Pranayama Training

The beginning

Once upon a time… more than twenty years ago, when I was a young yogi carried by great inspiration and an even greater imagination.

I met a master, a true master.

This master was not an old sage full of peace and compassion, with a gentle and soothing gaze that could relieve, with a single look, all the aches of the heart. On the contrary, he had a powerful and unsettling gaze, carried by dark, piercing eyes that demanded and inspired discipline and commitment. Nothing less.

In his previous life, he had been a young army officer in the Middle East. He had fought in a war and had witnessed one of the worst massacres of the twentieth century. He came out of it with a heart deeply haunted, troubled and inconsolable.

Lost, not knowing where to go to soothe the pain of his mind and his tortured heart, he then heard of a yogi, a wild and fiery master, who had left India to share in the West the teachings of his own master, the great Swami Sivananda. This master, who had left India with the will to change the world, was called Vishnudevananda.

The young, traumatized soldier then crossed oceans and continents to become his student and disciple, and committed himself to the path of yoga. On the path of yoga, he found again the feeling of life, of peace, and the presence of the beyond that gives meaning even to the darkest and most incomprehensible events of humanity.

When I met him, after the death of his master Vishnudevananda, he had settled on the outskirts of Montreal and opened a small center called the Shiva Yoga Center, itself carried by the archetypal force of Shiva.

He ran a small yoga studio that held no more than fifteen people at a time. I have never seen a yoga space where practitioners reached such concentration, strength and depth.

I became his student, his disciple, and he initiated me into the practice of pranayama. But not in the way it tends to be taught in most schools, which barely touch the surface of this practice.

Very early on, in the first weeks of discovering this practice in all its depth, I felt how it gave access to a source of inner power. I felt how it awakened and activated a will of another caliber. I felt access to extraordinary frontiers of consciousness.

And now, after more than twenty years of carrying this practice, nourishing it and passing it on, it is time for me to offer it in a more formal way.

It will be more than a training. It will be an in-depth training of the breath — and a transmission.