Yoga for Musicians:
The benefits of a daily yoga practice
—Jesse Stacken


Introduction
Famous violin virtuoso Yehudi Menuhin called yoga master B.K.S. Iyengar, his “best violin teacher”, even though Iyengar was not a musician. As many instrumentalists do, Menuhin suffered from muscle pains and had tried many different remedies. He first became interested in yoga after reading a book on the subject, and upon traveling to India in 1952, he met B.K.S. Iyengar. At that first meeting, Iyengar gave Menuhin a sequence of poses that made his muscle pains disappear completely. A few years later, Menuhin invited Iyengar to Europe to continue teaching him yoga. He accepted and therefore was able to introduce yoga to the west. Because of Iyengar’s introduction, yoga has become increasingly popular. It seems one cannot walk around New York City these days without seeing someone with a yoga mat, or another new yoga studio opening in the neighborhood.

The yoga boom had certainly influenced me as I walked into the Life in Motion yoga studio on 105th and Broadway in September of 2004. I didn’t really know what I was in for, but I knew I needed to get in better shape, and I was interested in a form of exercise that also had some kind of spiritual element to it. I’m not sure if I got a good inward glance during that first class, but I know I got some sore leg muscles! I also went away with the determination to give yoga a chance. I thought that if it was going to help me, I would need to practice it everyday.

Unable to afford daily classes, I opted for a DVD called Yoga for Beginners. I practiced with the DVD for a month. The instructor in the DVD happened to be one of B.K.S. Iyengar’s most devoted students, Patricia Walden. I enjoyed her attention to body alignment, and thought that if an instructor was detailed enough on alignment, I could practice that alignment on my own at home. I soon began to desire an instructor’s expert eyes to guide me, however. After doing a little research, I found the Iyengar Institute in Chelsea, and upon attending my first class there, I had found what I was looking for. I’ve been attending class there once a week for four years now, mainly with the same instructor, Lara Brunn, who also happens to be a flamenco guitarist. Lara studied yoga with B.K.S. Iyengar and his children in India, as have most of the instructors at the Iyengar Institute. She knows that I’m a pianist, and she knows my personal challenges, such as not over-bending in my lumbar (lower back) region. She’s also helped me a lot in dealing with migraine headaches. In her class we usually focus on a certain area of the body, and we spend a lot of time on each pose, refining it and improving it. I practice at home daily, mainly working on the asanas (poses) that we worked on in class that week. It seems that everyday I learn something new in my yoga practice. Most of those things can be directly transferred to the challenges of daily life as a musician.