San Francisco Yoga Tour

The City by the Bay is a hot-spot for yoga.

By Colleen Morton

The next time you're planning a yoga vacation, consider just packing your mat and coming to San Francisco. The City by the Bay has enough studios to keep you exploring for weeks.

According to Sister Kamala Chaitanya, director of the Integral Yoga Institute and a resident of San Francisco since childhood, the city wasn't always the namesake of diversity: "The '60s broke this city wide open." Indeed, though Walt and Magana Baptiste opened the city's first yoga studio in 1955, most of San Francisco's oldest yoga institutions—like Integral, Sivananda, the Iyengar Yoga Institute, the Yoga College of India, the Kundalini Yoga Center, and the Yoga Society of San Francisco—were started in the early '70s.These early centers were often run by the American students of Indian gurus, and were essentially communities of yogis. At Integral and Sivananda, where images of Swamis Satchidananda, Sivananda, and Vishnu-devananda deck the altars, not much has changed. "We've been pretty steady in what we're about," says Sister Kamala. Both Integral and Sivananda offer a full schedule of hatha classes and workshops, but students can also attend evening meditations (at no charge) or join fellow students after class for a warming vegetarian meal.

The Iyengar Institute, best known for its two-year in-depth teacher training program, also offers a full schedule of public classes and workshops with veteran teachers like Judith Hanson Lasater and Ramanand Patel. Pat Layton, the Institute's director, says that when she first came to San Francisco in 1978, she had to adjust to the "individual spirit" of the city's yoga practitioners. "I came from a tradition where the teaching was more important than the teacher," she says, "but here, it's teacher-centered."

Indeed, there are thriving yoga studios in San Francisco that for years have served as teaching spaces for reputable teachers who have a loyal following of students—spaces which are only discovered by word of mouth. Like the James Howell Studio, or Studio Valencia, "one of the first studios to introduce Ashtanga Yoga to the Bay Area at a time when Iyengar Yoga was the style studied by most," according to teacher Leigh Evans. In 1987, Pattabhi Jois led a workshop there. Studio Valencia is a live-work space, and the artists that live there host a salon the first Saturday of the month where you can catch live music or a poetry reading.

Bikram Yoga has been in the city since 1973—the Yoga College on Columbus is the original Bikram Yoga center here—but the current craze for "Hot Yoga" has given rise to lots of new Bikram studios—Yoga Haven, Eureka, Funky Door, and Global Yoga, to name a few. Mary Jarvis, a Bikram yogi for 14 years, packs in 250 students a day at Global Yoga in the Marina District.

A few blocks away from Global Yoga, you'll find Tony Sanchez's San Francisco Yoga Studio, open since 1985, where you can take the Yoga Challenge I: 42 "yoga exercises" designed by Sanchez himself. Sanchez studied with Bikram Choudhury and was certified by Ghosh's College of Physical Education in Calcutta in 1979; the influence is apparent in the carpeted and mirrored room heated to body temperature.

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