About the Guest

Lucy Crisfield is a speaker at the World Yoga Festival, a plenary speaker at the British Wheel of Yoga Festival, and the founder of ‘Original Wisdom’, through which she shares the inner teachings of mantra and yoga philosophy with sound, meditation, and scholarly precision. Lucy has just finished writing a book with the same title as her signature course, ‘The Sounds of Sanskrit ~ The Language of Yoga’. Taking seven years to write, the book is a direct expression of her own experience in response to the meditative inquiry and realizations that the Sanskrit sounds have brought forth.

Lucy studied the violin and piano at the Royal College of Music from the age of eleven, and after receiving a first class honours degree in mathematics and Music, she left London to travel solo through twenty countries over five years in her quest for a deeper understanding of life. As well as immersing herself in yoga and finding herself at the feet of many revered teachers of the tradition, she also studied Arabic and the recitation of the Quran in Damascus, Yemen, and East London, and Hebrew at SOAS in London.

Many years later, when back in London, Lucy eventually found the master of sound she had been looking for, Peter Harrison, who initiated her into the Advaita Vedanta tradition. Lucy now lives in the South West of England with her partner and two children, where she offers unique classes which share the teachings and sounds of the yoga tradition to illumine the intellect and connect us to the creative wisdom of the Self.

In this episode, we discuss: 

1. How previous teachers have shaped the understanding of Sanskrit 
2. The difference between academic and vibratory approaches to Sanskrit
3. The metaphysics of sound
4. The difference between music and mantra
5. The philosophy of sound in the modern yoga world
6. The potential effects of mispronounced mantras
7. The role of grammar in receiving Sanskrit’s vibrational potency