Ancient history: early yoga teacher "did it for love"

I stumbled across this digitized version of a 1972 newsletter from Project Artaud, the San Francisco artists' collective that was the original legal live/work artists loft building. In the article "The Ultimate Toe," original member Abe Davis writes:

I was meeting "Sid" the Yoga Teacher, who was thinking of having his classes here. After I heard how he runs his classes, it was obvious that this was being done for love, and that any slight amount of money involved was less than he spent on dinner for his students after the class.

Wow, that must have been a long time ago. But it gets better:

...I said, "What do you really do for bread?" He gave me his card: Sydney G. Abrahams, Chief Architect, San Francisco Arts Office, U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, Region IX. And he said, "If there's anything I can do to help the project..."

"Yes," I said quickly, "we need some help to get this theatre re-opened..."

The rest is history. Countless performers (including me, in tiny parts), have appeared in Theater Artaud itself, and in the other performance spaces at Project Artaud, still a rollicking place.

But to get back to the point -- I love that back in 1972 there was this hippie architect who taught yoga classes for a couple bucks and then spent all the money on his students. Nowadays people would be telling him he deserves to make money from his expertise; they'd hire him on a contract basis to fill out the schedule at their high-end yoga studio. But back in the early 70s, giving away your time and talent was still thought of as a virtue.

yoga, Project Artaud, Theatre Artaud, hippies,Sixties