Juliana Beck

Juliana Beck (nee Bocora), November 7, 1917 - July 8, 2009 was a native of Cleveland, Ohio and a significant participant, learner and teacher in the oral tradition and holistic discipline of both hatha yoga and kundalini yoga. She was a student of internationally renowned Yogi Vithaldas. Juliana studied and then taught yoga in the United States, Europe and India. As a yogini, she was a cosmopolitan woman whose life culminated in her enlightenment as a yogic adept, a devotion she shared as she taught many students for over five decades. She was also the founder of her studio “Juliana’s Yoga System” in Cleveland, Ohio.

Early Life in Dance
Demonstrating an early talent for ballet, Juliana, who loved both ballet in particular and dance in general, studied the art first in Cleveland and then in New York City, where she danced under the tutelage of Russian ballet master Serge Nadezhdin. Nadezhdin took one look at her plié and told Juliana that she “had weak knees.” After a time with him, he told her that she had developed the strongest legs in the studio. In fact, as her dance career matured, she toured with a Russian Dance Troupe, proud of the fact that she could do “Cossack Kicks” on par with the strongest male dancers in the company.
Introduction to Yoga
Juliana worked in various aspects of physical culture, until an automobile accident put her in the hospital with a collapsed lung. It was there that internationally renowned Yogi Vithaldas came upon her and helped her to heal. Diminutive and demure, Juliana studied with Yogi Vithaldas in New York City, later humorously relating to her Cleveland students that she would be in his unairconditioned and cramped hardwood floor studio “With Yogi Vithaldas leading me and a bunch of big strong guys all doing deep breathing in ninety-five degree heat with sweat just pouring out of us and dripping down everywhere.”
Yogic Maturation
Juliana established her own practice in her studio “Juliana’s Yoga System,” in Cleveland, Ohio in the early 1960’s. During her over five decade tenure there, she often traveled back to New York, a place she considered home, to see Yogi Vithaldas and also appear on New York radio as a yoga authority in her own right. She emphasized the cornerstones of proper yoga practice: sound nutrition, selecting asanas that fit the individual student at that time and place, insisting on proper movement patterns, a blending of the mind and body, and the integration of yoga into one’s life. Part of this also entailed a breaking away from the conformist flow of mainstream society in order to free an individual so they might grow and develop spiritually. Juliana carried these ideas with her when she traveled to Europe, where she participated in both yoga and physical culture studios. In the mid-1970’s, she went on an extended trip to India, where she met yogi colleagues, taught and mingled among the people.
Views on Yoga in Contemporary Society
Juliana consistently lamented, beginning in the 1960’s, that yoga in the United States and in the West suffered from commercialization by those who did not understand it as a deep spiritual devotion based on achieving, as the word yoga means, “one” between mind, body and the universe. She thought that yogis should be paid as professionals, but should not commercially exploit yoga for personal gain.
Moreover, Juliana decried the fact that yoga was being taught as an “exercise workout” without proper mechanics and without any spiritual essence, even though she advocated health through exercise and was an admirer of Jack LaLanne, who she saw as a pioneer of physical culture in a more and more mechanized society. She did not like the fact that yoga was being published in books by people who hadn’t the proper education in the discipline, and that yoga was appearing on television, where an asana was rushed, not held long enough, and not taught as part of a body and mind activity. By contrast, Juliana taught that movements, asanas and approaches should be tailored to the individual student, each of whom has a unique body, mind and set of life experiences. To superimpose a rigid system on a group of students as though “yoga were a six week night class” was to miss the essence of what yoga was all about.
Teaching Emphasis
Juliana emphasized that yoga was a way of life and not simply something one does to say that one is doing yoga. She taught both hatha yoga and kundalini yoga. Hatha yoga, she stressed, was to strengthen the body so that it could sit uninterrupted, free of pain and disturbance in order to free the mind of bodily and worldly concerns for dedication to meditation. As her students might progress, she would teach aspects of kundalini yoga that emphasized third eye meditation.
Critique of Modern Society’s Materialism
One who stressed an examined view both of one’s life and of contemporary society, Juliana was concerned that the modern obsession with material acquisition ultimately made large numbers of people unhappy, while contributing to unfair modern societies around the globe as the haves seemed to gain, while the have-nots didn’t. To her end, she still loved dance and held a special place in her heart for ballet as arts that could help people achieve transcendence.
A unique teacher who was loved by many yoga students, one of them penned this remembrance of her after she passed:
:She always warned us that we'd never find a yoga class like hers, and as we've all learned, so true. If we could have only videotaped her!!! Her observations about life and her uncanny ability to read what was on your mind made her the unique person she was. I still hear her telling us to just let go and let our bodies follow. Well, I feel lucky to have met her and known her all these years. One of the few who actually practiced what she preached.

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