B. K. S. Iyengar Dies

I was driving into the office this morning when I learned from NPR that B. K. S. Iyengar died yesterday. He was ninety-five.

Bellur Krishnamachar Sundararaja Iyengar was born in 1918, and became one of the first of the modern teachers of Yoga in the West and remained until his death among the foremost of those teachers.

Yoga in the west has been garnering some criticism for wandering rather far from its spiritual roots, and no doubt some of the criticism has been well earned. While he no doubt profited and well from Yoga, B.K.S. Iyengar was also one of those who never forgot the spiritual connections, and for that those who care about Yoga in the west, of whatever particular discipline, owe him a great debt not only for being one of the first, but for remaining constant in the holistic understanding of the practice.

A great man has passed.