About the author
Chicago-born Doris “Joy” Thurston from Chappaqua, New York is an award-winning author, poet, painter, and sculptor. She won the 1983 Jakeman Award for Outstanding Poetry at the State of Maine Writers Conference for “The Stroke.” A booklet, “Notes on Oskar Kokoschka” is in the Museum of Modern Art Research Library. Her painting, “Our Father” won a year’s traveling prize with the Sears-Price Southern Contemporary Art Show.
Entertainer as well as artist, Thurston combined song, dance and art, performing from Greenland to South America with “Portraits in Song,” in which she sketched a patron while singing.
At age 50 she suffered from painful arthritis, hyperventilation attacks, overweight, and depression. She discovered the Sivananda Yoga technique and took their Teacher Training program with Swami Vishnu DeVenanda in Val Morin, Canada. Her pain and illness disappeared within two weeks.
Thurston taught yoga on the Treasure Coast in Stuart, Florida, and saw amazing results in her students. Indebted to India for the healing science of yoga, she took a six-week “Yoga Tour of India” the following year with her guru, recording her experiences in an illustrated journal. She still does yoga as an octogenarian.
Meeting Baba Muktananda, a Siddha Yoga guru, in 1974, Doris received the Kundalini Kryas, and performed automatic yoga. Her meditation included singing, chanting, dancing and talking in tongues. “I asked Baba to bless my writing and have been writing ever since,” she confesses.