:: March/April 2003 Volume 2/Number 2

Teacher Profile: Bryan Kest

For Byran Kest, it wasn't a question of choosing yoga. At age 15, his father told him that he needed to "...do yoga every day or get out of my house." Today this tough kid from Detroit - who spent time in a boxing ring and on a football field - is a well-known yoga dynamo, teaching the style he coined - Power Yoga.

By Julie Deife

How he got to this point is a yoga fairy tale of sorts. As a teenager, Bryan's first teacher was David Williams, the man who brought Ashtanga yoga to the United States. "It was fate, Bryan muses. I was just lucky enough to be there." At the time, he hated every minute of it, not realizing it would shape the rest of his life. Choosing to live in L.A. when he was 17, he arrived without a plan. He explains that he always felt supported by the universe, and that if you are a good person, good things will happen.

As fate would also have it, Bryan then traveled to India to study with Pattabhi Jois (founder of the Ashtanga yoga method). He spent an entire year there and was for the most part the only student Jois had with him at that time. Bryan's assessment is that he "...got a real good hit of Jois, maybe better than anyone has except David Williams or Norman Allen." Within a month, Bryan could do every strength pose in all six series of Ashtanga. He found Ashtanga yoga to be rigid, painful and difficult (20 years later there are still some flexibility poses that he can't do), but kept it up because as a Detroit boy he needed something that fed into his mentality, and Ashtanga indulged it.

It was while he was in India that Bryan's belief about who he was, began to change. The 'good boy' or 'bad boy' judgment meted out by Jois according to how Bryan's practice went on a particular day, led him to think that our identities are too often formed by what others want us to be. It also bothered him that he wasn't allowed to go off on a tangent during a series, like doing the splits when it wasn't the next asana expected. There were places in his body that the series wasn't allowing him to access. "Not allowed? What do you mean I'm not allowed. But I feel like doing it." True to his nature, he did it anyway.

Bryan came out of his practice with Jois open and aware but once again, without a plan. "Literally three days later some guy who had just come down from the north (India) walked up and said, 'Oh, my god I just got back from this amazing meditation called vipassana.'"

Bryan checked out the practice, and to date he has completed 11 10-day silent vipassana meditations. He has studied extensively with Goenka and asserts that what he knows about the meaning of yoga has come from his meditation practice and studies. Bryan maintains that people are making the physical yoga the path to enlightenment, but that "All it is, is Eastern calisthenics so you can sit in meditation and learn to open up your body more comfortably." Bryan also cites the work of Krishnamacharya and his son Desikachar as reinforcing the views he holds about yoga today, that of an individual approach to the practice.

Yet it took Bryan seven years to evolve a practice suitable for him, one that manifested itself in the form of Power Yoga. He spent hundreds of hours alone on the mat, letting the body move where it wanted, from one posture to the next. Eventually he developed series that work for him and serve as the foundation for the classes he teaches today.

Not at all concerned that so many others are now calling their classes 'Power Yoga,' Bryan explains that Power Yoga is "just a name for Hatha yoga. It is Hatha yoga with a set of asanas that a particular teacher has developed." Originally, Bryan intended the name to mean an empowering yoga class.

Bryan took a lot of heat within the Ashtanga community for the name Power Yoga, some charging he was 'westernizing' the practice and capitalizing upon it. But Bryan is quick to point out that he teaches "..on donation basis only and always has. I don't have a store. People come, no rules, nothing assigned, just come and practice yoga." He adds "Just because you do yoga doesn't mean you eradicate your jealously, envy, anger, fear and all the emotions that come up when people are threatened by you."

Bryan emphasizes that he is not teaching yoga to change people but to help them look in the mirror. He doesn't push people into poses because he doesn't think there's anything wrong with anybody the way they are. He is not critical, and he doesn't want his students to be goal-oriented in the practice. Yes, he gives a rockin' physical class, but that's because he believes in order for the stuff to come up, we have to be challenged.

Now at age 38, Bryan Kest wants "to be the best that I can possibly be and I don't see any vehicle for bringing me there other than yoga. Yoga is my ultimate path."

Bryan Kest teaches at Dance Home in Santa Monica and can be reached through his website www.poweryoga.com