5) My first Yoga Inspiration : Sri Krishnamacharya

Even though I have been involved as a teacher /student with the Sivananda System of Classical Hatha Yoga ( founder Swami Vishnu devananda )  right from 1997 , my first Yoga inspiration was not Swami Vishnu devananda but Sri Krishnamacharya . I have never met Sri Krishnamacharya but used to see his pictures in many local magazines doing amazing asanas even at his old age . During those time I was not motivated in to yoga much .But there was once a special edition of a local magazine in Tamil language which was in the form of a question and answer session by Sri Krishnamacharya's son Sri Desikachar ( who founded KYM ) and there in he described the origins of yoga , various health and spiritual benefits of yoga , what makes Sri Krishnamacharya so special and why is yoga so popular these days and other related questions .Since that book had a vast variety of questions from many common people ,I felt as though those were the questions I wanted to ask for which Sri Desikarchar's answers were really excellent and motivating . 

Some of the things I found motivating in that book are :

1) How Sri Krishnamacharya  cured the 20 year insomnia problem of an English women in just one session of yoga .

2) How J Krishnamurti came to learn yoga from Desikachar and how much respect  J Krishnamurti gave him inspite of the fact that J Krishnamurti was already a world famous spiritual teacher .

3) How Yoga therapy under Sri Desikachar's guidance  helped one famous sports person in Chennai who was affected by a wrong medical treatment to develop self confidence and start facing life positively inspite of the fact that wrong treatment crippled him from playing competitive sports again .

4) Most motivating for me was Sri Krishnamacharya's daily yoga sadhana in spite of his old age  and Sri Desikachar had mentioned that Krishnamacharya used to get up early morning before 3 a.m and do his own yoga sadahana first and also his morning worship to the Gods and finish them before people got up .This was very motivating for me as Krishnamacharya's house was hardly 2-3 km from my house and yet he was doing this daily Yoga sadhana inspite of his old age and inspite of being a family man with wife ,kids and grand kids  . So I thought that to be a Yogi one need not run to Himalaya's but that one can very well practice yoga sadahana being in the city and this was what got me hooked on me to start trying Yoga . So I would say that Sri Krishnamacharya was my first Yoga inspiration but I could never meet him personally as by the time I got really interested in yoga i.e in 1997 he was no longer alive and fate pushed me to learn yoga from the Sivananda Yoga Vedanta Centre in Chennai and that was one of the biggest blessings in my life as it turned me from a Yoga practitioner to a yoga teacher to a person who did a Yoga TV show .Though Sri Krishnamacharya was my first Yoga inspiration , it was Swami Vishnu devananda ( founder Sivananda Yoga Vedanta Centre ) who was my main guiding force for all the Yoga sadahana and Yoga teaching I did so far .More about that later in another post .