I feel T Krishnamacharya’s unique skills lay not just in contexting ancient Yoga teachings for adult students, or utilising both traditional and contemporary postural related resources to craft multiformed Āsana synthesises for youngsters.
They were in what was collectively grouped by TKV Desikachar as Viniyoga from 1983, as a response to requests from his senior Western students on how to describe this personalised application of Yoga teaching, as taught to him by T Krishnamacharya.
This collective name, Viniyoga, was coined by TKV Desikachar to help describe a process for the personalised application of the methodology within the teaching of Yoga, through a precise developmental progression uniquely geared to an individual student according to their stories, each with its own aims. needs, abilities and interests.
Of course, this also presumed that the teacher themselves had directly experienced this as a process, firstly as a student, then if appropriate as an apprentice teacher. Otherwise, how else can we be equipped as, what might be termed, a full spectrum “Viniyoga of Yoga” Practitioner, to personally transmit this experiential process directly and cohesively across the generations.
Thus, the use of the term the Viniyoga of Yoga became an Upāya for Desikachar to collectively describe this personalised application of Yoga teachings arising from his own personal 27 year one-to-one study with his teacher Śrī T Krishnamacharya.
For me, this was his greatest strength and finest grace, with its potential to empower each individual student towards a profound experience of what is Yoga both within and beyond their own unique Pañca Maya matrix.
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Link to Series: 108 Yoga Teaching Path Pointers
