Yoga Beyond Belief: Insights to Awaken and Deepen Your Practice

Los Angeles. Within a year he was living at the Sivananda Yoga Ashram in Canada, fixing their electronics and sound systems and meeting yogis and swamis from around the world. After a couple of years he mastered the most advanced asanas and practices. In 1967 he founded the Center for Yoga in Los Angeles and served as principle teacher for twenty-five years. He was credited with helping spearhead the new wave of yoga in America and hosted a continuous stream of yogis and masters, many on their first visits to Los Angeles, making their way to the U.S. and Canada. The list of luminaries includes Vishnudevananda, Venkatesa, Chidananda, Muktananda, Satchidananda, Pir Vilayat Khan, Ram Dass, Kalu Rimpoche, Allen Ginsberg, BKS Iyengar, and K. Pattabhi Jois.
    Along the way Ganga founded yoga centers in major U.S. cities and served for five years as vice-president of the International Sivananda Yoga Vedanta Centers. He was designated the successor to Swami Vishnu, but left in 1973 due to philosophical differences so he could pursue and begin developing a non-dogmatic, contemporary vision of yoga. Throughout the late sixties and seventies, he traveled around the U.S. and the world, teaching and lecturing at universities and institutes and appearing on numerous television programs. Ganga has taught yoga to stars and celebrities, consulted on movie sets and television specials, and traveled with yogis and swamis in the U.S., Europe, and India. He organized and led yoga tours and pilgrimages to India, assistedin and conducted the first yoga teacher trainings in North America, and organized the first American fire walk with sacred firewalkers from South India, walking on hot coals himself in 1970. He participated in peace gatherings and flew in the Peter Max-painted peace plane dropping leaflets over the San Francisco war moratorium gathering in Golden Gate Park. He has been called one of the “architects of American yoga” and a “pioneer of yoga” by the
Yoga Journal
.
    Always characterized by an inquiring mind, Ganga worked with polygraph expert Cleve Backster on plant responses in New York and with the Findhorn Community in Scotland in 1974, and in the mid-seventies to early eighties he studied with J. Krishnamurti in California, Switzerland, England, and India. In the early eighties he trained in homeopathy at Sivananda Homeo Clinic in the Himalayas and studied with BKS Iyengar in India and Ashtanga yoga with K. Pattabhi Jois.
    In 1991, Ganga participated in the first international conference on Ayahuasca and medicinal plants in Brazil. He invited the leaders and shamans back to the U.S. to continue exploring these healing traditions and comparing them to the practices and teachings of yoga. Ganga was an invited delegate to the Wisdom Keepers Gathering at the Earth Summit in Brazil, journeyed in the Amazon region, and hosted a series of meetings with elders and scientists researching entheogens.
    While Ganga has had extensive classical training in several prominent lineages of yoga, in Sanskrit, and yoga philosophy—he received the teaching title
Yoga Acharya
three times from the Sivananda Ashram, the Yoga Vedanta Forest University, Rishikesh, Himalayas, and the Yoga Niketan in India—he has always been an innovating and startlingly original yogi. He created partner yoga, and in 1981 Viking Penguin published his beautifully illustrated
Double Yoga
, still the definitive volume on this unique system for partner practice. Also during the seventies, Ganga was one of the early developers of Flow Yoga and introduced it at centers all over the country. Flow is now one of the most popular systems of yoga practice.
    The first-ever yoga workout video,
The Flow Series
, was released in 1990 in collaboration with Tracey Rich, Ganga’s wife and fellow teacher of more than twenty-four years. Their second video,
Total Yoga
, published by Gaiam/Living Arts in 1994, has sold more than 1.4 million copies and has set records as the number one yoga video in the U.S. and worldwide, and fourth best selling exercise video. In 2002 TimeWarner published a three-volume video series,
Total Yoga, The Flow Series—Earth, Water, Fire
.
    In 1983 Ganga and Tracey founded the White Lotus Retreat in the hills of Santa Barbara, which the couple has directed ever since. To these forty acres in the coastal mountains, thousands of students from around the world have come for yoga workshops, continuing education, and advanced studies. Highly respected in