priya thomas

(me on left "cobra", my grandfather on right "malasana")

Priya Thomas is a yoga instructor with a background in South Asian Art, Comparative Religion, and Sanskrit. Trained for 21 years in the classical South Indian dance form Bharatanatyam, her teacher was the primary pupil of T. Balasaraswati. She holds a BA from McGill University in Comparative Religion and a MA in Fine Arts from York University. She completed her yoga teacher training in 2010 at YogaSpace. She is a doctoral candidate in Dance Studies at York University working on a dissertation in the area of modern yoga. She is currently working on an entry on yoga for the Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism.
In addition to writing for this blog, she has contributed an entry on yoga to The Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism and a chapter to  Fields in Motion: Ethnography in the Fields of Dance (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2012) . She is also a songwriter/multi-instrumentalist with five solo releases (www.priyathomas.com) and an experimental project called iroquois falls.

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On a personal note: some have asked me why I started this blog. I think it's about gratitude. A few years ago now I lost perhaps the biggest influence/friend/teacher I had in my life to suicide. I got lucky and found yoga helped when I needed it most. My friend either did not have luck on his side this time around; or his illegible choices simply expressed the blueprint, the precise design for his own life. Maybe this blog is a memorial of sorts, or a reminder that all life is memorial. I thank all of my teachers and friends along the way that kept me standing: the folks at the West End YMCA, YogaSpace, Downward Dog, and Centre of Gravity. I hope the blog reaches out in some way.