Joy Graham began studying and then practicing bodywork and anatomy/physiology in the 1970s in New York. She studied and taught with Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen at the School for Body/Mind Centering in Massachusetts.
In 1979 she went to India to study meditation, chanting and kirtan. She returned several times over the next years. She did further yoga studies in Los Angeles with many established yoga teachers. She continued studying and practicing bodywork, working with chiropractors and privately.
She attended yoga teacher training in 1991 in Los Angeles. In 1996, she and her family moved to the Lodi area, and she began teaching at a bodywork school in Sacramento.
She opened her private bodywork business in Lodi in 1997, and she was asked by her bodywork clients in Lodi to teach yoga, so she began teaching them in 1998. After teaching for two years, she decided to tailor the yoga classes more to the level of fitness of her students.
In 2000, she attended a different style of yoga teacher training, conducted by Larry Payne, Ph.D., receiving her certification from him in 2001.
She no longer practices bodywork. She continues to study with teachers who were associated with the late revered Sri T. Krishnamacharya, a yoga master and ayurvedic physician from India, and with Chase Bossart of the Healing Yoga Foundation in San Francisco, California.
