Karma Krew Peace by Peace Yoga Challenge
Much of Yoga is about challenge, about dancing on the edge of what we are capable of as bodies, as minds, as jivas (souls). Challenge is a good thing when it is honored in the form of practice. My yoga practice has been challenging me for around five years now. I remember when I was a junior in high school and I took a teen ashtanga class at the 92nd St Y. I couldn’t get into up dog from chataranga. It became my challenge, first by straightening my right arm and then my left, to flow through that transition. Then, I discovered hot yoga and my challenge became early morning classes with regularity, adding consistency to my practice. A few months later, I discovered Jivamukti and my challenge became standing on my head. Last year, I went to college and my challenge became cultivating a sustainable home practice outside of the yoga haven on NYC. Now, I am faced with yet another challenge.
I am doing a yoga teacher training and as a result, I am practicing a lot. Yoga too often gets mislabeled as “self-care.” Yes, when I am doing yoga, I am caring for myself, but in practicing self-care, I am also caring for others because I am able to show up in the world in a way that makes me of maximum service. That latter part is the true challenge of yoga - that is what involves the effort, the edge - the doing of service. In the Rockies video I posted, there is a teacher who says, “Yoga is not yoga unless it is brought into your life.”
That is where Peace by Peace comes in. At the beginning of class, I dedicate my practice to something greater than me. For the month of June, as I practice daily, the fruits of my asanas will be dedicated and devoted to Sanctuary for Families, a NY nonprofit that serves domestic violence and sex trafficking victims and their families.
To keep my yoga authentic, I want to keep it far away from being self-indulgent. I want to keep it as a vital force by giving its fruits away. Please sponsor me because, as with every single challenge I embark on, I need support. And it’s simple - there’s a button at the top of this blog!
Shanti Shanti Shanti.
Namaste.
I am on the plane to Seattle and finishing Blake Mycoskie’s amazing book Start Something that Matters. I have been wearing TOMS shoes for two years now and go through pairs rapidly as tends to be pattern with shoes (I have New Yorker feet – I walk hard on pavement and usually wear the same pair until they deteriorate).
I found out about this book via yogapreneur (oh, hay, I can’t believe I just made up that title) Kimberly Wilson’s blog and it’s been on my Shelfari for a few months now. Finally, I ordered it on Kindle for iPhone and have been so hooked. Like, I haven’t been this hooked on a book since I finished the vampire-novel-for-academics-and-yogis A Discovery of Witches. And that was fiction!
But the TOMS story may as well be fiction for how gripping it is. It is all about giving. It is inspiring and awesome and preaching to my heart right now.
On Thursday, I went to hear and meet Donna Karan at the 92nd St Y (where I first started my yoga practice, by the way). I went backstage to meet this terrific woman, who started the Urban Zen Foundation (post to come!) and intended to just put my name out there for a summer internship. But, when I told her I was a yoga teacher, she basically screamed, “Then you should teach with us in Haiti!”
It sounded so right, to teach yoga in Haiti, and it was something I didn’t think of before. You see, I have to make money this summer because college + further yoga teacher trainings = muy expensivo, and this winter break, I have been getting a bit disheartened by feeling like I have to choose money over giving. There are so many organizations I would love to volunteer for, but they just don’t pay.
Mycoskie, with the beloved TOMS shoes, views this as a core issue with a pivotal solution that our society faces today. We should not have to wait until we make enough money to be able to give back. We should be able to give and get in tandem. This is certainly how I view my yoga practice and yoga teaching. I practice to teach and teach because I practice. I want to get to give and to give because I get.
TOMS does this – and, side note, I want to put out into the universe that I would love to teach yoga at the TOMS headquarters for that staff one day – by combining philanthropy and business and making those two components interdependent. It’s sheer brilliance. I am in love with these ideas.
The final chapter got me thinking about the times when I played a part in giving in a group, in giving purely, and in giving with so much freaking joy.
It was during my yoga teacher training. The women and man in that training still teach me what it means to show up for my peers with an open heart and through pooling everyone’s limited resources, in order to create an abundance of resources.
Pat teaches elementary school kids and provided yoga instruction during recess…outside, in the yard. Major issue: these kids were basically practicing on concrete because they didn’t have mats. So, an email went out asking if any of us had extra mats. We were training to be yoga teachers, for Goddess’s sake - of course we had extra mats! So, that weekend, we came early, brought the mats, blasted music, and, when Pat entered, presented them to her one by one. The process was so simple, so easy, didn’t cost us anything, but the rewarding look of surprise on Pat’s face was worth a million.
We did something like this again at the end of the training. The Yoga Collective was brand new. We had a huge book list of recommended reading and five required texts for the training. Books are expensive, especially yoga books, so we circulated the titles between us, but it wasn’t easy for us all to get our reading done on time because of the limited resources. