Finding Harmony Podcast

Merry Christmas! For this year-end special we have a little present for you all. Some Magic! We would like to introduce you to an incredibly interesting practitioner and teacher, Andrew Eppler. At one time, he was a kind of young-prince in the Ashtanga Yoga culture. Introduced to the practice by the late Cliff Barber as a 14 year old. He was Guy Donahaye’s first Ashtanga teacher in Oxford when he...

What does cooking, painting and yoga all have in common? Listen to this week’s episode of Finding Harmony with Tara Mitra to find out. Tara is a life long lover of learning, discovering new ideas, people, and places. It seems no accident that her mentor, Guru, and main teacher was named after the Hindu goddess of knowledge, music, art, speech, wisdom, and learning: Saraswati. Growing up in an abus...

The truly bizarre thing about living in an intentional ‘spiritually aspirant’ community (for decades) is that you share profound memories with a select group of folks who you know only incidentally. Yet, those shared memories are quite intense and emotional for both of you. You can imagine a professional athlete might feel the same or a developer in Silicon Valley. You watch from afar sometimes as...

New York, New York. If you can make it there you can make it anywhere. Today we interview Barry Silver, traveling artist, explorer of the mystic and esoteric realms. Although Barry is currently based in Mexico, we met him back in Mysore, India, as one of the “Cool Kids” from a thriving New York Ashtanga scene. At the time he was assistant to the revered Eddie Stern. And intimidatingly self-compose...

Sweden is famous for IKEA, ABBA, Minecraft… and Spotify! Today we speak with the lovely Lisa Lalér, who was born and raised in Stockholm in Sweden. We’re extremely grateful that Lisa opened up to us about her turbulent childhood and the trauma accumulated in her body which manifested as stiffness; so much so, that when she came to the practice of Ashtanga yoga she was praised as the stiffest stude...

We were engrossed in conversation with our dear friend, Certified teacher Karyn Grenfell, Founder of Ashtanga Yoga Melbourne, when she mentioned a hilarious old trick... Karyn recounted, while backpacking (back in the day, before cell phones and the internet) how she planned to meet a friend at a particular time, on a particular date, in a particular city neither had been to, on the corner of two...

Grab a coffee, brew your tea, crack a coconut, because this is a real “chai-stand” conversation! In today’s episode you’ll hear story after story about different people and events within our global yoga community, including celebrity encounters, and funny stories about our time in Mysore, both together and separately. Our guest is not a professional yoga teacher, but is someone known and loved far...

Similar to Ganesha the elephant-headed deity in India, Janus is the god of beginnings, gates, transitions, time, duality, doorways, passages, frames, and endings in ancient Roman mythology. He is usually depicted as having two faces. Susanna Finocchi, (our first Italian guest!) is a woman who knows these transitions well. Susanna expounds on the weirdness of being a Southerner in the North. You be...

Samhain or All Hollow’s Eve is an ancient festival of the northern Gaelic islands. It’s a celebration meant to honor the beginning of winter when the demarcation between this world the other is thinned. On this day the Aos Si (the Fairies! as they say) travel more easily into our world, and we must disguise ourselves or risk being taken by them! And so... to celebrate this day and these celestial...

It is probably no secret to you all that we (Harmony & Russell) enjoy watching television together (shhh…!). After finishing over 21 seasons of Hell’s Kitchen, we moved on to prestige dramas like The Handmaid’s Tale and Mrs. America, and our current obsession, Succession… and often you’ll find references to these narratives percolate in conversations with our guests. We’re in the Golden Age of...

We can not wait to introduce you to our guest this week: Michael Baidoo. Michael is very unique in that he’s what we might call a “CoVid phenomenon.” He is completely self taught through online resources, social media, and Zoom. And, he is amazing! It’s a delight for us personally as older, less awestruck, students (Harmony and Russell have been doing Ashtanga Yoga for over 50 years combined!) to...

Observe this seeming contradiction: The sea, once it casts its spell, holds one in its net of wonder forever. Water and air, the two essential fluids on which all life depends, have become global garbage cans. - Jacques Cousteau - Today we are taking a deep dive into the ocean of yoga with Dr. Daniela Ceccarelli as our guide. We’re learning about coral reef ecology, the purpose of counting fish, a...

