Eddie Stern: One World Yogis
OMTIMES: How long have you been practicing this style of yoga?
Eddie Stern: I started practicing with Guruji in 1991, so it’s been 25 years now. I had been doing Sivananda Yoga for about three to four years before I met him in India.
OMTIMES: And when/where did you begin teaching?
Eddie Stern: I started teaching Sivananda Yoga in 1989, and then stopped teaching it when I began studying with Guruji. I started teaching Ashtanga Yoga in 1993, out of a small room in a Hare Krishna center on St. Mark’s Place in Manhattan, called the Sanctuary. The Sanctuary subsequently moved locations, and is now called the Bhakti Center, which is run by the well-known author and spiritual teacher Radhananath Swami.
OMTIMES: You and your wife have just opened a new studio, Brooklyn Yoga Club. What are you looking forward to bringing to this new space?
Eddie Stern: Our basic idea in Brooklyn is integration. We’ve noticed over the years the bifurcation that can occur between one’s spiritual practices and the world outside of the yoga or meditation studio. A question that very often comes up is, “how can I integrate my love for yoga into the needs of my family, friends, social life, work etc”. Guruji used to say to us, when we asked him about it, “Get up early, practice for one hour, take a shower, go to work!” For him, it was quite simple. So, after 20 plus years of running a yoga studio that was largely focused on yoga practice and social service, we asked the question to ourselves, what would it look like if we tried to build a place that integrated the ideas surrounding yoga and ‘regular’ life into one place? So the Brooklyn Yoga Club is basically our answer to that – it’s an experiment. We don’t really know what the answer is!
What we did do is rent out a townhouse in Brooklyn, and dedicate each floor to things that we feel are essential aspects of our lives. The ground floor is dedicated to practice, where we have a yoga studio and meditation room. The first floor is dedicated to community and study; the café, library and community space are on this floor. The second floor is dedicated to nourishment. On this floor we have a kitchen for cooking classes, a co-located workspace for about half a dozen people, and a small B&B room for visiting yoga students. All of the co-located desk rentals and the B&B room have yoga included in the price. And then the third floor is our residence, where Jocelyne, our daughter, Lili, and I live.
