing, the way I'd like to sort of get into your origin story is just to ask at what point? Well, let's put it this way. There's a lot of words that we could use to describe what folks like us do at various times and in various capacities. Words like yoga practitioner, yoga teacher, and variants of that educator, instructor. In your case, also scholar is an appropriate title.

Speaker C: And you're studiously avoiding the word therapist, I see.

Speaker B: Well, I'm getting there, but that's just you knowing my history. But another word that could apply to us, which is relevant is performer, because we're up on a stage a lot in front of people and not just showing or demonstrating, I think, for example, of whose entire teaching I started as a performer, really? Of Asana. Right. So all of these things could apply to us at some point. But words like therapist, which I'm obviously getting to, or clinician. At what point in your history, your evolution, did you start to think of yourself that way?

Speaker B: Thinking of yourself as a clinician?

Speaker C: I didn't think of myself as a clinician until I don't even know that I think of myself as a clinician. Help me understand the meaning of the word clinician. What do you mean by that okay.

Speaker B: So I can actually relate that to because I've asked myself this question as well. And for me, it was the first time I was left alone in a room with someone with the door closed, and I was expected to help them with whatever skills I had at my disposal. And I distinctly remember a feeling of panic washing over me because I was like, oh my goodness, this is like a real person with a genuine problem. And they put me in here to help them, and what the hell do I do? And there was something from within myself that I had to pull out of myself in order to express a certain amount of confidence. Whether it was well founded or not is irrelevant. I had to project it to that person in that situation.

Speaker B: Now, at what point in that timeline did you decide to go and get the massage license? Because I know that was another I forgot about that.

Speaker B: Yeah, the entire profession back then was actively lobbying. Lobbying, that's the word government to do that, because there was that problem with massage and its association with prostitution, and it was actually being regulated by the local police departments who would check you out to make sure that you weren't doing happy endings or whatever.

Speaker C: So that woman who ran that massage school actually ended up becoming a student of mine. And so the chiropractor said, you need a massage less. And she said, I can help you learn to do that. You have to study. You have to go to Honolulu and take the test. And I did it. I got that. But I never practiced. I got enough experience to be able to pass a written and live test, and I flew to Honolulu for that. But I never used the license for massage. We would build neuromuscular education or we would use certain codes. That okay. So you know it. And that's how that happened. It was interesting too, Leslie, because I came to go as a student of religion, but my earliest first work were people with structural problems. But then it kind of evolved after that pretty quickly to helping people with their energy, with their sleep, with pain management, and then with anxiety, and it just evolved very quickly. So I went back to India to get more technical training in yoga therapy.

Speaker B: See, now that's interesting. So maybe this word clinician isn't something that has been part of your general way of self identifying.

Speaker C: Never. I never thought of my I understand the word, and I don't think it's an inappropriate word, but it's not part of the word that I use. My teachers use the word chikitza and therapy. So I thought of myself as a yoga teacher and a yoga therapist. No, my self concept first is I'm a yoga student and a yoga practitioner, but then I'm a yoga teacher and a therapist. I understand that is what you mean by I apologize. I'm drinking coffee, and I do this intermittent fasting, so I don't need until.

Speaker B: Like, once yeah, I've been doing that. Oh, the dog is still there. Yeah, go ahead.

Speaker C: Just 1 second. All right.

Speaker B: And that reminds me, I usually start all the interviews this way just to sort of geolocate you. I'm in New York. Most people know that by now. And you are where, exactly?

Speaker B: Yes, and I have visited you there. It's a lovely home, and you have a whole set up now. And the thing that was occurring to me before I hit record when we were chatting is the last time I was there visiting with you, you were saying, Well, I don't know if I even want to renew my passport. And then you did, and then the entire world stopped traveling.

Speaker C: Yes, indeed.

Speaker B: For the 80th birthday celebration for Desiccatchar, what would have been his 80th birthday. And I was thinking, is that the last time I actually saw you in person? I know the last time we had a Zoom was when I put that on the Rama Jotie Vernon thing together. After Rama passed.

Speaker C: Interesting journey has been at these 32 years.

Speaker B: Yeah. But the thing I was working my way up to is you've got a whole set up now where you can teach from where you are, like many of us have been doing on Zoom, and you've been conducting trainings and workshops and interviews from the comfort of your own property.

