bhavani — The Yoga Space

BHAVANI LORRAINE NELSON

Guest Artist/Teacher- Sanskrit Study/Kirtan/voice performance

Singer, Songwriter, Kirtan Wallah, Inspirational Teacher, Professional-level Kripalu Yoga Teacher, and Distinguished Toastmaster

Bhavani credits as the beginning of her pull toward a career in teaching the moment as a six-year-old when she taught the Brownie scout next to her how to make a carnation from a Kleenex tissue. Her path was further clarified when her eighth grade English teacher asked her to teach sentence diagramming—a lost art—to the class. Since that time whenever Bhavani learned something she enjoyed, she ended up sharing it with others.

That sharing included classic voice and vocal pedagogy, guitar and macrame in her traveling years, junior high mathematics for the city of Baltimore, and third grade math on television for the state of MD. Always she was known for taking subjects that seemed complicated to others and explaining them in clear, understandable language.

Along the way, she was also called upon to use other skills as she did work in theater and opera companies, became a classical deejay on a prominent NYC radio station, did voiceover work, and led choirs. There again she took that experience and shared it in programs teaching public speaking, voice projection, and freeing the voice for speaking or singing.

But behind all that she learned and all that she shared in her teaching, Bhavani maintained a study and experience of the spiritual. In the beginning it was through her singing for many Christian denominations, then moving into Eastern contemplative practices, and finally ending up at Kripalu in 1988. There she immersed herself in yoga, including deep practice in meditation, pranayama, and the Sanskrit chanting she’d first discovered through Ram Das in 1970.

Bhavani counts as her spiritual teachers Kenneth G. Mills, Yogi Amrit Desai, Sharon Salzberg, Joseph Goldstein, Sylvia Boorstein, Ruth Denison, Namadeva Acharya (Thomas Ashley-Farrand), and Russill Paul.

As she’d always done, Bhavani didn’t keep the practices she learned to herself, but once again shared her knowledge in user-friendly ways, leading at Kripalu and around the world workshops and programs particularly on various types of meditation, but also yogic tools to relieve stress, and the joys of sounding—especially chanting.