MC YOGI

MC YOGI is a yoga teacher and hip hop artist from the San Francisco Bay Area. As a teenager he was painting graffiti, being thrown out of schools and living in a group home, until his father introduced him to yoga at seventeen. He trained under his father's teacher Larry Schultz, went on to Mysore to practise Ashtanga with Sri K. Pattabhi Jois and Sharath, spent years with the Vedanta Society and later stayed at Ramana Maharshi's ashram at Arunachala. Time among Krishna devotees turned him towards chanting, and he came to regard Neem Karoli Baba as his guru. In 2008 he began recording albums that set mantra and yogic stories over hip hop beats.

His classes are slow, easy-going flows mixed with meditation, mantra, guided relaxation and stories from his own life, drawing on Hindu, Buddhist and Christian sources. He leads residential retreats, including weekends at Kripalu, Drala Mountain Center and the Sivananda ashram in the Bahamas and a week in the Azores, runs an accredited meditation teacher training, and teaches live sessions in his own app. His memoir, Spiritual Graffiti (HarperOne, 2017), tells how yoga redirected his life and won a silver Nautilus Book Award.