ABOUT KETUL
My yoga studies began in 1971 at the Integral Yoga Institute in NYC. At the same time, I began studying dramaturgy and acting with Stella Adler at her studio in NYC.
In addition to yoga, I studied tai chi, modern dance and acrobatics with Katya Delakova in her program The Art of Moving, which she taught at Sarah Lawrence College. I studied Shakespeare with Ada Brown Mather of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. While working with Stella, she insisted I take horseback riding lessons and study the philosophy of Spinoza. Stella also arranged an audition for me in a conservatory at SUNY Purchase College of Arts. I earned a BFA in acting at Purchase.
While working with Stella, Ada and Katya, I began teaching yoga in 1974. Most of my teaching was with private clients. I was privileged to have the composer Samuel Barber and several members of the New York Philharmonic among my students.
After graduating from Purchase, I performed in off-Broadway plays and summer theater in Provincetown, MA. I was hired by Shakespeare and Company in Lenox, MA where I first studied with my voice mentor Kristin Linklater. At the end of my contract with Shakespeare and Company, I moved across Lenox into the Kripalu Center for Yoga and Health.
At Kripalu I became co-director of the Rest and Renewal, and Health for Life programs. It was in the Health for Life program I began to specialize in teaching people living with chronic and life-threatening illnesses. A few of us from Health for Life coordinated with the Boston AIDS Action Coalition. We led retreat programs for HIV and AIDS patients at a monastery in Boston.
I left Kripalu to travel to Albuquerque NM to attend classes in ayurvedic medicine with Dr. Vasant Lad. At the same time, I was hired to create a yoga program for dancers at the White Mountains Summer Dance Festival in NH. The program I created for the dance festival led to me teaching yoga to dancers and musicians at the Juilliard School in NYC.
Back in NYC, I opened my own studio and developed my Rasa Yoga program. I continued studies in ayurveda, Feldenkrais, Alexander and Laban techniques and in Polarity Therapy. During those years I traveled to the south of France each summer to teach German artist Anselm Kiefer and his wife Renate Graf.
In 2005, I moved to Boulder Colorado and began a long sabbatical. In 2010, I adapted what had been Rasa Yoga into the Rasa Yoga Experiment. In 2013, I was diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease. I began classes in 3rd Law Dance Theater’s Dance for Parkinson’s Program. I traveled to Orkney, Scotland to resume voice work with Kristin Linklater at the voice center she established there. Katie Elliott, the artistic director of the 3rd Law Dance Theater, persuaded me to start a yoga class for Parkinson’s patients. Now, former students in NYC have persuaded me to teach online Zoom classes for students across the country, Canada, and Europe.
The experiment continues to unfold.
WHY A VIDEO AND WEBSITE
This endeavor, a website and video, came about when a student, who attended classes at the Rasa Yoga Studio in Manhattan, many years ago, tracked me down here in Colorado. She’d been practicing for more than 20 years with an audio cassette I’d made sometime in the 90’s. Her cassette broke. That it had continued to work so long was incredible. She asked if I had another, and if she could buy one. I went to the cellar and was astonished to find a couple cassettes.
The cassettes had been so poorly made and are horribly outdated. I thought I might record a video on my smartphone. A video would bring the practice up to date and provide a visual for my friends in NYC from all those years ago. One day, on a walk with Katie Elliott, the artistic director of, and co-founder of, the 3rd Law Dance Theater, I told her my intention. After a moment, she asked, “would it be okay with you if 3rd Law produced it?” So, here we are.
Katie and 3rd Law have been so kind and generous. It took a while to pull together. Largely because our videographer, amazing videographer, is in such demand. A few weeks before our scheduled shooting, I was hospitalized with acute on chronic heart failure. We shot the video two weeks after I was discharged from the hospital.
I’m telling you this because this approach to practicing yoga can benefit anyone, any age, any condition in most remarkable ways. That sounds like a sales pitch, but there’s no product I’m selling. I’m only offering an invitation to enter an investigation, an experiment. I’m sharing my history, my experience, my failures. If any of it seems appropriate or of value, you’re welcome to it.
I’m an old man now, and fat. I’ve endured and continue to endure a host of diseases and some limitations. I’ve survived sexual abuse, a teen-age suicide attempt, and years of alcohol dependency. In all the years I’ve been teaching, I’ve encountered these, and many other stories, in the persons I’ve had the privilege to work with. My history, with theirs, has been the evolution of what I now call The Rasa Yoga Experiment.
I was delighted to receive a friend’s comments after she watched the video. “You’re enormous!” she wrote. “In your light blue outfit, you’re as vast as the sky.” Okay. Why not be as vast as the sky, no matter what your story is or what your body looks and feels like.
Be willing to experiment. Perhaps fail, if you’re lucky enough.