Interview of Sudhir Tiwari published in Yoga Bridge, the newsletter of the Yoga Association of Alberta, Canada, winter 2018. Interview by Norm Cowley. This interview has been translated into French.
Sudhir Tiwari may have grown up in the world’s oldest yoga institute, but he never intended to follow in his father’s footsteps.
He had other dreams that felt “natural” to him. “My intent was never to pursue a career in yoga,” said Tiwari, the son of well-known pranayama teacher Shri Om Prakash Tiwari, who has been the secretary-general of the Kaivalyadhama Yoga Institute since the 1960s.
“My inclination at that time was engineering,” he explained. “Yoga was just a part of life, so I went to engineering school.”
After he graduated from Bangalore University in India, Tiwari moved to the United States and took his Master of Business Administration (MBA) at St. Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. Eventually, having worked at an executive level in the health and wellness industry in India and the U.S., he moved to Canada in 2000 and worked at General Nutrition Centres (GNC).
Tiwari’s father would have preferred that Sudhir remained at the yoga institute in Lonavala, India, but he allowed his son to follow his own path.
For 20 years, anyway.
“Especially when you’ve grown up in that atmosphere, you know the hardware and the software, you know the soul of the institute or the messages or what the message of the founder is,” Sudhir said. “Although (my father) wanted me to stay back, he did not want his wish to overpower what I wanted to do, so he said, ‘OK, you do whatever you want to do, but eventually you’re going to come back to yoga. And I did.”
O.P. Tiwari asked Sudhir to return to the yoga business about five years ago.
“In 2010, 2011, he used to travel a lot,” Sudhir said about his father. “At one point, he said: ‘I want to cut down on my travelling and I want you to start teaching.’ At that time, I said: ‘OK, he’s given me my time.’ I worked at GNC as a regional sales director and now it’s time to move on. So I quit my job and I said to my dad, ‘OK, I’m going to do what you want me to do.’ ”
Sudhir still lives in Toronto with his wife and two children, but now travels the world for six months of the year to teach yoga workshops that focus especially on pranayama, the breathing part of yoga.
The master teacher has a deep knowledge of the yogic texts, pranayama, asana, kriyas and Ayurveda, plus he is familiar with alternative western medicine. He will make his first visit to Edmonton for a Pranayama and Yoga Workshop from April 27-29, 2018, at the Providence Renewal Centre.
“I travel extensively and three times a year I go to India,” he said. “I started going there last year because I designed a three year pranayama certification course. The structure of the course is such that I have to be there three times a year for one week, one week and 10 days.
“At times, towards the end of the year, when I have time, I extend my stay and beyond teaching I do other stuff.”
Swami Kuvalayananda, who formed the Kaivalyadhama lineage in 1917 and officially registered it in 1924; may not be as well-known as Swami Krishnamacharya, but he is considered a yoga pioneer because of his work in bringing yoga and modern science together. He sought scientific explanations for the various psycho-physical effects of yoga he experienced. With the help of some of his students in a laboratory, he started investigating the effects of some yogic practices on the human body.
Kuvalayananda founded the Kaivalyadhama Health and Yoga Research Center in 1924 to provide a laboratory for his scientific study of yoga. He also started the first scientific journal devoted to scientific investigation into yoga, Yoga Mimamsa, where he published his first paper on shoulder stand in 1924. The first scientific experiments were on yogic techniques such as the effect of asana, shatkarma, bandhas and pranayama.
“He said scientific research is incomplete without philosophical research,” Sudhir said. “He started collecting manuscripts for different traditional texts dating back thousands of years – ‘This is the practice. What is the technique? How should this practice be done?’ ”
The substantial and innovative experiments and studies into almost every aspect of yogic practices caught the attention of several top post-secondary schools in the United States, including Yale University. Researchers were sent to Kaivalyadhama to learn more. The research and collaboration are still on-going.
Kuvalayananda was also a teacher of former India independence leader Mahatma Gandhi (almost 80 letters have been found showing their correspondence) and was asked at one point by the Mahārāja of Mysore to assess Krishnamacharya’s practice and to provide feedback.
