page_title: Stephen Cope
section_title: Career
hierarchical_section_title: Stephen Cope / Career
caption_attribution_description: English: Photo taken by Richard Gueler, Nov. 27 2004. All rights released.
context_page_description: Stephen Cope is a psychotherapist, Kripalu Yoga teacher, and author of several books on yoga and meditation. He is the founder of the Kripalu Institute for Extraordinary Living.
context_section_description: Cope became a Kripalu Yoga teacher, and author of several books on yoga and meditation including the bestselling Yoga and the Quest for the True Self. In 1993 he organised a conference at Kripalu on psychotherapy and spirituality. A panel of experts including Marion Woodman and Daniel Goleman spoke on exposing the shadow side of the personality, leading Desai to admit that he too had such a "shadow"; the following year, Desai's sexual contact with female resident disciples became public, and Desai was forced to leave Kripalu. This led Cope to reflect that the Western world's version of yoga—asanas, pranayama, meditation—had lost the surrounding context of an ethical lifestyle (classical yoga's yamas and niyamas) that were needed to support those practices.
  Cope is the founder of the Kripalu Institute for Extraordinary Living and is a scholar-in-residence at Kripalu; he has given numerous training courses there. 
  In 2008, Cope was identified by Nora Isaacs, writing in Yoga Journal, as one of the people who had "each, independently, discovered the benefits of merging mindfulness with asana", leading to "something we might call 'mindful yoga'."
caption: The Kripalu Center, formerly a Jesuit seminary
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