Speaker B: And in the more group oriented things, the degree of agency that each student has using this medium exceeds in some ways what you can do in a live situation in terms of whether you want to be seen or not, whether your camera is on or not, or whether you're even present or not. It's a lot easier to hit that red button down there than it is to roll up your mat and walk out of a room with a teacher. It's a lot of hootspa to do that, and not many people do, even though they may desperately want to escape for whatever reason. So here you got the red button, right?

Speaker C: And then you can see the recording on your own time.

Speaker B: Yeah. You can hit replay or pause or fast forward. It's really very versatile in many ways, and obviously, there is nothing that could ever replace being in the physical presence of each other and your teacher. It's true.

Speaker C: Yeah. There's an energetic thing, and I know there are a lot of people that went through a program that just completed with me, and they're like they're really hoping that for the clinical applications part of our program, that we can do it in person. And I'm like, oh, yeah, I wondering we just don't know. It seems like we're back in an uptick again a little bit. Fine.

Speaker B: Yeah. But you've always had a worldwide stage, but with Zoom and its capabilities, time zones notwithstanding, it really quite literally is a worldwide audience for these things that you do and that folks like us in general do. And I was wondering, as we were talking, you have some very long term students that you are remaining connected with. How far back do some of these relationships go that you still I have.

Speaker B: Well, I do, but our audience doesn't. So that was just a little bomb you dropped there. Why don't you just tell them what was happening back then?

Speaker B: It increases your overhead significantly. Yes.

Speaker C: But people like I teach through zoom. In Europe, I just was interviewed with a big group in India. It just spreads by word of mouth. And my focus is really the work, not self promotion. And that's why, like you said, a lot of people don't know about what we're doing because we're not popular like some of them were.

Speaker B: Sure. And a lot of people who may be familiar with your name probably don't know what you were dealing with back in four, because your whole life blew up, really around that time, didn't it? I remember you talking about how the teachings were so deeply embedded in your brain and your psyche that you were chanting sutras in recovery.

Speaker C: Well, that particular story, Leslie, is in the 8th. When I was in graduate school, I was in graduate school studying new Sanskrit in University of California, Santa Barbara, and I was in a landslide, and I was knocked unconscious, and I was in the IC unit, and friends came to see me, and the nurses said I was making these weird sounds. And he said, you were chanting up sutras in the IC.

Speaker B: Am I conflating that story with the brain surgery?

Speaker B: Okay. Of course, I have two brain injury stories there. My apologies.

Speaker B: And by the way, for those of you, the other mantra that you mentioned, mohammed Trunjaya, that's the many people may have heard at Ashrams or various other places where things are chanted in Sanskrit.

Speaker C: I use that many hours a day, every day for the week leading up to my first big brain surgery. That was the big one. That was the traumatic one. I couldn't stand for two weeks afterwards. And my vision was totally I had complete double vision, so the whole world looked different. And that's when the punch of Maya meditation came. I couldn't check it out loud. I could do it all mentally because of the pressure in my brain from that surgery. But beforehand it was Mutton rick Zengaya before the surgery.

Speaker B: Yeah. Well, it's a hell of a story. And of course, in New York, we're hearing the news and that's the same mantra we were chanting on our end.

Speaker C: I was grateful for the love and support from you guys and people that I knew from around the world.

Speaker B: Yeah, it was touching us over for a while. There was no certainty that you would make it out of that.

Speaker C: And I had never really hardly been sick. I had mono at one point when I was otherwise. I was about 48 and I really was very healthy and never had any sickness. And that was right at the point where my 20 year marriage was ending as well. So, yes, you're right.

Speaker B: That's kind of what I meant. I was giving you the opportunity to talk about it, but I wasn't going to bring it up.

Speaker C: Well, what happened was we love each other still, but we knew that we had a son and we knew our relationship really was not fulfilling, either of us. And so one of the things that one of my students showed up for a program and I'm sorry, I'm in brain surgery. So she came to Honolulu and she said, when I was coming out and I can't remember this, she said, when I came out of brain surgery, I was pointing up. You can't see that I was lying on my back, pointing straight up. I don't know whether that means I was some reincarnated yogi standing on 1ft with his finger pointing to God. And then she told me afterwards, she said, Gary, what are you learning? And she said, I raised my hand like this and went like that.

Speaker B: So from a clenched fist to an open fist.

Speaker C: Letting go.

Speaker B: This is audio only for the first part, so I have to narrow it.

