Christopher Key Chapple is Doshi Professor of Indic and Comparative Theology at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, where he founded and currently directs the Master of Arts in Yoga Studies, delivered face to face and through hybrid learning. This Glo course counts toward one of the certificates required for the completion of the degree. Chris began Yoga as a teenager, receiving direct instruction from Gurani Anjali in classical Yoga at Yoga Anand Ashram in Amityville, New York, from 1972 until 1985, when he and his wife moved to California. He has published more than twenty books, including Karma and Creativity (1986), Nonviolence to Animals, Earth, and Self in Asian Traditions (1993), Reconciling Yogas (2003), Yoga and the Luminous (2008), and Living Landscapes in Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain Yogas (2019), all available through SUNY Press. In 2002 he started the first of many Yoga Studies programs at LMU and, in 2004, the Hill Street Center for Yoga and Meditation. Chris serves on numerous advisory boards worldwide and has been part of the Glo community since its inception.
Education
Five major afflictions define human action or karma: ignorance, egoism, addictive attraction, revulsion, and non-recognition of our mortality. Due to various forms of complacency and lower-level success, one can be tricked into the deluded attitude that spiritual work is not needed. However, the pain and suffering of daily life will eventually prompt the spiritual seeker to move out of complacency into sustained spiritual practice, sadhana.
Education
Listen to a lecture and learn how Tantra offered challenges to the puritanism of Jainism, urging its followers to worship the goddess and engage in the five forbidden M's of drink, drugs, meat, fish, and fornication. Haribhadra, acknowledging this tradition's allure, advised his students to embrace Eightfold Yoga, re-aligning Patanjali's system with Jaina principles and with the worship of eight wisdom goddess who foster benevolence, protection, power, light, stability, beauty, radiance, and liberation.
Education
The spiritual path begins with an experience of yearning for something greater than the humdrum of daily existence and its dramas. By exploring your own karmic narrative, you enter the path of yoga. You cultivate benevolence through the practice of the Five Great Vows. Consequently, you're able to meditate, and enter a state of equipoise; whether in circumstances of praise or blame, culminating in overcoming the karmas that characterize mundane life, leading to freedom.