Stephen Cope

Stephen Cope was brought up in Wooster, Ohio in the 1950s and 1960s; he learnt to play the piano from an early age.

[1] He was educated at Amherst College, where he became a Presbyterian (of his childhood he is reported to have been reared as a Protestant) and subsequently a Quaker.

[2] His working life began as a professional dancer with Minnesota Dance Theatre.

[1][2] He trained as a priest at Episcopal Divinity School, Boston, in 1974, but was not ordained as he was openly homosexual.

This led Cope to reflect that the Western world's version of yoga—asanas, pranayama, meditation—had lost the surrounding context of an ethical lifestyle (classical yoga's yamas and niyamas) that were needed to support those practices.