The film that began everything

The Documentary

For years I practiced a yoga whose home I had only read about. Then I went to Mysore with a camera, and I started asking questions.

What became Mysore Yoga Traditions began as a simple wish, to let the people of Mysore tell the story in their own words. Over many visits I sat with elders, Sanskrit scholars, spiritual leaders, well known āsana teachers, and the Queen of Mysore, and asked each of them what yoga is and where it comes from.

As practitioners outside India, we inherit a great deal of contradictory opinion about what is traditional, how old these practices really are, and where they began. Here those questions are met by the people best placed to answer them. It remains the closest and most intimate look into that community I know of.

The Archive

The conversations never stopped

The film opened a door, and the cameras kept rolling. In the years since, we have gone on recording lectures and interviews with the Sanskrit community of Mysore, the community that formed Śrī Kṛṣṇamācārya, and those recordings have grown into a wide and unusual education.

The scholars speak on the history of yoga in Mysore, on Āyurveda, on the Yoga Sūtras and the Bhagavad Gītā, and on a great deal besides. You are not handed one settled opinion. You hear many learned people, who do not always agree with one another, and you are left free to draw your own conclusions.

There is more

The work continued

The film led to a sequel, Kings and Yogis, to the Mysore Yoga Conference, and to a program of study with the scholars themselves. If the film leaves you wanting to go further, that is where it goes.