Priya Krishnamurthy

📍 Mysore, India

🗣 Kannada, Tamil, Hindi, English

I was born in Mysore. My family is not from the yoga world — my father is a silk merchant on Devaraja Market — but I started practicing Ashtanga at 19 with a teacher in the Jois lineage and have not stopped for 16 years. Mysore is the origin city of Ashtanga yoga and serious practitioners have been coming here from around the world since the 1970s. What they come for is not a retreat or a workshop but a Mysore-style practice: each student works at their own pace through a set sequence with individual adjustments from the teacher. No music, no theming, no performance. Just the practice at 6am when the city is waking up and the air still smells of jasmine from the overnight garlands. I also take people through the actual Mysore that I grew up in — the silk market, the Devaraja bazaar, the Chamundeshwari temple at dawn — because the yoga makes more sense when you understand the city it came from.