About Peter Brother

As a child I loved riding my bicycle everywhere. I had a paper route and delivered papers on the bike. I remember when I was a teenager my biology teacher had a jaguar 3.4 sedan and I loved jaguars. I once rode the bike all the way downtown from Dorval – 14 miles one way to look at the cars in the showroom.

When I was 29 I was over weight had not really exercised for years, my daughter was born and I read Aerobics by Ken Cooper. I started running and lost 50 pounds in less than a year. 

Shortly thereafter I went riding one day with some friends who had “good bikes” and I couldn’t keep up even though I was probably in better shape than they were. That was the day I decided to buy an Italian racing bike. I was 31 and it was beautiful. I called her my Italian mistress and it seems I have had a love affair with Italian or Italian made bikes ever since.

Since then I have trained with riders trying out for the Canadian Olympic team (if I kept up with them for the first 6 mile lap it was a good ride) and have led many day rides for Great Canadian Bicycle Tours. I toured Europe in the summer of 1977 on my Italian racing bike. When in Switzerland I saw the legendary Eddy Mercx come through Martigny on the Tour de France. It was over in seconds. 

I have hiked the whole Bruce Trail (825km) a foot trail following the Niagara Escarpment at least once and several sections many times.  In the last few years I have  toured in Newfoundland in 2009and the east coast of New Brunswick in 2010.

  My Yoga Journey

Peter sees yoga as a way to practice mindfulness or awareness. These simple practices allow us to come back to the body and the breath – to integrate mind and body. Yoga balances the nervous system, the right and left brain, allowing us to reconnect with the source of who we are. See article on Hatha Yoga-Purpose (link?).

 The purpose of the practice is for us to become more aware of everything in our lives. Awareness allows us to experience life fully, to embrace life. It is an approach that goes against the grain of our prevailing culture because in includes embracing our discontent, our anguish and pain as well as our pleasures and joys. Through awareness we are present to the gift of the present moment.

 He has been practicing Yoga and Meditation for over 20 years and is a graduate of the ‘Yoga Sanctuary Teacher Training Program’, the ‘Meditation Teacher Training’ from the Himalayan Institute and the’Sananda Devi Teacher Training Program’(major influence Swami Satyananda). He has studied Structural and Ayurveda Yoga Therapy with Mukunda Stiles, Mindfulness Yoga with Frank Jude Boccio and is currently studying with Saraswathivasudevan, Chennai India.

 A major influence on his approach to yoga has come through studying with the Bihar School of Yoga started by Swami Satyananda Saraswati. He traveled to India in 2007 to meet him and to study there for a few weeks. His studies were over a 5-6 year period and included 4 years of study in Toronto and a year in Cleveland Ohio.

 Swami Satyananda’s major contributions to yoga include a systematic study of the effects of asana on the body, chakras and the nervous system. He also rediscovered the practice of Yoga Nidra, probably the most important practice for most of us.

Beginning of My Yoga Journey

I became interested in eastern viewpoints in my early 30’s. I met my first “real yogi” at a Jungian conference around 1979 and I was amazed at what an 80 year old man could do with his body. Soon after I bought “Light On Yoga”, by Iyengar and tried doing poses with partner. We weren’t very good, partially because we didn’t know what we were doing. I met a yoga a local teacher yoga and went to one of her classes and thought “this is very hard”. So I continued to dabble until I went to my first regular yoga classes with Maggie French in 1990.

To be continued.

More about Yoga here