Yoga legacy and Bhakti
PBS yoga pioneer Lilias Folan has died at 90, prompting tributes and a renewed look at her role in mainstreaming yoga through TV (x.com). Meanwhile the Bhakti Yoga Conference—featuring Sadhvi Bhagawati and HappyJackYoga from Harvard Divinity School—focused on “Bhakti in Action,” emphasizing service as practice (video linked) ( ).
Lilias’s TV series began as a local show on WCET on October 5, 1970, was picked up for national PBS carriage within a few years, and the program remained in distribution into the late 1990s. (en.wikipedia.org) The program catalogue lists about 500 half-hour episodes, and Folan produced 11 home-video releases and multiple books; her home videos have been reported to have sold nearly 700,000 copies. (en.wikipedia.org) At its commercial peak the series was carried on roughly 190 public-television stations across the U.S., and local scheduling sometimes placed her show as a lead-in to children’s programming such as Sesame Street on some PBS lineups. (integralyogamagazine.org) Folan’s lineage of study included T.K.V. Desikachar, B.K.S. Iyengar and Swami Chidananda of the Divine Life Society, and she was later honored with the title Swami Kavitananda by Goswami Kriyananda in 1998. (yogajournal.com) The Bhakti Yoga Conference is organized by Happy Jack Yoga as a free global series featuring more than 40 sessions, with its opening gathering live-streamed from Harvard Divinity School and a closing session hosted at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies. (happyjackyoga.com) Sadhvi Bhagawati Saraswati, Ph.D. — described in the conference materials as a Stanford graduate, renunciate monk, bestselling author and recipient of a presidential service award — presented a session titled “Bhakti in Action” that positioned seva, or selfless service, as a central, practiceable expression of bhakti. (youtube.com) The conference roster and schedule named interfaith and institutional partners and speakers such as His Holiness S.B. Keshava Swami at the Harvard opening and Radhanath Swami at the Oxford closing, underscoring the event’s campus-hosted live components alongside its global online programming. (happyjackyoga.com)
