Francis, and “presented them in a yogi perspective,” Galentino says. The instructor brought up the Virgin Mary and St. His instructor, Victor Vyasa Landa, talked about the importance of following your heart, says Galentino, but nothing Landa said threatened the student’s Catholic theology. “I loved the class instantly,” he says, but he found it to be much more than relaxation. Then a senior at the university’s prestigious school of foreign service, and seriously considering becoming a Jesuit priest, Galentino found the yoga class a “reprieve” from the stress he was going through.
“It sparked a real, true education beyond the course,” he says. Gandhi’s autobiography, The Story of My Experiments with Truth, had a particularly deep impact. Galentino first became interested in yoga during his academic class work at Georgetown, reading about Indian leader Mahatma Gandhi, and the various physical and meditative disciplines that Gandhi followed.
He is the author of Hail Mary and Rhythmic Breathing: A New Way of Praying the Rosary (Paulist Press, $6.95).Īlong the way, he has become a man of disparate parts: Harvard graduate, marathoner fluent speaker of French and Swahili Jesuit volunteer in Africa and Honduras. A decade later, Galentino, 32, has synchronized the strands of his life - the Western, Catholic tradition of saying the Rosary, with the Eastern religious breathing practice called praynayama. The experience was profound, if not life-changing. “I’ve always been interested in health and fitness.” “I read it in the course catalog and thought it would be interesting,” recalls Galentino, now director of Catholic Volunteers of Florida, based in Orlando. For Galentino, raised in a traditional Italian Catholic home and educated in church-affiliated schools, this breathing-and-exercise discipline long identified with Hinduism was entirely new. In 1996, when Richard Galentino walked into a Georgetown University gymnasium for his first yoga class, he was not sure what to expect.
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