It is with great pleasure that we introduce you to our friend Anna Guryeva. She graces us a with a marvelous little window into the Russian soul. From the heart of Siberia, she reveals a path to joy. To see the beauty of the Russian spirit, one must understand the generational hardship of the people, and Anna’s narrative, though particular to her, shares this ancestral trauma. To know the horror o...

It is such a joy to meet a human being dedicated to evolution, self discovery, and insight. It’s our pleasure to introduce to you the accentless Englishman, now profoundly Canadian, Geoff Mackenzie! Citizen of the world, swimmer, rugby player, and avid skier… Mysore teacher and Yogic Health Coach. He tells us how his practice has evolved over these past few year, becoming less strict. He’s created...

Richard Freeman and Mary Taylor need no introduction. In this episode, we talk about the dissolution of our minds, bodies, and practices in the face of time. How do we let go of the physicality of the practice? We were curious after 50 years of yoga, how they’ve maintained their enthusiasm in the face of age. What we heard was extremely enlightening, and surprisingly heart-opening. Your whole body...

It is with great pleasure we introduce to you the contagiously ebullient Hanne Sydanmaa from Helsinki, Finland. We asked Hanne to share a bit about the birth of Ashtanga Yoga in Finland, which continues to this day to have the most practitioners per capita over any other country in the world! We tried, in our way, to get Hanne to open herself to us… So that you could see the Real Hanne, with her z...

If you ever wondered how gods are made, our guest today will tell you they start out as heroes. They become big enough to thrust out at Brad Pitt and decide the fate of thousands of women and children. Hector must have been like that… a giant like Priapus or Goliath standing in the way of Achilles. Probably a good sized lad. Maybe even 6 foot 4 and full of muscles. Our guest today is very much lik...

September is National Recovery Month. This national observance has been held every September since 1989, to educate and increase awareness around mental health and substance use disorders. It’s also a month to celebrate the people who have recovered and honor their strength in living healthy and rewarding lives. We are reminded of Malcolm X when he wrote in the forward to his autobiography that 't...

You know her as Lee. We know her as 이성은 It is with great honor and joy that we introduce you to our very special friend, Lee (this is her last name of course). In the Korean language the last name is introduced first before the first name. Why would that be? What kind of culture believes that family is more important that the individual? The answer is a Confucian culture. Or Kong Ja Nim in Hang...

It’s our pleasure to introduce you to Ann Svärdfelt. Many of you know here as her the proprietor of the Santosha Cafe. Her experience of Mysore is unique. She came to Ashtanga Yoga later in life, already with small children, and as a responsible adult. She stepped into the practice from a very different space than many of us, who were in somewhat of a state of arrested development, bugged out dro...

As you’re quickly becoming aware, We, in our little Ashtanga Yoga Land, have a culture. This word stems from the Latin meaning “to cultivate or to toil over.” And, this cultivation of the soil, slowly became a cultivation of the mind. This is were we get the word ‘cult’ from... which is to say, “cultivated, or inhabited.” In a way, our work in yoga, leads our mind to become inhabited. We become Se...

It is with great pleasure that we introduce you to our great friend Mariela Cruz. Mariela is one of those phenomenal human that you might find in an Alexandre Dumas classic like ‘The Count of Monte Christo’ or ‘The Man in the Iron Mask.’ Someone who’s heart-centered and gifted with supreme powers of intelligence, wit, and physical prowess! With 7 children, a lawyer, a gifted solo pianist, she also...

Today we’ve created a Venn diagram of interesting listening…. Here you’ll find the intersection of the dedicated The Last Kingdom fan (secretly in love with Uhtred of Uhtred; and Aethelfled her personal hero), mixing with a keen interest in True Crime Detective procedurals, along with a curiosity in what it might take to become a female weight lifter, or body building champion (and this may or may...

"By the practice of the limbs of Yoga, the impurities dwindle away and there dawns the light of wisdom, leading to discriminative discernment." “Dukham evam sarvaam vivekinaha.” For a viveki, a person with discriminative knowledge, everything is painful and also, simultaneously, full and sweet. As epic poet, Leonard Cohen wrote, “Ring the bells that still can ring Forget your perfect offering Ther...

It is our great pleasure to introduce you to our old friend (and living legend) Certified Ashtanga Yoga Teacher, Alex Medin. Unfortunately this sentence doesn’t do him justice! He’s an excellent and exceptional student in so many walks of life: a boxer, ballet dancer, a Sanskrit scholar, entrepreneur, and humanitarian to name but a few. In fact, if there is one allegory to describe Alex, it's that...