Eddie Stern: One World Yogis
An Interview with Eddie Stern: One World Yogis
Eddie Stern is one of the city’s most well-known yoga instructors in New York City. He studied Ashtanga Yoga, chanting, philosophy and ritual under Sri K. Pattabhi Jois, of Mysore, from 1991-2009, and is the founder of the Broome Street Ganesha Temple; co-publishes Namarupa, Categories of Indian Thought, a Hindu art and philosophy magazine; and runs the Urban Yogis project that brings yoga and meditation to young adults and youth in disadvantaged and at-risk-to-violence communities in NYC, with his collaborator, Deepak Chopra. His students include Gwyneth Paltrow, Madonna, Kenny Scharf, Chris Martin, Willem Dafoe & Mike D. He has published several books on Pattabhi Jois and Ashtanga Yoga, including a translation of Pattabhi Jois’s 1960 treatise, Yoga Mala. He continues to study with Pattabhi Jois’s grandson and successor, R. Sharath Jois. He can be found teaching at his newest NY studio, Brooklyn Yoga. brooklynyogaclub.com
Interview with Eddie Stern
OMTIMES: Can you tell us about the Ashtanga Yoga tradition?
Eddie Stern: Ashtanga Yoga is, at its root, a practice of internal purification. My Guru, Sri K Pattabhi Jois, had a particular way of teaching yoga that he learned from his teacher, Sri Krishnamacharya, in the early 1900’s. The understanding of the early yoga masters was that yoga postures should be practiced for the purpose of strengthening and purifying the body, nervous system and mind so that the practitioner could experience consciousness as distinct from everything that changes.
His teachings stemmed from the philosophical tradition of the Sage Patanjali. Patanjali, in his text the Yoga Sutras, basically discusses the relationship between consciousness and the mind, and how they get mixed together. The mind, according to Patanjali, is a field that holds the content of thought, memories, and emotions, and consciousness somehow gets mixed into this field. Through the yogic practices, consciousness and mind are seen as distinct, they are unmixed as it were, which leads to inner freedom, or liberation. The asana-based practice that Pattabhi Jois taught is linked to Patanjali’s ideas about purification. He used linkage of breath and movement to create internal heat, a technique called vinyasa. The internal heat purifies the internal organs, and brings a deep level of focus to the mind. Since Pattabhi Jois, and later his Guru’s son, TKV Desikachar, introduced the technique of vinyasa to the West, it has turned into its own distinct brand of yoga. However, its origins are in the teachings of these great teachers from India, who understood vinyasa as a technique, not a style.
