Radha on a Path to 13th Street
RADHA METRO-MIDKIFF, Executive Director, with her dog, Henson, in one of the many studios at the Integral Yoga Institute, NY that has offered traditional Yoga, Meditation, and classes in the Village since 1970. Photo by Bob Cooley.
By Roger Paradiso
Integral Yoga Institute (IYI) was founded on the Upper West Side in October 1966 after Sri Swami Satchidananda, a spiritual teacher from India, came to America at the invitation of the artist Peter Max. The guru’s wise and practical teachings inspired many New Yorkers, mostly hippies and flower children, to take Hatha Yoga classes and attend weekly discussions on attaining peace and love without the use of psychedelic drugs.
In October 1970, a beautiful brownstone on West 13th Street in historic Greenwich Village was dedicated as the New York IYI. Both an ashram and a teaching center, it became a beacon for spiritual seekers from all over the city and is the place where thousands of people experienced yoga for the first time. Today, this gem is still here and brings us back to the sixties when ideas were vibrating across the Village.
I interviewed the Managing Director of the Institute, Radha Metro-Midkiff, on a snowy winter’s day in January.
Her parents met Swami Satchidananda in the 60s. His beliefs resonated with them, especially his interfaith message. Along with her four siblings, Radha started going to the Integral Yoga School in Connecticut. It was pretty rare then, as it is now, to have a school teaching yoga.
“How can we find peace and joy in the middle of a chaotic world? First, find your peace within. If you have peace, you have everything; if you lose your peace, you lose everything. And when something does come along to disturb your peace, that is the most important time to practice being peaceful.” — Swami Satchidananda
“The framework for my Yoga School was similar to a traditional school,” she said. “There would be some arts, some music, and some physical activities as well as math, history, and science. We started off our days with meditation. We would also study the science of yoga and do Hatha Yoga which is the physical form of yoga. What is particularly special is that we didn’t just do the physical form of yoga, but we followed the path of yoga which was a lifestyle.”
The kids had activities just like other schools. “For example, we had a chorus,” said Radha. “We performed ancient Hindu texts–singing, reading, or chanting. Everything had some kind of spiritual aspect to it. When we were doing geography, we would integrate it into this idea of karma yoga as well. They had us build a playground for younger children. We had a very practical practice of doing geometric shapes. So even when doing geometry, it could be part of doing yoga. Yoga is not something you do separate from your life, but it gets woven into it, every moment every day.”
After high school, Radha went to the American Musical and Dramatic Academy in New York City and lived on the Upper West Side. She also worked at the IYI for about a year. “So many people here took me under their wing and taught me about being an adult in a very supporting environment,” she said.
Radha spent eight years working at Yogaville, home of the International Headquarters of Integral Yoga in Virginia. She also continued acting locally and also traveled to the Institute in India.
“I always would laugh and say I either needed to live way out in the boondocks or in the heart of Manhattan,” she said. “I moved back to NYC to work on Wall Street in 2000. I was a block away from the WTC standing on the sidewalk when the first building fell on September 11. I was one of the people who walked across the bridge to Brooklyn where I lived at the time.”
The Integral Yoga facility was not far from the WTC. You could look out the window and see the smoke and fire. “A lot of people who were traumatized came to us. We were their safe haven,” said Radha. The trauma led to a lot of stress. “My anxiety and depression got worse and I had to get away.”
Radha returned to Yogaville to try to find her way again. “I tried a lot of western medicine and therapy which weren’t working so well for me. I woke up one day and I went back to the yoga life and that’s when I started healing. It took about five years to fully heal. Yoga got me back. Science started catching up to the benefits of yoga. And I wanted to pass that on.”
In 2022 Greenwich Village facility was looking for someone to revitalize it after COVID. They scouted Radha at the Virginia center and asked if she would be willing to take on the executive director’s job. She came back to discover she had a yoga teacher on the roster who was one of her teachers at AMDA 30 years ago!
“13th Street is such a great location. We teach about 75 classes a week and reach around 2,000 students a month. In addition to our staff, we have nine Ashramites who live here,” said Radha.
You can contact Radha at the Institute: www.iyiny.org
About Integral Yoga
Integral Yoga follows six branches of the history of yoga.
The most well-known are Hatha (the physical path) and Raja (the path of meditation and contemplation). Raja Yoga is science-based.
Bhakti is the process of devotion to yoga. Pujua ritual worships any figure like a divine entity. The secret is making this worship personal like to God or the universe or a flower.
Japa Yoga is repetition of divine sounds or sacred mantras, like Ohm. It doesn’t have to be verbal recognition. You can also write out the sacred sound so sometimes it could be pictures.
Karma Yoga and Jnana Yoga are the other branches.
