Vish Iyer (born on 29 June 1974 as Vishwanath Iyer in Chennai, India) is an American author, Yoga Guru, transformational speaker, actor and entrepreneur. [1] [2] [3] He is best known for his Om meditation, pranayama, and integration of yoga and love techniques. Iyer's wedding documentary was bought by Time Warner, which primarily highlighted his integration of yoga and love techniques. [4] He is the author of Yoga & Love.
Vish Iyer was born in Chennai, as Vishwanath Balasubramanian Iyer to Orthodox Tamil speaking Hindu Brahmin parents. [4] At the age of 13, Iyer's father migrated to Botswana, Southern Africa to start the first private Engineering institute in Botswana. Iyer did his undergraduate degree in biology, a master's degree in French and completed his first masters in business from the University of California, San Diego and second masters in information systems from San Diego State University. [5] He started his career as a software consultant and moved to Southern Africa and later the U.S, with his wife Deypika. [6] He has always had a keen interest in Hollywood and to pursue his goals he attended UCB and actors workshop studios to learn acting skills.
In 2004, Iyer built $55 million real estate business with his partners and in 2008 he lost it due to his judgment errors that put him back into his deep yogic roots.[ citation needed ] This failure led him to pursue teaching yoga meditation, conduct workshops on relationships that led to a movement in the United States to connect Yoga meditation and love, where he claimed to reduce the divorce rate. [7] He combined principles of Vedic Yoga (Classical Yoga), Sankya (Hindu Psychology), modern neuroscience, applying mantra & powerful meditation techniques along with his personal experience of finding his wife Deypika on a movie set. Iyer was recognized as a Yoga meditation expert and was invited on several TV and radio shows including NBC, ABC, USC balance, Kron TV, Time warner and others. [8] [9]
On his wife’s recommendation, putting his acting career in Hollywood on hold to write Yoga & Love that explains how yoga can help in finding true love. The book primarily focuses on the transformation through Yoga as a path to love, [10] a self-help guide for the modern world and covers his personal experience and life which explains how he manifested his wife. [11] [12] [13]
Iyer made his feature film debut as an actor in a Hollywood movie as a romantic lead in Tommy Friedman’s Neshima scheduled to be released in 2015. He is playing the romantic warrior in the movie.[ citation needed ] Iyer has also had bit parts in Bold & the Beautiful.[ citation needed ]
Kundalini yoga derives from kundalini, defined in Vedantic culture as energy that lies dormant at the base of the spine until it is activated and channeled upward through the chakras in the process of spiritual perfection. Kundalini is believed by adherents to be power associated with the divine feminine. Kundalini yoga as a school of yoga is influenced by Shaktism and Tantra schools of Hinduism. It derives its name through a focus on awakening kundalini energy through regular practice of mantra, tantra, yantra, yoga, or meditation.
Paramahansa Yogananda was an Indian Hindu monk, yogi and guru who introduced millions to the teachings of meditation and Kriya Yoga through his organization Self-Realization Fellowship (SRF) / Yogoda Satsanga Society (YSS) of India, and who lived his last 32 years in America. A chief disciple of the Bengali yoga guru Swami Sri Yukteswar Giri, he was sent by his lineage to spread the teachings of yoga to the West, to prove the unity between Eastern and Western religions and to preach a balance between Western material growth and Indian spirituality. His long-standing influence in the American yoga movement, and especially the yoga culture of Los Angeles, led him to be considered by yoga experts as the "Father of Yoga in the West."
Maharishi Mahesh Yogi was an Indian yoga guru, known for developing and popularizing Transcendental Meditation, and for being the leader and guru of a worldwide organization that has been characterized in multiple ways including as a new religious movement and as non-religious. He became known as Maharishi and Yogi as an adult.
Kattassery Joseph Yesudas is an Indian playback singer and musician who sings Indian classical, devotional and film songs. Yesudas is estimated to have recorded more than 50,000 songs in various Indian languages, including Malayalam, Telugu, Kannada, Tamil, Hindi, Odia,Bengali, Marathi as well as Arabic, English, Latin, and Russian, in a career spanning six decades. He is often referred to as Gaanagandharvan. He is one of the highly acclaimed singers in India. Yesudas holds the record for singing 11 songs in different languages in a single day. He has also composed a number of Malayalam film songs during the 1970s and 1980s.
Nitya Chaitanya Yati was an Indian philosopher, psychologist, author and poet, best known for his commentaries on Advaita Vedanta as well as his literary criticisms. He was a disciple of Nataraja Guru, the successor to Narayana Guru. Yati published over 140 books in English and Malayalam including a commentary on Darsana Mala of Narayana Guru, titled, Psychology of Darsana Mala. Kerala Sahitya Akademi honoured him with their annual award for literary criticism in 1977.
Ranganathan Madhavan is an Indian actor, writer, film director, and producer who predominantly appears in Tamil and Hindi cinema. Madhavan has won four Filmfare Awards South and three Tamil Nadu State Film Awards. He has been described as one of the few actors in India who is able to achieve pan-Indian appeal, having appeared in films from seven different languages.
Aaytha Ezhuthu is a 2004 Indian Tamil-language political action film written and directed by Mani Ratnam. It is loosely based on the life story of George Reddy, a scholar from Osmania University of Hyderabad. It stars Suriya, Madhavan, Siddharth, Esha Deol, Meera Jasmine and Trisha, while Bharathiraja appears in another pivotal role. The title of the movie was taken from the name of a Tamil letter, ஃ – three dots corresponding to the film's three different personalities from completely different strata of society.
