Telluride Yoga Festival: Scott Blossom Returns, Asana + Ayurveda

16 Jun Telluride Yoga Festival: Scott Blossom Returns, Asana + Ayurveda

Purchase your pass to the the 2019 Telluride Yoga Festival, Thursday, June 27 – Sunday, June 30.

Learn more about the presenters here.

View the schedule here.

Scroll down to learn more about yoga instructor, Dr. of Oriental Medicine and Ayurvedic consultant Scott Blossom. Listen to his podcast.

For more on Scott’s classes, go here.

Let’s turn back the clock to 2007, when a young yoga instructor had an epiphany. She realized that her Kharma yoga or yoga of action/selfless service had put her on a path to create a yoga festival as unique as the Town of Telluride.

And the Telluride Yoga Festival was born.

Next step was to attract top-tier presenters. Shadow yoga instructor, Dr. of Chinese Medicine, Ayurvedic consultant, and acupuncturist Dr. Scott Blossom was the founder’s pick for the bellwether.

Scott had been involved with all kinds of yoga events, big conferences, and small boutique gatherings, but by setting a yoga happening in place as beautiful as Telluride, he was convinced a wonderful kind of alchemy would occur spontaneously and the entire town would become a yoga venue.

“As the yoga movement in the US was exploding in the early 2000s, I was invited by Yoga Journal, (the nation’s premier yoga magazine), to be one of their leading experts writing about Ayurveda. In this capacity, I had the opportunity to teach at Yoga Journal conferences all over the country, reaching over 10,000 students.”

No big surprise, Scott was also once featured on Yoga Journal’s list of “21 under 40” top instructors who would shape the future of Yoga in America.

No doubt he helped shape the future of the Telluride Yoga Festival simply by showing up, along with his mentor, Dr. Robert Svoboda, a scholar widely considered the preeminent American expert on Ayurveda. With Scott on board, other luminaries needed little convincing to join the roster of top instructors who return to town year after year to the Telluride Yoga Festival to help students stretch – externally and internally.

Rock stars jump-started the yoga boom in the 1960s, when the Beatles hooked up with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. Forty-plus years later, with close to 40 million Americans actively practicing, yoga teachers are the rock stars. However, they claim very different turf from their cock-of-the-walk counterparts.

Rockers live in a hard-drinking, drug-taking world of gladiatorial rowdiness, selling sex and sizzle. Yoga’s perks are more esoteric and holistic: Scott and his fellow princes and princesses of the mat offer self-awareness, holistic health, and inner serenity. In their world, “Oh baby” becomes “OM.”

Scott Blossom was last seen at the Telluride Yoga Festival in 2014, two years after owner/director Albert Roer and Erika Henschel took over the management and direction of the weekend.

Thanks to Erika, Scott returns this year to lead classes on aging and memory, cannabis and the brain, and Shadow Yoga.

“I believe that Ayurveda should be in the hands of all people who need it. And I believe that it has only benefited a fraction of the people that it could in the West, especially underserved and impoverished populations. My mission is to find ways to communicate about it in a way that is free of unnecessary jargon and beliefs, and instead emphasizes actionable concepts and practices available to a results-oriented American audience. I do this by boiling down this rich and complex traditional medical system into a set of simple-to-follow advice and practices, which can be followed by anyone, regardless of their familiarity with or interest-level in traditional Ayurveda.”

Scott is joined over the Yoga Fest weekend of June 27 by other renowned yoga instructors, among them: Beryl Bender Birch, MC YOGI, Gina Caputo, Ashleigh Sergeant, Eoin Finn, Amy Ippoliti, Kia Miller, Tommy Rosen, Tymi Howard, Karl Straub, and more.

Scott Blossom, more:

Scott Blossom holds an undergraduate degree in biology. He then went on to attend the Santa Barbara College of Oriental Medicine’s four-year program to earn his MA in Traditional Chinese Medicine, and his license in acupuncture.

After graduation, Scott developed a wellness program for hundreds employees Santa Barbara Cottage Hospital. The success of the initiative led to an invitation from the Cancer Center of Santa Barbara (now the Ridley-Tree Cancer Clinic) to develop a wellness program from staff and cancer patients. Both are still going strong.

While teaching at yoga conferences across the country, Scott developed a relationship with Dr. Robert Svoboda, who became his mentor in Ayurveda. Together they have taught all over the US, Mexico, and Brazil.

Scott Blossom was also a student of Zhander Remete, founder of Shadow Yoga, a hatha yoga system that helps free the body of energetic obstructions and ignites the inner fire for healing and meditation.

Shadow Yoga with Scott Blossom consists of spiraling, circular, and linear movements designed to integrate yoga asana, martial arts, South Indian dance, and Ayurvedic medicine.

“The power of yoga comes from the way we align our bodies with gravity using the bones and the joints. Someone who is leveraging a stretch using aggressive muscular effort is going to be creating an imbalanced stress on a joint. What the ancients called circulation of prana includes being sensitive to how your physical body functions optimally and yoga asanas are a great way to reflect on how to live harmoniously with the capacities and limitations of our own bodies. What I teach comes down to attuning yourself with your body’s internal intelligence, the prana. That is the first step towards becoming a true yogi.”