Tirumalai Krishnamacharya

In 1928, when Tirumalai Krishnamacharya left the Himalayas after a long, eight-year apprenticeship with his teacher, Yoga was a dying art practiced by a handful of ascetics living on the fringes of society. But this was soon to change. For the next sixty-one years, Krishnamacharya shared his knowledge of Yoga as a holistic healing discipline with thousands in his own country and with many others who came to study with him from Europe and America.

He started a quiet revolution that revitalized Yoga for the modern age and produced some of the most influential Yoga masters of our time, all of whom were his students: Indra Devi, TKV Desikachar, BKS Iyengar, and Pattabhi Jois.

Krishnamacharya was the only master in the modern era to have been trained in the complete art of Yoga Cikitsa. Helping people to heal through Yoga was his life’s work, and he devoted himself to this work for seventy years. His work is now carried on through the efforts of TKV Desikachar and the KYM, a renowned centre for Yoga Therapy practice, education, and research for thirty years.

If Yoga Therapy is the future of Yoga, then the future has been here for a long time, waiting for us to be ready to learn. The legacy of Krishnamacharya - our legacy as students and teachers of Yoga - is not a style of Yoga, it is Yoga - past, present, and future.