David, meanwhile, was pleasantly surprised by Audio Letter. Sharon's lyrics, some in Sanskrit, were like mystical riddles: "Freedom is a psychokinetic skill." When Sharon and the guitar player, Sue Ann Harkey, moved to New York, David began playing with Audio Letter, too.

Soon neighborhood jazz musicians such as drummer Denis Charles and trumpeter Don Cherry began showing up to jam at Sharon and Sue Ann's apartment on East 7th Street. Charles and Cherry played on Audio Letter's 1988 album, It Is This, It Is Not This.

Sharon was still in a lot of pain though. When she went to a doctor, he diagnosed a broken vertebra and recommended surgery to fuse it. Tara gently urged Sharon to try yoga, explaining that yoga had helped her regain mobility after she had broken her pelvis in a car accident. Sharon was afraid at first, because the yoga postures were painful for her, but she trusted Tara, who was a very sensitive teacher.

Yoga's mysticism intrigued David, too, and, at thirty-four, he wanted to stave off the aches and pains of growing older. As he investigated yoga he realized that it was a physically challenging, deeply mystical practice with an intellectually advanced philosophical base.

Sharon and David tried different yoga teachers in New York but were frustrated with the focus on physical exercise and the exclusion of the spiritual and philosophical aspects of yoga. Meanwhile, they had begun incorporating asana, pranayama, and yogic teachings into dance and musical performances, which they performed everywhere, from vacant lots in the East Village to downtown clubs. They actually began teaching the audience Sanksrit chants and simple asanas.

Knowing that Sharon and David practiced yoga, friends in the audience began asking them to teach. Sharon and David brought the same elements from their performances into the yoga classes they began teaching: music, Sanskrit, yogic scriptures, and an open desire to connect with the sacred.

Feeling that they needed to learn more if they were really going to teach, Sharon and David decided to go to India.

We spent four months in India in 1986, earning teaching certificates the first month from the Sivananda organization. We were both excited about the ancient texts, like Patanjali's Yoga Sutras, which seemed to us to be vibrating with meaning for modern life.

After leaving the Sivananda program we traveled north on an overnight train to visit Swami Nirmalanda, "the Anarchist Swami." Sharon had been corresponding with him from New York. He and other amazing teachers we met in India encouraged us to pursue our vision of a modern yoga method based on the ancient traditions. Above all, they confirmed our growing sense that a yoga based on India's ancient scriptures could bring spiritual substance into the Western lifestyle of shallow materiality.

We opened the first Jivamukti Yoga Center in a creative hot spot, in Manhattan on 2nd Avenue and 9th Street (down the street from Saint Mark's Church, where great neighborhood poets like Allen Ginsberg read). We were inspired not only by our teachers in India but also by our friends, the tattooed, pierced, blue- and green-haired nonconformist artists, poets, and musicians who lived in our neighborhood. We remembered how the Beatles had come back from India and made the colors, sights, and sounds of India so hip that they had soaked into Western culture. We wanted to create a place that would turn everyone on like that to the richness of yoga.

What didn't turn us on were the white walls and potted plants of the other yoga centers we visited in New York. So we painted the walls all kinds of beautiful colors, put up pictures of Indian deities, and rolled out huge Oriental rugs on the floor. We hung pictures of our inspirations and gurus over the altars, everyone from Swami Sivananda to our first teacher, Tara, to Saint Teresa of Avila and Glinda the Good Witch. And we played all kinds of spiritually uplifting music, from Bhagavan Das to Van Morrison to the Indian-jazz fusion of Bill Laswell.

Some people might consider it heresy to have Mother Mary share

During the 1970s, the writer Ken Kesey journeyed to Egypt. He reported back to America via installments in Rolling Stone magazine describing his trip and his investigation into the Egyptian mysteries. In the last installment, Kesey reported that the ancient Egyptian teachings were alive and well, due to the disinterest of modern Egyptians.

an altar with Hindu deities. Well, yoga was a heresy from the start because it put power into the hands of the people, not priests. Yoga philosophy says: You are the direct line to God. At Jivamukti we carry this idea further; we seek to diminish the divisions between religions by looking for their essential commonality. For example, you can find the essential nature of the Goddess in Mother Mary, Glinda the Good Witch, Isis, and the Hindu goddess Laxmi. They all represent her bountiful, merciful force.

When we started the Center we went to some meetings with other yoga teachers and, to be honest, they thought we were a little silly. They said things like, "Oh you're going to go bankrupt within a year. You can't put up those pictures from India. You can't paint the walls all those weird colors." And they warned us, above all, "You can't talk about God."

We saw, both in New York and in India, yoga teachers who were very concerned with keeping their students for financial and egocentric reasons, sometimes even prohibiting their students from studying elsewhere. In India we saw classes filled with small talk and gossip and tea breaks. We saw teachers of yoga classes for children beat their students with sticks. Few teachers based their classes on the yogic scriptures. In the States, the teachers either weren't aware of the scriptures or didn't find them relevant, and in India, many teachers considered them archaic.

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Copyright © 2002 by Sharon Gannon and David Life.

Tags: Yoga