Yoga allows you to rediscover a sense of wholeness in your life, where you do not feel like you are constantly trying to fit broken pieces together.

– BKS Iyengar, Light on Life

YCSC Instructors

All of our instructors are steeped in the methodology and philosophy of Iyengar style hatha yoga and have many years of teaching experience and yoga practice. Several of our instructors have earned teaching certificates from the Iyengar Yoga Institute of San Fransisco, which is accredited through the state of California. Some have studied in India directly with Geeta and Prashant Iyengar, son and daughter of BKS Iyengar.

We are pleased to offer classes and workshops with Kofi Busia. He is one of a handful of instructors in the world who were given a senior yoga teaching certificate directly by BKS Iyengar. He studied and practiced with Guruji on numerous occasions in India many years ago, when classes were very small and intimate.

Additionally, a few instructors bring in other influences of their training into their teaching such as kinesiology, flow, etc. Please consult the individual instructor bios for more complete descriptions of background and education.

Abbey Asher

Abbey is a formally trained ballet and jazz dancer who performed professionally in Santa Barbara. She began studying Iyengar yoga in 1995 and completed teacher training in 2004. Abbey has been a student of Maya Lev and Kofi Busia for many years and is currently teaching yoga at UCSC. In January of 2008, Abbey studied for one month at the Iyengar Institute in Pune, India.

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Kofi Busia

Kofi is one of the few teachers awarded a senior certificate by Mr. Iyengar. He has studied with BKS Iyengar many times in India and has been teaching yoga for over 35 years. He is also a scholar of Sanskrit and has translated the Sutras of Patanjali from the original.

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Maya Lev

Maya Lev is the Director and owner of Yoga Center Santa Cruz. Maya's love of yoga was initiated by her first teacher, Sarah Pepper, when she was a freshman at UCSC. She subsequently became a student of Ruth Hille, a founder of Yoga Center Santa Cruz, who encouraged her to consider teaching yoga. Maya attended the teacher training program at the Iyengar Yoga Institute of San Francisco and began teaching in 1993. She is profoundly grateful to Kofi Busia, her primary teacher for the past 22 years, for inspiration, guidance, and insight into the subtle mechanisms of the asanas and their effect on the body. In her teaching, she combines a rigorous physical practice with a deep reverence for the spiritual transformation yoga offers to each student.

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Steven Graves

Stephen was first introduced to yoga in 2007, when he was 18. Since 2012, he has practiced Iyengar yoga regularly. Between 2017-2020, he participated in teacher training at the Iyengar Yoga Institute of Amsterdam, earning his level 1 certification in 2021. In 2023, he studied for three months with the Iyengar family at RIMYI in Pune, and with other senior teachers elsewhere in India.

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