Speaker C: That's all right. I'm letting go. I'm opening my hand, letting go. What I understood was all my ideas about what I should and shouldn't do dissolved. And what was important was what's most important, what was most precious to me, and that was my son and this new woman that I had met who I'm still living with 20 years later. And my fear about what will the community think if I don't maintain a dysfunctional marriage, all that disappears. And me and my wife, my ex wife, we harmoniously separated, and everything was fine with that. But for me, it was like a big letting go of all my ideas about how things should be and then just what emerges, what was most precious and important for me.

Speaker B: Yeah, well, something like that does help you sort out your priorities pretty quickly.

Speaker C: Yeah, I wouldn't wish it on anyone, but I'll tell you this. For me, it changed my work as well, because I don't feel like I knew something different. But when I was then after subsequent to that experience, I had much more people coming to me who had life threatening and even terminal conditions, and I was more able to be present with them in a way that was meaningful and helpful for them. Because going through that level of near death, what can I say? Experience shifted something in me, I guess.

Speaker B: Did it challenge or reaffirm any convictions or beliefs that you had at the time about the nature of the soul and its permanence or impermanence beyond a single life in a single body?

Speaker C: That's a really interesting question. I mean, you've heard me say that early on. I was young and a religious study student, and there weren't many of my colleagues who evidently I found out later. That's what I talked to. But he told me that the whole purpose of this preparation for the moment of death. And I was in my early 20s. My surgery was at 48, was my first brain surgery. So I had already known about impermanence. And then the teaching is, of course, that who we truly are is unchanging, and it transcends life and death, birth and death. So I have some kind of faith in that. The brain surgery didn't. It just deepened my sense of presence, I guess. I don't know what else to say about it. I take strength from these teachings. I would say. The word faithing word in the modern world, but not in belief, but a feeling of like, that there's something that's beyond what I can understand. It gives me strength in the face of the challenges that continue in life, including the global situation that we're in now.

Speaker B: Sure. I'm sorry that I almost interrupt you there, but sorry. When you say the word faith in English, I'm assuming the one that's echoing inside your head is shreddha.

Speaker C: Yes, definitely shreddha.

Speaker B: And is faith the best word we have in English to express that idea? I'm asking for a specific reason. It has to do with my history with the desert, actually.

Speaker C: Yeah. There's a false etymology of shanta, which is support. And so shanta is a place where you feel refuge, where your heart finds support. It's very different than belief, which is ideas and formulas. Faith, this experience of what I call the heart mind, but it's a feeling of connection or to something that your mind can bigger than your mind or you can't really fully understand or go to. But it's a feeling of sort of I don't know, I think the word refuge, confidence, is one of the Sasquatch translations of the warshraw. You feel confident, you feel support. As I said, and you smiled when I said it's a difficult word to talk about now because people confuse faith and belief. And then belief is in formulas and ideas that can become dogma. And by the way, dogma is not a bad word in its theological context. Belief expresses faith through language. But faith is an experience of the heart.

Speaker B: Yeah, but it also has the connotation of belief in the absence of or even the possibility of proof. And it becomes problematic in that shading of its use.

Speaker C: I would maybe slightly disagree. You can have faith and then accept the beliefs of the lineage or the dogma. And I don't mean dogma negatively. I mean, dogma has a negative connotation. But the teachings, the philosophy that is associated with the lineages, that's connected to the source that you have faith in. But I think that those things are belief, belief in something that you don't have proof. But faith is, I think, of faith. And actually, I have an academic training in religious studies, so I think faith, the way I understand faith, it's not belief. It's a feeling of the heart. It's a connection to support, a sense of refuge. And it doesn't require proof. It's not an intellectual thing.

Speaker B: So the in Shadha as support is something you do relate to.

Speaker C: Yeah.

Speaker C: I do remember.

Speaker B: Yeah and I'll never forget and he had been talking about Shadha in that session, and he asked me what I thought it was.

Speaker C: That sounds like him.

Speaker B: Yes. And I said that I thought it was something like a willingness to surrender to Dharma.

Speaker C: Beautiful.

Speaker B: That touched him somehow.

Speaker C: Yeah, it's very beautiful. I mean, we could have a longer discussion about what surrender is and what Darma is as well. But the idea of recognizing Dharma and letting that Dharma guide your life, which means surrendering your own other impulses, dysfunctional habits, that, to me is a beautiful definition of faith.

