WOODLAND PARK Rev. Jaganath Carrera, a yoga scholar with bushy grey beard, who wore a long white tunic and went barefoot during an interview at his Yoga Life Society center on McBride Avenue, started studying yoga in 1973.

STAFF PHOTO BY MATTHEW KADOSH

Rev. Jaganath Carrera, sitting at his center in Woodland Park, teaches yoga meditation.

At the time, he learned of John Coltrane's and other musicians' connections to the discipline.

"The music moved me and I wanted to know what moved them," Carrera said.

Now he teaches a synthesis of various branches of yoga. Those include Bhakti yoga, yoga of devotion, Raja yoga, a moral type of yoga, and Japa yoga, which includes the repetition of mantras, he said.

"The idea is that your whole life is involved in the practice of yoga," Carrera said.

He is a strong proponent of yoga meditation, something that he teaches readers how to do in his new book "Awaken: Inside Yoga Meditation."

"It is a great way to break the cycle of stress," he said. "It's a little retreat."

Carrera said that in the name of meditation, devotees pick a thought or an object to focus on and that as a result both their creativity and focus is increased.

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Woodland Park based yoga scholar teaches meditation