I started teaching yoga in 1974 in Colorado, I was living in Winter Park, and I started teaching skiers. At that point I was teaching more of the Sivananda system and just pushing it up a little bit to make it a little more rajasic a little more active, a little more physical. People would come, and feel great, and by the time I left Colorado in 1980 I'd taught pretty much everyone in town - the ski patrol, ski instructors, the bar owners.

Beryl Bender Birch

Categorized in : Winter Teaching Yoga

The experience of yoga is unspeakable. It's the experience of samadhi. It's the experience of connectedness, of oneness, boundlessness, merging with God consciousness... even if it's just for an instant.

Beryl Bender Birch

oneness consciousness yoga

Practice means making an effort to keep your mind steady. Yoga is about learning to pay attention. That's what drives transformation.

Beryl Bender Birch

yoga practice mean

I always tell people, I can't teach you yoga. Nobody can teach you yoga. I can't teach you to teach yoga. All I can do is teach you a set of instructions and if you follow these instructions, hopefully it will lead you to the experience of yoga.

Beryl Bender Birch

yoga instruction people

I really do believe that the bottom line that creates transformation in the individual is the ability to focus your attention in an ever greater and more subtle way, and that follows the whole path of the limbs.

Beryl Bender Birch

focus attention believe

I'm really fascinated by the parallels between quantum theory and the teachings of some of these ancient texts. So many of the things that quantum physicists are talking about today, like non-locality and the observer effect, are things the yogis have been saying for thousands of years.

Beryl Bender Birch

teaching talking years

I really think there's an evolution to the practice and the individual no matter what brings you in, whether it's wine and yoga or chocolate and yoga or surfing and yoga.

Beryl Bender Birch

yoga wine thinking

My sangha, what I seem to attract, are people who have been practicing a long time, they're teaching, they're more serious about their spiritual journey.

Beryl Bender Birch

teaching journey spiritual

I think it's really important to create spiritual revolutionaries.

Beryl Bender Birch

important spiritual thinking

Lots of media people ask me what do you think of yoga in the gyms, and what do you think about this article and what do you think about that, and how about it's so commercial now. I say, look, whatever gets people turned on to it.

Beryl Bender Birch

media yoga thinking

I'm not a rock star, I'm not Seane Corne or Shiva Rea or Rodney Yee or Baron (Baptiste) or John Friend, and thank God, because there's just too much risk of getting hit by flying tomatoes if you stick out that much.

Beryl Bender Birch

rocks flying stars

Separation of mind and body, that's been around since the Greeks.

Beryl Bender Birch

body greek mind