Gary Kraftsow

For more than forty years Gary Kraftsow, an American yoga teacher, has taught in the Viniyoga tradition. In 1974 he began studying with T.K.V. Desikachar in India, and in 1988, in Paris, he received a Viniyoga Special Diploma. He also holds a master's in psychology and religion from UC Santa Barbara. In the early 1980s he opened a school of yoga therapy on Maui, and he still directs the American Viniyoga Institute, which he set up in 1999. He helped to design the yoga protocols for two research studies run by the National Institutes of Health and for a trial of workplace stress reduction.

In his teaching, breath-centred āsana is joined with prāṇāyāma, chanting, mantra and meditation, all adapted to the individual, together with the philosophy of the Yoga Sūtras, Sāṁkhya and Tantra. At the institute he leads the Viniyoga Foundations Program and therapist training, and he also offers an online library of live and recorded classes, plus workshops and retreats in the US and abroad. Penguin is the publisher of both Yoga for Transformation and Yoga for Wellness, his two books, and he teaches several self-paced courses on The Shift Network.