Profile of Tao Porchon-Lynch
Tao Porchon-Lynch (born Täo Andrée Porchon, August 13, 1918 — February 21, 2020) was an American yoga master and award-winning author of French and Indian descent. She discovered yoga in 1926 when she was eight years old in India and studied with, among others, Sri Aurobindo and Indra Devi, B.K.S. Iyengar, K. Pattabhi Jois, Swami Prabhavananda, and Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. Even at age 101, she still taught a weekly class in New York, and led programs across the globe.
She was the author of two books, including her autobiography, Dancing Light: The Spiritual Side of Being Through the Eyes of a Modern Yoga Master, which won a 2016 IPPY Award and three 2016 International Book Awards. In the front matter endorsement, Deepak Chopra said: "One of the most acclaimed yoga teachers of our century, Tao Porchon-Lynch... is a mentor to me who embodies the spirit of yoga and is an example of Ageless Body, Timeless Mind. Like yoga, she teaches us to let go and to have exquisite awareness in every moment." She was the recipient of India's highly prestigious award Padma Shri in 2019 for her excellent work in the field of Yoga. Biography of Tao Porchon-Lynch
Tao Porchon-Lynch was born on August 13, 1918, on a ship in the middle of the English Channel, two months premature. Her father was from France, while her mother was a native Indian (Manipuri) Her mother died when Tao was seven months old and she was raised by her aunt and uncle. Her uncle, who designed railroads, often brought her along for trips around Asia, travelling as far as Singapore. The family owned vineyards in the wine region of the Rhône River Valley, located in Southern France.
At age eight, Tao witnessed a group of youthful yoga practitioners exercising on a beach. This encounter got Porchon interested in yoga, who stated in an interview with Guinness World Records, "I wanted to do the amazing things that they were doing with their bodies." Going against the advice of her aunt, who remarked that yoga was meant predominantly for males, she started practising yoga, although she did not get involved in it professionally until much later in her life.
Model, dancer and actress
In her early career, Porchon worked in the fashion industry. She found success as a model and won several titles, including "Best Legs in Europe". For a period of time she was signed under the Lever Brothers. She travelled around the globe modeling in such cities as Paris.
During the Second World War, Porchon moved to London and became a cabaret performer under the mentorship of Noël Coward. Notable journalist Quentin Reynolds took note of Porchon, writing that she made a "dark London brighter". Porchon-Lynch grew up speaking French and Meiteilon. Thus, she had to overcame the language barrier learning English. After the war died down, she relocated to the United States, where she got a job as an actress under Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, appearing in various Hollywood motion pictures, including Show Boat (1951), also featuring Kathryn Grayson, and The Last Time I Saw Paris (1954), in which she co-starred with Elizabeth Taylor. During her career as an actress, she frequently gave free yoga sessions to her fellow actors and actresses. She was also featured in the documentary If You’re Not In the Obit, Eat Breakfast, a television film which premiered in 2017.
Yoga teacher
Tao Porchon-Lynch was married to Bill Lynch around 1962, and in 1967 she abandoned her acting job, deciding to become a full-time yogi.
In the same year, Porchon-Lynch assisted in the establishment of the American Wine Society (AWS) with her spouse. When it split into different branches across the United States, she was selected in 1970 to be the Vice-President of the AWS in Southern New York. She also frequently appeared as part of the judging panel in various wine competitions. She later became the publisher and editor-in-chief of the wine appreciation magazine, The Beverage Communicator, distributed by the AWS. With her fellow yoga practitioners, Porchon-Lynch organized annual wine appreciation trips to France. In 1976, she became one of the founders of the Yoga Teachers Alliance, now known as the Yoga Teachers Association. In 1982 her husband died and she set up the Westchester Institute of Yoga in New York, which has students from all over the world. In 1995, with Indra Devi, she flew to Israel to attend the Yoga for Peace International Peace Conference. Porchon-Lynch has also been one of B. K. S. Iyengar's disciples in yoga and reportedly the first "foreign" student of his.
Porchon-Lynch has embraced her age and carried her yoga with her. She has mentioned, "I'm going to teach yoga until I can't breathe anymore." She received the Guinness World Records title of world's oldest yoga teacher from Berniece Bates in May 2012. Porchon-Lynch was 93 when she broke the world record. In 2013, in collaboration with Tara Stiles, she released a DVD on yoga, titled Yoga with Tao Porchon-Lynch. In addition, she published a book about meditation, titled Reflections: The Yogic Journey of Life.
In 2016, Tao Porchon-Lynch received the Women's Entrepreneurship Day Pioneer Award at the United Nations in recognition of her achievements in the sports world.
