Alison West

The director of Yoga Union and the Yoga Union Center for Back & Scoliosis is Alison West. After 10 years of intensive study and teaching Yoga in New York, both at the Sivananda Center and at Jivamukti, she created Yoga Union in 1996 in SoHo. She studied Astanga Yoga in New York with Eddie Stern and in Mysore with Sri K. Pattabhi Jois for several years. She continued to learn Iyengar Yoga for alignment during this time, particularly with Kevin Gardiner, Mary Dunn, and later Genny Kapuler. Alison also studied under the Iyengars in Pune. In the early 1980s, she began studying Yoga theory and the subtle techniques of pranayama, meditation, mantras, yantras, and mud at the Sivananda institutes in Munich and New York. She resumed her Shambhala pieces of training in NYC and continued her meditation studies with TKV Desikachar during a retreat at Colgate University in 1993. Ramana Maharshi and Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj were two of her spiritual mentors.

Alison teaches three-pillar hands-on teacher training courses that need the "Gold Standard"* 200 hours and a 500-hour Mandala of Yoga Master program across the country, as well as seminars and master classes in Europe and the Middle East, as well as group and private workshops while in Manhattan. She also teaches via the internet. Both the 200-hour and 500-hour levels of Yoga Union teacher training are registered with the Yoga Alliance. She is also the founder and director of the world's first and only 150-hour Back Care and Scoliosis Certification Program. She completed Yoga for Back Health in Yoga Journal on-demand, which you may access at any time.

Alison was a key influence behind the establishment of Yoga for NY in 2007, a group that represents all yoga studios, teachers, and students in the state of New York as the state attempted to license Teacher Training Courses. Yoga practitioner. She was elected as the CEO and President of Yoga for New York, which was successful in defeating the licensing attempt with a measure signed by Governor Paterson. During these events, she was featured on the front page of the New York Times. She also defeated the city's attempt to levy a "class tax" on Yoga classes, despite the widespread belief that such a tax could not be implemented.

Born: 1969