Business of the Month: ISHTA Yoga, 816 Broadway
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If your plans for the year ahead involve sitting alone atop a mountain in search of enlightenment, you’re in luck. Our January Business of the Month, ISHTA Yoga (816 Broadway, btw. E. 11th and E. 12th Streets), offers a far more convivial, joyful, and sun-protected road to self-realization. This studio teaches an integrated approach to yoga that will equip you to find and pursue your own path to inner peace.
The origin story of ISHTA Yoga can be traced back to World War II. Mani Finger was a South African shell-shocked veteran who had become drug- and alcohol-dependent after coming back from the war. Several attempts to wean him off his addiction failed. So his father tried involving him in the family business, hoping that that might help. Mani was then sent on a business trip to Los Angeles and, as luck would have it, found himself staying at a hotel where Yogananda, the father of Western yoga according to many, was giving a lecture. Mani decided to check it out on a whim, and the experience so impacted him, that he sought a private meeting with the yogi. This encounter led Mani to fully immerse himself in the study of yoga and to eventually, after overcoming his addiction, turn his home back in South Africa into an ashram and popular teaching destination for visiting swamis.
Mani’s son Alan began to study at his father’s side at the age of 15. As their study progressed, they integrated into their practice elements of styles learned from the likes of Swami Venkatesandanda, Swami Nishraisananda, and Swami Shuddhanand Bharati. During the 1960s, they gradually turned their practice into a system called ISHTA that, though influenced by the multiple lineages that they had studied, aimed to teach students to draw from these selectively, based on their respective needs. Alan brought ISHTA yoga to Los Angeles in 1975 and founded there a yoga institute as well as the studio Yoga Works. He then moved in 1993 to New York, where he launched another set of studios. After a series of permutations, these studios became the ISHTA center and world headquarters, which he now co-owns along with his wife Sarah Platt-Finger and Mona Anand.
The ISHTA system helps students cultivate their physical and emotional wellbeing. Paradoxically, though, It does not set this or anything else as a goal, because its focus is not external. Instead, it prioritizes self-acceptance and the habit of connecting with yourself and enjoying yourself in the moment. As a practical matter, this approach results in a far more individualized and almost self-directed practice than one aiming to achieve, say, an unassisted handstand or a wounded peacock pose. Because of ISHTA Yoga’s focus on the individual, the studio makes an effort to cater to the diverse needs of its students. This has resulted in wide range of classes, including foundational ones as well as ones in restorative yoga, yoga nidra (meditation), yin yoga (which involve long-held supported poses), vinyasa flow, power yoga, and somatic flow, among others.
The eclecticism and flexibility that sets ISHTA Yoga apart reflects a general lightness that characterizes the style. A line favored by Alan — “the more seriously you take yourself, the more serious your problems” — captures this attitude, which leans towards acceptance and openness and away from doctrine and expectations. This attitude has shaped not just the style of practice, but also the studio’s culture, which constitutes an important part of ISHTA Yoga’s appeal. Advanced yogis looking to deepen their knowledge may come in drawn by the breadth and depth of the instructors’ expertise; and injured yogis may come in drawn by the studio’s reputation for handling these conditions sensitively. But people stay for the welcoming and supportive community that the ISHTA Yoga has managed to foster. It’s a place where people linger. People travel there from other neighborhoods, because of the connections and friendships that they have made with regulars at the studio. A yogini who was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s recently wrote about how ISHTA Yoga had become the center of her life due both to the sense of peace that she derived from the practice and to the sense of belonging she felt at the studio. But perhaps nothing offers greater evidence of the centrality of community at ISHTA Yoga than its experience during the pandemic.
The neighborhood South of Union Square, like many others in the city, had over half a dozen yoga studios. Most shut down during the pandemic. ISHTA Yoga, on the other hand, without even lowering prices, saw its business increase and its broader community come together, as online classes allowed far-flung former yogis to rejoin classes at the studio from afar. So successful did remote classes prove, that they were combined with in-person classes when those resumed. They have also become a means for the studio to expand its popular international teacher training program.
Closer to home, ISHTA Yoga is also looking for ways to partner with nearby local businesses so as to make itself even more available to people in the neighborhood and further expand the community that, as ISHTA’s manager puts it, sits at the core of the studio’s identity.
I think it’s a beautiful practice. And it’s just wonderful the blend [of people] that happens here and what the practice evokes in them personally and in their connections with each other. I think that’s just very special.
For creating a kind place and community that supports and even renders fun our individual journeys towards inner calm, we’re thrilled to name ISHTA Yoga our January 2025 Business of the Month.
What special small business would you like to see featured next? Just click here to nominate our next one. Thank you! #shoplocalnyc
Here is a map of all our Businesses of the Month: