About Arturo
Arturo Galvez has over 30 years of yoga teaching experience and studied yoga in India, Latin America, and the U.S. His teachers include B.K.S. Iyengar and Indra Devi, world-renowned masters in the Krishnamacharya tradition. Arturo is an Experienced Registered Yoga Teacher 500 with the Yoga Alliance. In 1980 he started the yoga program at the University of California, San Diego, one of the first at a U.S. university, which evolved into UCSD’s yoga teacher training program. He also teaches yoga history and philosophy. He has conducted yoga retreats and seminars around the world for more than a decade.
Arturo has taught yoga segments on Univision TV and produced more than 100 web-based yoga videos for Hispanopolis.com, as well as a yoga DVD (Yoga con Arturo). He is cofounder of UCSD's MindBody seminars, which combine Eastern self-development techniques with physical fitness, and coproduced Vibración Cósmica, a radio program on metaphysical and self-help themes.
Arturo also has 15 years of experience as a social worker, His educational background includes a telecommunications degree and advanced study in social work and education.
Yoga is a way to freedom.
—Indra Devi
Schedule
Private classes by request
(Beginner to advanced)
Saturdays on Zoom: 8:30 am Pacific Time
(Intermediate to advanced)
Mondays and Wednesdays, 4:00 to 5:30 pm
(Beginner to advanced)
Arturo teaches an alignment-based practice based on the teachings of B.K.S Iyengar and Indra Devi, with focus on safety and proper execution of postures.
blog
New Year's Update
Yoga in a Word: Asana
The Book Project
retreats
Past retreats have included locations in Tuscany, Baja, the Big Island of Hawaii, and Southern California.
email
yogaconarturo@gmail.com
New Year's Update
January 29, 2023
After moving to online teaching during the pandemic, I’ve decided to continue holding classes on Zoom for the foreseeable future, for both UCSD and my own classes. At some point I may offer in-person group workshops monthly or every other month. (I know my longtime Saturday morning students miss meeting in person!)
As for retreats, it’s been more than three years since the last one, but I’m exploring a return to the Big Island of Hawaii. Watch this space…
Yoga in a Word: Asana
January 16, 2023
One of the goals of yoga is to stop the fluctuations of the mind. In its everyday state, the mind often prevents you from being truly present, from focusing, from relaxing. The mind can look for (and find) everything it sees as wrong. No matter how minuscule, no matter how outside of your control.
The problem is being unaware that your mind is doing this.
The solution is yoga.
In yoga, we use the breath to link to the unconscious. In a yoga pose, or asana, you can connect your breath to your mind and slow its fluctuations, and eventually stop them. The root of asana is asat, essentially holding or hanging on to: staying in the pose with all of your being.
Here we find we don’t have to grasp what interrupts our peace. Here we can turn to the breath, the form of energy (prana) that sustains every process in the human body, and return to ourselves.
The Book Project
January 8, 2023
In 2013, I sat down with one of my students, a writer, to begin collaborating on a book about yoga and my life. We taped hours of conversations, touching on topics from the expected—teaching, healing, and yoga philosophy—to the more uncommon—metaphysics, astral projection, and plant medicine, among others. These conversations were transcribed, put into narrative form, and revised over and over to transform the themes, story, and structure into a cohesive whole. This year the book is nearly complete, and we’ll soon move to the next stage.
If you talk to authors, many will say it’s not surprising or unusual for writing a book to take ten years. I’ve seen over the course of this project that you can’t rush the process. You need time to stop thinking about it, focus on other priorities, and eventually return to it with fresh eyes. Only then can you continue to polish it effectively. Life’s demands conveniently create these interludes. Although at times impatience has kicked in, for the sake of the book, it couldn’t have gone any other way.
The book is not a traditional linear memoir but a hybrid creation, consisting of stories from my life interspersed with broader questions of being, all linked to yoga. Indeed, everything is yoga…