Ballroom dancer and meditator
Outside of yoga, Porchon-Lynch continued to involve herself in competitive dancing, particularly in ballroom tango. She had several hundred first-place titles in competitive dancing. Her youngest dance partners were Hayk Balasanyan, Vard Margaryan and Anton Bilozorov.
In her spare time, Porchon-Lynch enjoyed meditating. In August 2014, she still drove her Smart car.
Death
According to her representative, Tao Porchon-Lynch taught her last yoga class on 16 Febrary 2020, and passed away peacefully on the morning of 21 Febrary, 2020.
Further reading
Articles
Books
0 Comments
Biography of Gloria Vanderbilt 1925: A 5 million dollar baby Gloria Vanderbilt (with full name Gloria Laura Madeleine Sophie Vanderbilt) was born in New York on 20 February 1924, into the wealthiest family in America, whose Patriarch Cornelius Vanderbilt (1794-1877), her great-great grandfather made his enormous fortune from steamship and railroad and left behind about 200 million dollars. Her father, Reginald Claypoole Vanderbilt (1880–1925), unfortunately, was a gambler and an alcoholic, who died of liver disease when Gloria was not yet 2 years old, and left her with 5 million dollar in trust fund (67 million dollar in today's value). 1925-1933: A movable feast in Europe Her mother, Gloria Mogan(1904-1965), the twin sister of Thelma Furness(who was ex-lover of Edward VIII when he was Prince of Wales), took Little Gloria to Paris to live. And from then on, they(or rather her mother Gloria Mogan) live like wealthy Gypsies, in a permanent movable feast, from Paris to London to Cannes and back to Paris again, and Little Gloria stayed with her loyal nanny Emma Sullivan Kieslich more than with her own mother. 1934: Trial of Century The idyllic life as an European exile came to a halt for Gloria Mogan, when her mother was upset about the social life of her daughter and concerned about the future of her granddaughter little Gloria, and decided to enlist the help of the latter's aunt, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, thus triggering the most scandalous war of custody of the 20 century. The testimony would become so off colour that the judge had to close the door of the courtroom to the public, but the damage has been done. Gloria Vanderbilt would be forever called "The poor little rich girl". When it finally ended, Gloria Mogan lost the custody of her daughter who would be living with her aunt Gertrude for the next seven years in the latter's Long Island Estate. 1941: From Long Island to Hollywood It seems that deep in her heart, Gloria Vanderbilt was her mother's daughter, aspiring for life and freedom, and her aunt Gertrude's way of raising her up was perhaps too much for her. At age of 17, she decided to leave her aunt to go to Hollywood. There, she met the very handsome and very rich Howard Hughes. she wanted to marry him. But instead she married his press secretary, Pasquale DiCicco, and her aunt Gertrude was so angry about the news that she disinherited Gloria. And the marriage was not a happy one, full of physical abuses and violence from her husband. So four years later, Gloria divorced him, walking out of the marriage not only happier, but richer, as she came into her $5 million trust fund. And she was in love. 1945 The new man in her life was Leopold Stokowski, a man of music, a British conductor of Polish origin. Although more than 40 years older than her, he was also a man of passion, and they got married just a few weeks after Gloria's divorce. And it was thanks to him, Gloria Vanderbilt discovered her love in art and decided to nurture her talent by painting, writing poetry and studying at The Art Students League of New York, then embarked on a short career in acting, on Broadway as well as in television dramas, she also became mother of two sons: Stan Stokowski and Christopher Stokowski. After 10 year of marriage with Leopold Stokowski, Gloria decided to divorce him after a short affair with Frank Sinatra. And she did not stay divorced for long. 1956: third time in a row In 1956, Gloria Vanderbilt Married Sidney Lumet, a television then film director. Their marriage lasted for 7 years but they remained friends all their life. 1963: love of her life Then Gloria met screenwriter Wyatt Cooper. They married in 1963, and Gloria would stay in this marriage until death took her husband away. To Gloria Vanderbilt, Wyatt Cooper was the love of her life, her soul mate. And the father of her children. Gloria had longed to become mother again, and Cooper made her dream come true by giving her two beautiful sons: Carter Cooper and Anderson Cooper. It also made Gloria Vanderbilt discover another wonderful side of Cooper: “We had the family life that I’d always wanted,” Vanderbilt said. “He made me understand what it would have been like to have had a father – he was a most amazing father. I’d never experienced anything like it.” The marriage was also very inspiring for Gloria's sense of