Dakshinamurthy is an aspect of the Hindu god Shiva as a guru (teacher) of all types of knowledge. This aspect of Shiva, as the original guru, is his personification as the supreme or the ultimate awareness, understanding and knowledge. This form represents Shiva as a teacher of yoga, music and wisdom, and giving exposition on the shastras. He is worshipped as the god of wisdom, complete and rewarding meditation. As per Hindu scriptures, if a person doesn't have a guru, they can consider and worship Dakshinamurthy as their guru. Eventually they will be blessed with a self-realised human guru, if they are worthy.
Isha Foundation is a non-profit, spiritual organisation founded in 1992 near Coimbatore, India, by Jaggi Vasudev. It hosts the Isha Yoga Centre, which offers yoga programs under the name Isha Yoga. The foundation is run "almost entirely" by volunteers. The word isha means "the formless divine".
R. Gnanathesikan, known as Ilaiyaraaja, is an Indian film composer, conductor-arranger, singer and lyricist who works in the Indian film industry, predominantly in Tamil. Widely regarded as one of the greatest Indian music composers, he is often credited for introducing Western musical sensibilities in the South Indian film musical mainstream. He has composed more than 7,000 songs, provided film scores for more than 1,000 movies and performed in more than 20,000 concerts. Ilaiyaraaja is nicknamed "Isaignani" and is often referred to as "Maestro", amongst others by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, London.
Guru En Aalu is a 2009 Indian Tamil-language romantic comedy film directed by Selva and produced by K. R. Gangadharan. It stars Madhavan, Abbas and Mamta Mohandas in the leading roles, while Vivek and Brinda Parekh portray supporting roles. The film was a remake of Aziz Mirza's 1997 Hindi film Yes Boss starring Shahrukh Khan. The music was composed by Srikanth Deva with cinematography by U. K. Senthil Kumar and editing by V. T. Vijayan. The film began production in late 2007 and released on 24 April 2009 to mixed reviews, becoming an average grosser at the box office.
Swami Vivekananda is a 1998 Indian biographical film directed by G. V. Iyer and produced by T. Subbarami Reddy. It took Iyer 11 years to finish the research work required for the film and to write the screenplay.
Gurmukh Kaur Khalsa is a teacher of Kundalini Yoga as taught by Yogi Bhajan and a pioneer in the field of pre-natal yoga. She is the co-founder and director of the Golden Bridge Yoga Center in Los Angeles, the author of two books and three DVDs. She has become a yoga guru for Hollywood film stars.
Thycaud Ayyavu Swamikal was a spiritualist and a social reformer, the first to break customs related to caste in Kerala when caste restrictions and untouchability were at its extreme.
Hinduism in Los Angeles made its first significant impact in the late 19th century when wandering Hindu monk Swami Vivekananda, a disciple of Ramakrishna Paramahamsa, came on his second visit to the United States. Swami Paramananda, a disciple of Swami Vivekananda, founded the Vedanta centres in Los Angeles and Boston.
Tirumalai Krishnamacharya Venkata Desikachar, better known as T. K. V. Desikachar, was a yoga teacher, son of the pioneer of modern yoga as exercise, Tirumalai Krishnamacharya. The style that he taught was initially called Viniyoga although he later abandoned that name and asked for the methods he taught to be called "yoga" without special qualification.
Modern yoga is a wide range of practices with differing purposes, encompassing in its various forms yoga philosophy derived from the Vedas, physical postures derived from Hatha yoga, devotional and tantra-based practices, and Hindu nation-building approaches.
Yoga in the United States has a long history, foreshadowed in the 19th century by the philosophers Ralph Waldo Emerson, whose poem "Brahma" is a statement of the Hindu philosophy behind yoga, and Henry David Thoreau, and starting in earnest with the Hindu leader Vivekananda's visit from India in 1893; he presented yoga as a spiritual path without postures (asanas), very different from modern yoga as exercise. Two other early figures, however, the women's rights advocate Ida C. Craddock and the businessman and occultist Pierre Bernard, created their own interpretations of yoga, based on tantra and oriented to physical pleasure.
Postural yoga began in India as a variant of traditional yoga, which was a mainly meditational practice; it has spread across the world and returned to the Indian subcontinent in different forms. The ancient Yoga Sutras of Patanjali mention yoga postures, asanas, only briefly, as meditation seats. Medieval Haṭha yoga made use of a small number of asanas alongside other techniques such as pranayama, shatkarmas, and mudras, but it was despised and almost extinct by the start of the 20th century. At that time, the revival of postural yoga was at first driven by Indian nationalism. Advocates such as Yogendra and Kuvalayananda made yoga acceptable in the 1920s, treating it as a medical subject. From the 1930s, the "father of modern yoga" Krishnamacharya developed a vigorous postural yoga, influenced by gymnastics, with transitions (vinyasas) that allowed one pose to flow into the next.
The Story of Yoga: From Ancient India to the Modern West is a cultural history of yoga by Alistair Shearer, published by Hurst in 2020. It narrates how an ancient spiritual practice in India became a global method of exercise, often with no spiritual content, by way of diverse movements including Indian nationalism, the Theosophical Society, Swami Vivekananda's coming to the west, self-publicising western yogis, Indian muscle builders, Krishnamacharya's practice in Mysore, and pioneering teachers like B. K. S. Iyengar.
