Carmen Castañeda

By Miguel A. Kavlin

Carmen Castañeda is an internationally renowned teacher of Hatha Yoga. She has taught for ATT, Mac Graw-Hill and Merryll Lynch in New York; the Adelaide Club in Toronto and the Watergate Club in Washington D.C. Her background, however, is extremely varied.

She was born in El Salvador, where since her teens she studied Modern Dance. Later, she went to New York City on a scholarship to study with Merce Cunningham. New York opened many new horizons for Carmen However.There she met a chinese master of Internal Martial arts and famous practitioner of traditional chinese medicine. She studied the somewhat unknown arts of Pa-Kua and Shing-Yi Chuan with him forover ten years, and has become very accomplished in these arts.

Moreover, in New York she met someone who was to change her dance careerforever. Ms. Rita Devi, a world renowned performer and teacher of Orissi Hindu Temple Dance. Upon meeting her, Carmen decided to make Classical Indian Dance her specialty, and dedicated herself fully to training with Ms. Devi. Carmen has since become her foremost apprentice and true heiress to the tradition.

Finally, Carmen is also interested in Native American ritual, belief andpractice. She has  spent  time with Beautiful Painted Arrow in North America, Don Agustin Rivas in the Peruvian Amazon, and Severino Vila and Doña Inocencia Atahualpani in the Bolivian Andes.

All these experiences and training have given Carmen a very keen understanding and openness to subtle energies, and allow her to enrich her yoga classes with many important nuances derived from the other arts she has deeply been immersed in.

She has much experience teaching everyone from children to the elderly, from advanced yoga students to first-timers, from people seeking health improvement to those wanting to cultivate subtle spiritual energy.

Carmen facilitates guided journeys in Amazon with Miguel Kavlin and Don Rivas Vasquez : Contact us to find out more