Kaivalyadhama, a not-for-profit charity, has since grown to include a training college and yogic hospital as well as the yoga institute on its 180 acres of parkland and gardens.
Friedal Khattab, the well-known Edmonton yoga teacher who passed away in 2015, after dedicating her life since the 1960’s to yoga in Alberta, studied at Kaivalyadhama and stayed in the hospital to learn yoga therapy. She brought her teacher and then-director of the institute, Dr. Manmath Manohar Gharote, to Edmonton to conduct advanced teacher training for her teachers and yoga therapy training in 1977.
It was in this environment that Sudhir Tiwari grew up, although he was born in northern India. His father became a student of Kuvalayananda, starting a two-year course in 1957, and eventually was selected to run the institute.
Sudhir’s first teacher, Digamberji, is a direct disciple of Kuvlayananda, just like Sudhir’s father. Digamberji initiated Sudhir into a disciple at the age of 17 with a thread ceremony.
“However, when you grow up in an institute, the education began much before I was 17,” said Sudhir.
Because his life was all about yoga, he would attend the daily morning and evening ceremonies with his parents. Without even trying, he learned the chants and mantras, etc., just by being around them all the time.
“For me, it was not so formal, but when I grew up, I kind of knew a lot of things in terms of practices,” he said. “I understood them later, but I knew how to asana, I knew how to do pranayama, but the idea behind it came much later.”
Sudhir began teaching yoga after receiving his diploma in 1981.
“I was not a formal teacher, but I used to represent the institute,” he said. “If someone had to teach the railway people in India, I was one of the yoga teachers.”
In the 1980s, various organizations, corporations, schools, even the police force, would ask the institute to teach yoga to their workers once a week. So Sudhir taught yoga whenever he had time outside his engineering studies. He also practised on a regular basis.
“It’s not like I ever got divorced from yoga,” he said. “Yogic practice was a part of my daily routine.”
He continued to teach yoga occasionally over the years, often going to France once a year to teach workshops. But Sudhir had a rude awakening when he took over his father’s job.
“Technically, there was a 20-year gap for me being away from the yoga world,” he said. “Although I was teaching, I didn’t have all the information and knowledge.
“Thirty years ago, 40 years ago, when one says, ‘OK, I’m going to do yoga,’ yoga meant yoga. Now when I came back, the questions started after I said I teach yoga. ‘What type of yoga?’
“A long time ago, that wasn’t the case. Asanas meant asanas. It didn’t mean what style of asanas you’re doing,” he continued. “That’s what alarmed me.
“And when I saw a lot of physicality, I said something’s been changed. I didn’t judge for good or bad, but I could see that things had changed. Practices had become more physical so much so that you couldn’t say they were yoga. They were something disguised as yoga.
“That gave me more motivation. I said, ‘No, yoga should be taught in the form it was supposed to be taught. We can adapt, but without compromising the basic principles.’ So I said this will be my focus from now on to teach traditional yoga in the lineage of Kaivalyadhama.”
That means classical yoga with asana and pranayama, traditional chanting, meditation techniques and, of course, theory and philosophy as part of every workshop.
His mantra is: “Breathe Positive, Breathe Yoga.”
“Now traditional asanas are really becoming more and more popular,” Sudhir said. “Because to the extent yoga has been diluted, you see the cases of injuries coming up, which is not real yoga. If you do real asanas, you won’t find injuries. In almost 100 years of Kaivalyadhama being formed, there has not been one reported case of injury by people performing asanas because they’re performing it the traditional way.
“When people do asanas the traditional way, they feel the difference between the way asanas are taught when they’re taught as an exercise and when the asanas are taught as a yogic posture. There’s a difference. So people are now seeing the difference when it comes to the physical part of it.
“When it comes to pranayama, I see a difference in different parts of the world, but I would say North America still has a lot of catching up when it comes to pranayama. In North American, we’re still at the more physical level.”
Norm Cowley is Editor of Yoga Bridge and teaches yoga in Edmonton.