Speaker B: But there's that same root again.

Speaker C: There isn't support.

Speaker B: Yeah, from Shodha and Dharma, I think.

Speaker C: You know, I just want to share this with you because we're talking about faith. That one of my great teachers in life, and I've been blessed to have several. Not just Eskashar, of course, and also Christian Michaellia, who I didn't have much of a relationship with, but he said very specific things to me, one of which was in relation to Ishfar pranidana, and that he told me Krishna directly to me that Viveka Kyati. Perusha Kyati ishwar Kati. Same thing.

Speaker B: Okay, you don't have to translate that.

Speaker C: For the rest of the world. So Viveka is discernment. The old translation we used to use is discrimination, but that word has other connotations that therefore make it confusing in the modern context. But the ability to see what is true and what is real, the dawning mean like sunrises, and the light dispels the darkness. So the realization of what's real or true, that's Viveka kaki. That's a golan yoga parisha. Kathy is the realization of our true self as the unchanging source of pure awareness that transcends time and space, that doesn't die, et cetera. In the yoga community, that's self realization. You can call Perusha Kathy. Self realization. Eastwood kathy means God realization in the same way that Cathy is the same word, that the light dispels the darkness. So when you realize what's true, you realize who you are and you see God. That's what Christian Matari told me. And you also know I want to just add to this point because it just came to me now, but I was talking earlier about I've had the blessings of many great teachers. One of them was Raymondo Panicar. You may have heard me talk about Panic car he's gone now. He was a Roman Catholic priest. He was half Indian. He had PhDs in chemistry and theology and philosophy and wrote books in original and eight languages. An extraordinary mind. And he said that faith, he understood faith. He explained faith that's the connection with that which is beyond the mind and that the function of faith is to help us connect with what transcends our mind and our ability to understand or something that we haven't yet fully awakened to, that we have faith in, like you said. Well, we don't have proof, but we have that faith. And he said beliefs are an expression of faith that's embodied in ideas and formulas and beliefs convey faith. And faith can find expression and belief, but they're different. Anyway, this is interesting.

Speaker B: Well, that brings me around to something more clinically oriented. As I was doing the research before starting this chat, I think it was a video I was looking at. You made a comparison between the Vedas as Shruti revealed teachings that were literally heard by the Rishis that originated somewhere else, somewhere divine. And you made a connection between that as it exists in our world of yoga and in the medical world. For them, their Shruti is evidence.

Speaker C: Very different, isn't it?

Speaker B: Which is kind of the opposite of faith. And that's related to this discussion that we're having. And yet you have had in your career an opportunity to straddle that conversation by being part of a team that designed some studies about yoga and back pain. Studies that were published in the Annals of Internal Medicine that actually did provide sufficient evidence for people in the medical world to be confident in referring people to yoga for therapy. How's that for a segue?

Speaker C: Well, yeah, that's a great one. Although let me clarify one thing. When I equated shirti and faith in the revealed word to AMA, it wasn't in relation to evidence. That is, people and especially the uneducated. But even medical doctors have faith in a system that they don't understand. They have faith in it. They believe. The doctors know. As we go deeper into it, we know that evidencebased is also sort of a misnomer. And there's plenty of things that are so called evidence based that are in fact not evidence based or that far misinformation. Let's not get into that which we now see in the current coveted world. There's lots of misinformation and so we can't really anymore have faith in what I was talking about back then is people turn to the AMA in medicine and they have faith in that, even though they don't really understand it.

Speaker B: Well, that's not what you were talking about in the thing that I was you were talking about doctors having confidence in referring people to yoga because there is now some published evidence.

Speaker C: There you go. They don't know the yoga, but they have faith in the journal that says there is this is real, right? So they have faith in someone else telling them that's agama, as you know, it sounds good. We know because we trust that valid source of knowledge. That's kind of the idea of agama. But yeah, because this is real and yoga is real and the therapeutic potential is important and real and we need it in this current healthcare crisis that we've been in for the past 50 years or maybe always. That is people gaining more skills and tools to manage their own condition because there's so much that we can do for ourselves. So many of the conditions that glood our hospitals that people are suffering from are lifestyle related. And if people make some changes in their own life and take some things away that they're doing or eating or habits and add some things that are simple, they can do with movement and breathing and changing their diet and meditating and stress management, a lot of the problems people have can be managed if not even healed. Some can be healed.

