I’m Jared Israel Musiker & I am a multidisciplinary practitioner with a deep fascination for unconventional & underrated methods of improving contemporary being.

I teach Yoga that follows the Vinyasa-Krama method of Sri Tirumalai Krishnamacharya, the father of modern Yoga. This for me is an effective method of developing cognitive & physical flexibility which are essential faculties in the emerging world. 

My journey started in the Rainbow Nation of South Africa. I hold the proudly South African values of pluralism, diversity, & Ubuntu (“humanity towards others”) close to my heart. & I am equally proud of my unconventional family tree, with strong Jewish roots & even a fare share of eccentrics.

I was fortunate to start my Yoga practice at a young age. I had already been introduced to simple forms of breathe-awareness & mindfulness by my martial arts instructor from China during my teens. Not that I was mature enough to fully grasp the deeper significances, nonetheless I felt quite comfortable in stillness.

But it was the advice from a forward thinking psychologist that helped me find my way to a Yoga practice at age 17.

I started with hot yoga, where the austerity of the heated room & stoic teachers facilitated a truly transformative practice unlike any other; there certainly was no shouting out a running commentary typical of conventional Hot yoga styles.

Simultaneously I was learning about the Ashtanga-Vinyasa method, although I had enough of the dogmatism & competitiveness inside the ballet studio, this kept me at the fringes of the Mysore room.

Movement itself is something which fascinates me, there is a depth that one finds through understanding the relationship that movement has with time & space. Movement is after all the fundamental state of the universe breathing around us. Movement endows us with the ability to transform, evolve & gain new perspectives as well as explore states that can best be described as psychedelic without mushrooms.

After completing my studies in Dance, Theatre, & Contemporary Performance at the Cape Academy of Performing Arts in 2014, I enrolled in my first Yoga teacher training in Heated Power-Vinyasa Yoga at the YogaLife studio in Cape Town.

This training was informed by contemporary mindfulness & relevant research from neuroscience alongside a truly mind-blowing flowing practice. I am deeply grateful to have worked & absorbed so much from my teachers Dave & Lauren Porter whom helped me grow both on & off the mat.

After 7 years of daily practice, I started teaching postural yoga classes. However, I knew that at some point it was essential that I make the pilgrimage to the place where Yoga had flourished. In 2016 I spent a few months in the Northern parts of India, learning about the roots & people that practice traditional forms of Yoga which had much less to do with all these acrobatic postures.

In Varanasi I met an orange robed baba who taught me many lessons, walking me through the importance of the morning & evening Aarti, the significance of watching the cremation of a loved one. There I was also introduced to the brave Aghori & got to glimpse a kind of reality that my world cannot even begin to comprehend.

Here I discovered a great reverence for Yoga that cannot really be fathomed anywhere else; renunciation is not something which is undertaken lightly or at a nearby studio. These are supreme acts far from the modern lineages underneath Krishnamacharya’s dynamic “jumping Yoga” like Ashtanga-Vinyasa or Viniyoga. That is not to say that these methods are not capable of working great wonders though, only that respect must be given to the true enunciates of this world.

Nonetheless, later closer to Rishikesh I spent time in the Ashrams learning Shatkarma, Kriya Yoga, Nada yoga, Indian Classical Music Theory, & Swami Sivananda’s Yoga Nīdra technique. I also was directed to a female Swami, & Jyotisha with whom I spent hours with.

I am part of a generation who never had the opportunity to study directly with the grand master teachers of modern Yoga such as BKS Iyengar, Pattabhi Jois, or Swami Sivananda. For this reason I pursue the fundamentals of Krishnamacharya’s method through what is accessible. At the same time I seek out unusual teachers because they offer unique insights & innovations which prove invaluable & reveals the true service Yoga provides in this time.

I attended workshops with the master of the physiological context of Yoga, Simon Borg-Olivier, & Ana Forrest’s advanced training program. Both of which were invaluable experiences during this ongoing development however I always relate this back onto Krishnamacharya’s Ashtanga-Vinyasa method.

In 2021 I graduated with distinction from the department of History, Religions, & Philosophy at SOAS University in London in the Traditions of Yoga & Meditation where I my research investigated the disproportionate number of contemporary Western practitioners, renunciants, & advocates who stem from a Jewish background- coinciding with renewed interest in Jewish esoteric & mystical practices in a post-Holocaust setting.

I believe it is vitally important to understand what this thing, that we now call Yoga, is. What exactly does it mean to be a Yoga teacher & why this has become so significant to society? These questions I think hint towards something far more interesting & valuable than what is merely reduced to some subversive neoliberal agenda.

I think we live in an extraordinary time where we have instant access to almost all secret teachings, texts, & masters. We have probed deeply into almost every area including beyond our own atmosphere, & simultaneously nearly exhausted every subject. Now there is need to each personally be able to make some sort of sense of all of this.

From this general uncertainty & angst emerges the role of a multifaceted facilitator of growth & a new iteration of Yogic philosophies in conjunction with other disciplines.

In January of 2023, I finally get to visit BNS Iyengar in Mysuru. At 96 years old, is the last of his generation of Sri Krishnamacharya’s original Ashtanga-Vinyasa students & the younger contemporary of Pattabhi Jois. BNS Iyengar still teaches a complete method of Asana, Pranayama, Mudra, & Philosophy in the Mysore style- something which has been lost by other Ashtanga lineages.

Supposedly the quintessential sequences of connected asanas in Ashtanga-Vinyasa Yoga were drawn by Sri Krishnamacharya from the lost palm-leaf manuscript called the Yoga Korunta, subsequently destroyed by ants. However, I can’t help but ruminate on whether this text was not actually a poetic metaphor for the human body? A book to be read & studied full of the fragility of impermanence & concealing the eternal within its pages.

This is the gift of modern Yoga, an opportunity to re-embody the self in a way that dispels the 21st Century angst & equipping us with enough cognitive & physical flexibility to navigate brighter futures. This is perhaps a departure point from purist ideas about what Yoga might be, yet there is no name more befitting the honour of this evolving practice.