creativity. She got the idea of designing her own brand of jeans, by making the high-end Italian jeans she herself wore more affordable and fit better. It was huge success, so successful that she became "the duchess of denim" or "queen of jean", and later would branch out into other areas including scarves, shoes, table and bed linen and even china. While life gave her glory, it was also waiting to bring her tragedy. After 15 year of happy marriage, in 1978 Gloria lost her husband Wyatt Cooper to heart attach on operating table. She never married again. Ten years later, in 1988, she would have to live through another devastating tragedy: her first son with Wyatt Cooper, Carter Cooper would jump out of her apartment, killing himself. She survived again, and wrote a book to deal with her pain years later. 2000s: warrior of society After living so much and seeing it all, Gloria Vanderbilt continued to live more fully: she dined and danced and designed, she painted and exhibited her works, and she wrote, and wrote, and wrote. Nothing seemed taboo for her, not even erotica. In 2009, she wrote an erotic novel Obsession, and she was not shamed about it, either. “I don’t think age has anything to do with what you write about. The only thing that would embarrass me is bad writing, and the only thing that really concerned me was my children. You know how children can be about their parents. But mine are very intelligent and supportive." 2016: The rainbow comes and goes Anderson Cooper, Gloria Vanderbilt's younger son she had with her last husband Wyatt Cooper, had always had close relationship with her mother. But as a prominent journalist and news anchor for CNN who had extremely busy schedule and a public figure who was private about his personal life, there are things mother and son either do not have time to talk or choose not to talk. Until one day, Anderson Cooper decided that he wanted to ask his mother things he did not ask before, tell her thing he did not tell her before. They sat down, talked, and it opened the door to his mother's memory. They made the conversations into written word, to record, to remember, to love. Gloria Vanderbilt died at her home in Manhattan on June 17, 2019 of stomach cancer earlier in the month. She would be buried next to her son Carter Cooper and last husband Wyatt Cooper. Biography of Shigeru Umebayashi Shigeru Umebayashi is a Japanese composer. Once the leader of Japan's new wave rock band EX, Shigeru Umebayashi began scoring films in 1985 when the band broke up. He has more than 30 Japanese and Chinese films to his credit. In 1991, Shigeru Umebayashi scored for Japanese director Seijun Suzuki's biopic film about Japanese painter and poet Takehisa Yumeji Yumeji), one of the scores "Yumeji's Theme" was later included in Hongkong director Wong Kar-wai's film In the Mood for Love (2000), and this track became his best known work in the world. Umebayashi not only scored most of Wong Kar-wai's follow-up film, such as his film 2046 in 2004, and Grandmaster in 2013, but also worked with many other directors both in China and Japan, such as Chinese Director Zhang Yi mo for his 2004 film House of Flying Daggers. In 2009, Umebayashi scored for Tom Ford directorial debut A single man, together with several other composers including polish composer Abel Korzeniowski. Filmography 1980s Itsuka Darekaga Korosareru (1984) Tomoyo Shizukani Nemure (1985) Sorekara (1985) Sorobanzuku (1986) Shinshi Domei (1986) Kyohu no Yacchan (1987) Getting Blue in Color (1988) 1990s Hong Kong Paradise (1990) Tekken (1990) Yumeji (1991) Ote (1991) Goaisatsu (1991) Arihureta Ai ni Kansuru Chosa (1992) Byoin he Iko 2 Yamai ha Kikara (1992) Nemuranai Machi Shinjuku Zame (1993) Izakaya Yurei (1994) Zero Woman (1995) Boxer Joe (1995) Kitanai Yatsu (1995) Hashirana Akan Yoake Made (1995) The Christ of Nanjing (1995) Shin Gokudo Kisha (1996) Izakaya Yurei 2 (1996) Ichigo Domei (1997) Isana no Umi (1997) Watashitachi ga Sukidatta Koto (1997) G4 Option Zero (1997) Fuyajo (1998) Belle Epoch (1998) 2000s 2000 A.D. (2000) Shojo (2000) In the Mood for Love (2000) Midnight Fly (2001) Hikari no Ame (2001) Onmyoji (2001) Zhou Yu's Train (2002) Onmyoji II (2003) Floating Land Scape (2003) House of Flying Daggers (2004) 2046 (2004) Hibi (2004) Fearless (2006) Daisy (2006) Curse of the Golden Flower (2006) Hannibal Rising (2007) Absurdistan (2008) Incendiary (2008) Tears for Sale (2008) The Real Shaolin (2008) Murderer (2009) 2010s True Legend (2010) Days of Grace (2011) Trishna (2011) The Grandmaster (2013) Rise of the Legend (2014) The Bride (2015) Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon: Sword of Destiny (2016) The Wasted Times (2016) Selected film scores 1991, Yumeji directed by Seijun Suzuki 2000, In the mood for love (Faa yeung nin wa, original title) directed by Wong Kar-wai 2004, House of daggers directed by Zhang yi mo 2009, A single man directed by Tom Ford |
Categories
All
Archives
December 2023
|