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Bringing together mind and body through the paths of the East and West

Walking

I began studying meditation in 1982 and teaching yoga in 1989. Initially my motives were driven by athletics - I desired a calmer mind to better focus on my high jumping. The guided meditations I listened to on cassette-tape helped enormously, and I went on to have a successful athletic career at The University of Minnesota.

I was drawn to asana similarly. The relentless athletic training took a toll on my body, and I desired something to regain wholeness. Hatha Yoga seemed the logical solution; and for awhile, it was. I delved earnestly into the Iyengar method. It suited my engineering mind beautifully, as the body was dissected into clear-cut angles and lines. For my young-man mind, this was perfect!

I practiced doggedly and attained a degree of proficiency in the most advanced poses fairly quickly. Unfortunately, contentment of mind and comfort in body remained elusive. I believed fervently in the yoga, so when faced with adversity, I threw myself more fiercely into the practice. By 1991 I was practicing 4-6 hours per day. By 1994 I was in shambles. My body was wracked with pain such that practicing asana became impossible. I could no longer enjoy my passion for bicycling or skiing. Even sleep became difficult due to the chronic back pain. I came to believe that asana was a dead-end road and returned to the meditation practice, which I'd largely put aside during this foray into the asana-focused technique.

Walking

This dismissal of physical-practice turned out to be short-lived. In 1994 I stumbled upon a yoga teacher outside of Madison, Wisconsin who integrated sustainable agriculture, sport and yoga. This crossing of paths proved fortuitous, as Roger Eischens showed me the way to a yoga that healed the rift between my body and mind. For the next six years I studied at his side in the Madison countryside while in residence at Cress Spring Farm. Living and farming at a yoga retreat center healed my body such that I could resume my joy of athletics, work full days and rejoin life.

By 2000 our egalitarian experiment had run its course and the community of Cress Spring Farm had largely disintegrated. I moved two miles up the road to the Village of Blue Mounds where my focus shifted from healing the mind/body rift to exploring the spiritual components of Yoga.

In my quest to learn more about the spiritual underpinnings of Yoga, I had the good fortune of meeting Sri Morari Bapu. In multiple trips to India, Bapuji showed me the essence of Yoga, and simultaneously, showed me that what I practiced and taught, Modern Postural Yoga, had a very tenuous connection to historical Yoga.

As I deepened my understanding of Yoga’s rich, spiritual history, the evidence supporting the narrative of Modern Postural Yoga’s antiquity and lineage continued unraveling. While I was disappointed and disillusioned to learn that Modern Postural Yoga was not as ancient as I had been led to believe, I felt freer to continue experimenting with and tweaking the movement form that I practiced and taught.

Alignment Yoga was the fruit of that experimentation, and for 15+ years I offered workshops nationwide, trained hundreds of teachers and taught thousands of individual sessions. While I remain proud of and committed to Alignment Yoga, my interests are now better described as Movement Lab. As researchers observe phenomena and run experiments in a laboratory, I am keenly interested in doing the same in the first-person somatic laboratory. I’m particularly interested in how movement influences the mind, and in particular, influences the regulation of emotion.

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Movement Lab extends to include my other life - that of an academic. In 2023 I completed a Ph.D. in the University of Wisconsin - Madison's Kinesiology department. My doctoral work was part of the Watson Human Performance Lab and the Center for Healthy Minds. I'm now faculty in the UW-Madison's program of Healthy Promotion and Health Equity. My research interests include post-secondary wellness education and the interface of mental and physical training.

 

Meditation is also a significant part of what I practice and teach. In 2010 I had the good fortune to meet the meditation master Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche, and since then have been a dedicated student. I am one of the founding members of Tergar Madison, and a facilitator who guides meditation group sessions, offers meditation interviews, and leads non-residential retreats. I also facilitate Joy of Living programs, both in person and online.

When not meditating and studying, I love to train. For the past 5+ years I've been increasing my running volume, and trying my hand at progressively longer trail running events. I am working at building the cardiovascular base that will allow me to participate in multi-hour events, with an interest in watching how my mind and body interact when far outside of the standard/usual comfort zone.

If you’ve made it this far – congratulations! Website best-practices generally discourage putting this much text on a landing page, though most titles (yoga teacher, student, athlete, meditator, etc.) don’t fully capture what I do. For this reason, I’ve diverged from best-practices to give you a better sense of who I am. If you’d like even more information, please feel free to take a look at my CV.

For the next few years I will be primarily teaching in and around Madison, WI, though I plan to expand my orbit upon reaching dissertator status. In the meantime, please keep in touch via the various workshops and classes that I teach, or through my blog and social media.

For more information, please see Scott's full CV.

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Scott Anderson Yoga
Box 144, Blue Mounds, WI 53517
scott@scottandersonyoga.com

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