Sri Tirumalai Krishnamacharya was a renowned Indian yoga teacher, Ayurvedic healer and scholar. He is often referred to as the “father of modern yoga” and is also considered one of the most influential yoga teachers of the 20th century. Sri Krishnamacharya received a good education as a child and is a descendant of the legendary yogi and saint of Sri Vaishnava Nathamuni. Nanammal (February 24, 1920 — October 26, 2001) was the oldest yoga teacher in India.
He trained one million students for 45 years and taught one hundred students daily. Six hundred of his students have become yoga instructors around the world. Nanammal was born on February 24, 1920 to a family of farmers in Zameen Kaliayapuram, Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu, India. At eight years old, he learned yoga from his father and eventually mastered more than 50 asanas.
Nanammal's husband was a Siddha practitioner and was engaged in agriculture and cultivation, with whom he moved to Negamam and later to Ganapathy. He cultivated a taste for naturopathy after his marriage. He has five children, 12 grandchildren and 11 great-grandchildren. In 1972 he founded the Ozone Yoga center in Coimbatore.
Nanammal and her family follow the traditions transmitted to the next generations. The center taught its traditional style of yoga, which focuses more on pranayama (breath control). She founded the “Ozone Yoga school” and since then, Nanammal and her family have taught yoga to more than 100,000 people. During its last five decades, Nanammal trained more than one million students and continued to teach 100 students daily at the “Ozone Yoga Center” for the rest of her life.
Around 600 of his students, including 36 members of his family, have become “yoga instructors” and teach students around the world. According to his son Balakrishnan, he had trained more than 60 members of his family as yoga teachers throughout his life. Nanammal tried to enter the Guinness Book of World Records by teaching yoga to more than 20,000 students and enthusiasts in Coimbatore. Its objective was to raise awareness among women, mainly among students, about yoga techniques by going to various educational institutions to solve various problems related to health, especially after marriage.
He was also going to participate in the Indian reality show “India's Got Talent” as a contestant. She gained popularity on YouTube, where she included videos of her performing difficult yoga poses in her usual outfit, a pink sari. Later in her life, Devi moved to Argentina, where she established a foundation to teach her yoga methods. Devi, who was born into the bosom of European nobility, learned the art of yoga from the legendary guru Sri Tirumalai Krishnamacharya.
In the early 1930s, Jois reconnected with Sri Krishnamacharya, who had also moved to Mysore, and began teaching yoga in 1937.Jois is also known for popularizing Ashtanga Yoga, which is promoted as a modern form of classic yoga from India. Porchon-Lynch, of French and Indian descent, first became interested in yoga when she was eight years old and saw people practicing yoga on a beach in India. That dedication made her the oldest yoga teacher in the world and, on February 21, she breathed for the last time. Yoga was their family tradition and they didn't teach yoga to anyone outside the family and it stayed within the group.
Of Indian and French descent, Mrs. Porchon-Lynch was introduced to yoga for the first time at age seven in India, reports ABC News. To trace the life of Porchon-Lynch is to travel from the winding alleys of South India and the nightclubs of World War II Paris to an existence in which Marlene Dietrich is her best friend and Fred Astaire is a yoga student. Dennison regained her love for yoga when she returned to Scotland and began teaching yoga in the 1970s at her local church.
Although yoga has been practiced in India for thousands of years, in recent years it has gained strength in the rest of the world. Like several of the people on this list, at one point, Ida Herbert was named the oldest yoga teacher in the world by the Guinness Book of World Records. Krishna Pattabhi Jois is one of several famous yoga teachers who are credited with helping to spread yoga from India to the West during the 20th century. In 1972, Nanammal and her family founded the Ozone Yoga school, where they teach yoga following strict traditional rules.
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