Beryl Bender Birch
Introduction by Gail Bruce
Beryl Bender-Birch, a highly sought teacher and renowned yoga master. Beryl is Founder and Director of The Hard & The Soft Yoga Institute, which has schools and studios throughout the United States. She offers certification training in the United States and abroad. Beryl is compassionate and actively engaged in her community. She works with healing and growth on a practical and intuitive level. She founded the Give Back Yoga Foundation which reaches out to under-served populations; men and women in prison, veterans with PTSD, cancer patients and survivors, and those in addiction recovery. We are delighted she is part of the HipSilver team.
Beryl Bender Birch
For those of you who do not know me, I graduated from Syracuse University with a degree in English and Philosophy and traveled to India in l974 for 6 months to further my studies. At the time, I thought I was the last one on the train to go to India as so many of my teachers and mentors had already been to or were from India. Little did I know what was to come regarding the influence that this wonderful country and all the Eastern wisdom traditions would have on our Western culture.
I have been practicing yoga and meditation since l971 and teaching these wonderful practices for over 40 years. I have written a number of books on the subject and, in l980, I started training yoga students to become yoga teachers. I now focus on directing The Hard & The Soft Yoga Institute, the school I started in l980 that offers yoga teacher training programs nation wide. We have an outstanding faculty and have been rated as one of the top yoga teacher training programs in the country. Interestingly, a significant percentage of our students are over 60! We have programs running in 6 different states and are also the official training program of the Give Back Yoga Foundation, a non-profit I co-founded 10 years ago and the gateway organization for yoga service projects in the US.
My asana background comes from a fairly rigorous practice called ashtanga; my first book, Power Yoga, interprets this practice. The book sold nearly 300,000 copies and launched me on my travels around the world to teach yoga.
Since then, I have written several more books such as Beyond Power Yoga, the detailed philosophy of classical yoga.
Boomer Yoga was written for the baby boomers and beyond (all of us), and my last book, Yoga for Warriors, was written as a gift to the military, designed for veterans returning from deployment and trying to transition back to their families and civilian life.