Sri Dharma Mittra

Almost every yoga teacher who has reached for a poster of "all the postures" has reached, knowingly or not, for the work of Sri Dharma Mittra. His Master Yoga Chart of 908 Postures, photographs of his own body in every asana he could find or invent, arranged in a single dense grid, is one of yoga's iconic images. The man behind it, a Brazilian-born teacher in New York, has trained so many instructors over fifty years that he is widely known as "the teacher's teacher."¹²

Bodybuilder to sannyasi

He was born in 1939 in Pirapora, in the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais, and raised Catholic. As a young man he was an athlete, active in bodybuilding, wrestling and jiu-jitsu, and in 1962 he won a national bodybuilding title.² That same year his brother began studying in New York with the Indian teacher Yogi Gupta (Swami Kailashananda), and in September 1964 Dharma followed, meeting Yogi Gupta and becoming his disciple.² Ten years of intensive ashram life followed, full-time karma yoga and initiation as a sannyasi, and from 1967 he began teaching asana and pranayama, which he has done nearly every day since.²

In 1975, with his guru's blessing, he left the ashram and founded his own school in New York, later named the Dharma Yoga Center.² Its most famous artifact came a few years later. As an offering to his guru, working alone with a camera and a squeeze-bulb shutter, Dharma photographed himself in more than 1,350 postures, pinning the prints to wires with clothespins, and in 1984 completed the Master Yoga Chart of 908 Postures. It was first handed out at bus stops to advertise his classes; now it hangs on studio walls worldwide.² His 2003 book Asanas: 608 Yoga Poses drew on the same archive.³

What Dharma Yoga is

Dharma Yoga is a classical Hatha-Raja practice, graceful but demanding, and unusually devotional for a New York studio. It folds asana into deep relaxation, meditation, and an ethical emphasis Dharma states plainly: the transformative practice, he teaches, is compassion, learning "to see themselves in others."⁴ Classes are taught in tiers, and the school's "Life of a Yogi" (LOAY) teacher trainings run from 50 through 800 hours, many taught by Dharma himself well into his eighties.⁵ The 908-posture chart remains the lineage's visual canon.

The lineage today

The Dharma Yoga Center operates in Manhattan's Flatiron district, running classes seven days a week, in person and on Zoom with an on-demand library, under longtime director Eva Julia Grubler, with Sri Dharma Mittra, now in his late eighties, still sharing teachings in its trainings.⁶⁵ A worldwide network of LOAY-certified Dharma Yoga teachers carries the method beyond New York. A listing that names Sri Dharma Mittra as its lineage is offering a classical, devotional, physically serious practice, closer to old-school hatha than to gym-style flow, and shaped throughout by that ethic of compassion.

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