Speaker B: Absolutely. And I think the thing I love most about Desiccate Char's way of presenting all of this was that when all of those things that you just mentioned are presented to somebody in the context of a caring, attentive relationship with another human being, that's the foundation that makes it all work. Because as you know, he would often say, well, if the relationship is good and your technique is maybe not the best, you'll still get good results, whereas you can have the best technique in the world. But if you're no good at relationship, you're not going to get great results.

Speaker C: Well, let's say you may or may not because part of it is even if you have a great technique and bad relationship, then you may not be able to inspire your client to do their own practice. So something happens through the relationship and something happens through their practice. And we've had this discussion, you and I didn't mean to say anything clinically, but all true yoga, let me say it all true yoga and yoga therapy are practice based. They're empowering individuals to do something for themselves. Yoga therapy isn't what happens in a session between a therapist and a client. Although something happens in the session that's essential to the therapeutic process working and that's the importance of relationship. But then the client is given tools that they apply for themselves to help them manage and transform their own condition.

Speaker B: Sure. And if nothing else, they're given an experience of what's possible and a way to replicate that experience.

Speaker C: Yeah. And then if you have a good relationship, then you have faith in let's come back to that word. Like I had faith. I came back from years in India and landed on Maui as a young man in the heyday of Ashanda yoga. And so all the in people were doing Ashanda yoga.

Speaker B: That was a real moment historically for the listeners who aren't necessarily aware of some of that history. We're really talking about David Williams in his community that was centered in Maui. Not just in Maui like where you were in Maui, because there's different sides to the island. You were on that side of it. And that was an early hotbed of interest and practice of the Yeshanga yoga as taught by Patavi Joyce in my store. And I remember you saying not too tongue in cheek, but in all seriousness that really fueled your practice in large part for quite well.

Speaker C: Yeah. So let me just finish what I was to get to that point about Spain, I'm like 20 something, and so all these really beautiful men and women and young people that I wanted to make connections with. But the Ashanti was I could just see that it was a confusion. Sorry, we can talk about that later. I just could see the problems with it. With it.

Speaker B: You're not saying anything that most senior, stronger people haven't been saying.

Speaker C: Yeah. So in any case, my point is I had faith and we're talking about this part of the conversation started about relationship. I had faith in desktop. I had faith in my teacher and his teacher and the power of the lineage that I received. And that helped me not lose my center in trying to get into the InCommunity, you know what I mean? That relationship gave me the strength to stay grounded in what I knew to be right or true and then coming back to what you said. Then of course, over time, the Ashton Kiyoki found out about me because David and I were friendly, had a good relationship, and he knew about my relationship with Escaria and Priesthaya, and he never met Priestham church, etc and etc. But slowly, his students and people in the astonished community started to seek me out because they have can you help me with this? Can you help me with that? From a large percentage of them were structural injuries, but there were some who said, I can't do this posture and the jump throughs aren't helping me. Can you help me prepare my body to get there? So I helped Ashanti Alice, who wanted to go deeper into Washanka, but the bigger clientele were Ashanti Alice who were injured. And the truth is that I was able to, over years, buy land and build a house on Maui from income earned by injured.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker C: That was how much you were fishing.

Speaker B: No, but the other thing, the thing that popped in my head is this alternate universe in which, let's say that faith in what you had gotten from Desktop, the connection with him wasn't really that strong at that point. And you got sucked into the Ashtanda universe at that point. You the former gymnast yeah. Who could have whipped through AshtonA Primary without too much trouble.

Speaker C: I did first series, the first week, second series, the second week, third series, the third week. I said enough.

Speaker B: Right. So that's a gymnast just doing it.

Speaker C: Yeah, I was a gymnast, right?

Speaker B: Yeah. But I'm just picturing the alternative universe where Gary Krasaw becomes one of the leaders of the ashtaga community as that style of practice sweeps the globe.

Speaker C: You know why? Here's. What desk guichar said. Desktop said Gary, you're a Brussels. And he didn't translate that. So it took me a while to figure it out. And then later he had fallen. And then what it really means is that I've been on this yoga path for a lifetime. That's kind of what he said later to me, and you just haven't completed, so you had to come back. He said his words literally were, don't think you know what you know about yoga from what you learned from me.

Speaker B: Brussels like the opposite of a tuku. Where you come back.

