How I Fell in Love with Yoga

My love for yoga began 27 years ago in college. I was attending a large public Midwestern university and as a PE elective I took yoga. It was held during the Spring semester when everything begins to thaw and on days when the sun is shining, 50 degrees warms you to your bones and you are filled with the kind of hope for warmer days that only Midwestern springs can bring. Sometimes our teacher would take us outside to practice. Something about lying in the grass in savasana under the Spring sun, allowed the armor built up over 20 winters in the windy city begin to melt away. By the time I graduated, I knew I wanted to make this a part of my life.

Not long after graduation, I found the Temple of Kriya Yoga. It was a beautiful Brownstone in the heart of Logan Square, a historic Chicago neighborhood that came to be my home soon after. On Sundays, I would go to the Temple for noon meditation. Inside the Temple was a beautiful refuge from the city. It had the quiet, peaceful reverence I felt in Catholic church as a child. Listening to Kriyananda, it seemed like the secrets of the universe were being directly transmitted. Kriyananda had the perfect mix of grounded Tauran energy, humility, and humor that made every story he shared relatable. I wrote down everything he said and hung on his every word. I knew it was a privilege to sit at the feet of a man whose Param Guru was Yogananda. The practical lessons for living Kriyananda shared from the sacred texts like the Yoga Sutras and the Bhagavad Gita somehow resonated with me thousands of years after they were written. The guidance Kriyananda provided from the texts applied to the struggles I was facing in my life. This was definitely not the health club yoga everyone thought yoga was. This yoga spoke to my soul. I knew I wanted to learn more.