What if the teachings that could change your life were sitting in a drawer, waiting for someone brave enough to finish the work?
In this episode of Walking the Path of Love, Charlyn sits down with Shobhan Richard Faulds, a scholar, writer, and devoted practitioner who has made it his life's work to ensure that Swami Kripalu's teachings reach the people who need them most. Shobhan has been actively involved in the Kripalu lineage since 1981, served as Kripalu Center's lawyer for twenty-five years, and has written three substantive books dedicated to preserving and transmitting Swami Kripalu's teachings in a form that Western readers can truly receive.
Swami Kripalu practiced ten hours a day for thirty years, driven by a vision of yoga that began with health and moved all the way through psychological well-being, effective living, and spiritual awakening. He taught that these were not separate destinations but a single, coherent path, one that any sincere practitioner could walk. Shobhan spent more than a decade studying that vision, distilling over a thousand of Swami Kripalu's quotes, and finding a way to present it whole. He describes the work as the biggest puzzle he has ever attempted to solve in his life, and this conversation is a window into what that journey cost him and what it gave back.
What emerges is a portrait of a path that begins not with renunciation but with a longing. Shobhan met Swami Kripalu two days after walking across the stage to receive his college diploma, and his response was immediate and visceral: \" My God, this really is possible. This yearning I feel to express my soul in a full-hearted fashion is possible.” That moment set everything in motion, including a law degree, a master's in human development, and more than a decade of distilling over a thousand of Swami Kripalu's quotes into a coherent map for the rest of us.
One of the most quietly important things Shobhan offers in this conversation is a correction that matters deeply for anyone who has ever felt like they were doing spirituality wrong. The early Kripalu community made a mistake, he says plainly. The renunciate path was treated as the real path, the one that led to enlightenment, and the householder path was seen as the lesser route, the one you walked until a better lifetime came along. The more deeply Shobhan studied Swami Kripalu's actual teachings, the more clearly he saw that this was simply not true. The householder path is not a dumbed-down version of anything. It is its own complete and sacred way.
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