This fun and wonderfully good-quality footage from a 1950 French newsreel is too neato not to share. We love how they show shopkeepers and businessmen finding ways to practice during their daily grind. From the ‘When Yoga Was Weird” files via YogaDawg Howls.
Rough translation of the description via the google machine (if anyone can do better, please do!):
Among Yogis
Reportage tour at the Academy of Hatha Yoga in Paris, showing a yoga session led by Professor FERRER. Her students perform the same movements as he and men at their place of work, do yoga exercises.
A better translation thanks to YD pal Stefani Crabtree:
This broadcast reports from the Academy for Hatha Yoga in Paris, showing instructor Ferrer leading a yoga session. His students not only follow the asanas in this class, but also incorporate elements of yoga into their daily work routine.
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here’s something similar, yoga in the UK in the 50’s/60’s
Very cute! I like the film’s idea that yoga spreads from the studio to the workplace.
Wow, that is so great to find footage of Lucien Ferrer, I’ve never even thought of searching for that !
I happen to practice yoga in his “lineage”, and I’d like to share a few elements with you people who probably have never heard of him 🙂
Ferrer was Roger Clerc (the founder of the “yoga de l’énergie”, which is one of the main schools here in France) teacher, and a healer.
Ferrer was also Yvonne Millerand first teacher, and after his death in 1964 she went to Chennai and became Krishnamacharya student.
He had a gift for manual and energetic therapy, and he helped, relieved or even saved on some occasions thousands of people. You may call that reiki, hypnotizing or magnetism, whatever… in any case his talent or natural aptitude for feeling the minute and seeing the unseen lead to a very subtle yoga.
His emphasis was on the “inner” yoga, that is : meditation and visualization of the channels, and according to his students (Clerc having written wonderful hommages about him), his very presence had something magnetic. But of course, you know well that this is what most charismatic teachers do to their entusiastic students… who can tell now ?
The second major element of his teaching (in my simple opinion) was the combination of indian, tibetan and chinese features in his teaching. Of course, it remained an “indian yoga”, but he used a lot the chinese concepts of yin/yang and especially the meridians in his visualizations.
Surprisingly, he also incorporated tibetan yoga exercises, that we still practice as “les 18 mouvements de Naropa” (no need to translate that I guess ;). He never even met a tibetan yogi, but compared to what you can easily find on youtube or on the frescos of the Lukhang, it is astonishingly similar.
Finally, I’d like to add that Ferrer’s books were and are treasures. They are quite difficult to find, and haven’t been translated, but please believe this humble french man when he says that these are the real deal. Yes I know, the good old secret book trick, with the many ultimate secret techniques and magical runes… but nope, some books are simply great and helpful.
As I feel it, these books and the students of his students still spread this little man’s huge vibrations, 50 years from now.
Voilà 😉
Just saw this on another blog site! So glad its getting traction. Amazing footage! Thanks YogaDork for sharing.
Sivana