The Yoga Syllabus — original introduction
Kay Mouradian
Preserved from the original website’s yoga.html. Historical wording retained.

Part of my early research for my doctorate in education took me to India in the mid-seventies. My objective was to build a curriculum in yoga for my community college in Los Angeles and I developed this syllabus as a guide for those teaching yoga in public education.  Since one of my findings resulted in discovering how little westerners understand yoga and the effect of traditional yoga postures on the physical body, I developed adaptations of the traditional yoga postures  to ease the possibility of injury.  What is good can also be bad and Westerners tend to become competitive in mastering yoga postures, never considering cultural differences of the East and West.  The westerner’s body tends to be far less flexible than the body of an Orient. Time and patience are the keys to gradually increasing the body’s flexibility.

Wanting to go beyond yoga’s asanas, the physical postures, I felt the need to introduce meditation from an academic point of view...stressing how to understand the thought process.  The highest yoga is said to be the control of the mind and most of us have no understanding of how our minds work.  Discovering what thought is, what areas of the mind thought springs from and learning how habitual our minds are can open  new avenues of self discovery.

This syllabus was written specifically for educators but the information within it is valuable for anyone interested in learning the basics of meditation and learning about the different kinds of yoga.