Speaker C: Yeah, exactly. I didn't complete. I had to come back. But he's talking about he could see that. In fact, that's why he said to me why I told you that yoga's about preparation for the moment of death in your 20s, because you were already ready for that kind of teaching. And, you know, I told you the last time I saw him after the break, and we didn't see each other, he said, Gary, why are you holding back? Because I was a religious study student, and when I was young, studying with SShr in the seventies and eighties, he said, you need to go study Western medicine. And I said, Why? And he said, Because you're going to be bringing yoga therapy into Western healthcare. And I'm like, what? I'm a really study student. And so then the last time I saw him, which was in Colorado, he said, you should be teaching these inner teachings to your students. And I said, well, you told me I was too young. He said, yeah, that was long ago. You're old now. It's time for you to share these inner teachings. And I don't think that would have ever happened for me with Ashanda Shanda was, to me, just gymnastics.

Speaker B: Right. So we have a few minutes left in this first section here, and you brought it up at the perfect time, because I did have this idea of finishing off this part of the conversation with a few words about the last time both you and I saw our teacher.

Speaker C: Deep breath. Yeah. I remember you coming to me. We were sitting together. You were crying. I mean, I don't know. Crying, but, you know, like, you feel.

Speaker B: Now, like I'm trying not to do right now.

Speaker C: Yeah. And it was shocking to see the level of mental decline. We were just like, oh, my God.

Speaker B: Sure. And you're not alone in that. In other senior students of his had the same kind of problem.

Speaker B: Sure. Yeah. And everyone in the world had to stop using the term Vinnyoga. Except, of course, you.

Speaker C: Well, his father came to him in a dream, you know the story, right? And told him that Gary should have name his business American Vinyoga Institute. He told me that right when I was in India with 16 students. Right after I just branded. I changed from Maui Yoga Therapy to Pacific Institute for Advanced Yoga Studies. Not that I know anything about branding, but that's when I paid the cards and he said, no American video. He said, Father says you must have it. You must have it. So what can I say? He gave it to me.

Speaker C: Yeah, I had brain surgery. So he was asking me about that and giving me some practices and it was just a very sweet connection. And that was the last time there was love, only love.

Speaker B: How fortunate that there was that opportunity for that. And he was still lucid enough to be able to connect with you and have the context for what transpired.

Speaker C: Yeah. And specifically, he avoided any discussion about this other thing that is upsetting. And what was left was the pure yoga. And it's interesting, I think you know that I was with the Tibetans for 20 years.

Speaker B: Yes.

Speaker B: Well, it's on the record, dude. Everyone you're talking to the guy that outed his dementia on Ellis journal. So I caught a lot of **** for that. But that's a whole other story.

Speaker C: There's no doubt that you had deep love and respect for him and gratitude for him, as did I. And I know that my life and I don't want to speak for you, but my whole life has been shaped by what I've learned from him. And so I will be forever grateful to him. And also, I had the good fortune which there's not many of us alive still, they had some kind of connection, which are the good fortune of receiving personalized teachings like this vake a Cathy and Prucenish from him and just their perspective. It's so simple and profound and practical and accessible. When you look at what's out there in yoga in the world today, the approach is accessible.

Speaker B: But access to people who were immersed in it the way Chris Mathia and Desperate Char were is really no longer accessible. The India in which Krishna Chari was educated no longer exists in large crack. The situation in which Desiccachar found himself living with his teacher, that doesn't exist. And so it's up to folks like you.

Speaker C: I mean, you know, where it does exist, I'll say it's not the same, of course, but Pandit Rashmani and his son who runs the Himalayan Institute now, that's as close as I can see.

Speaker B: There's a thread there. Yeah, there's a thread that goes back. But these are increasingly rare in the past, is what I'm saying. Thank goodness you've been able to keep at it all these years. And you have students who are now teachers, who have their own students who are teachers. And that's the padmpada.

Speaker C: Yes. I was going to say Sam Pradaya. Yes. Pamempada. Yeah.

Speaker B: Correct. So I can't think of a better note to end the first section of this talk with Gary Kraft. So I'm a good old yoga buddy for so many years. The premium part of this will be available to subscribers to Breathingproject.com, and you can see the full video of this conversation we just had and what is to come. It's you log in there and you can do it for free for a month. Try it out, see if you like it. And there's a ton of material there.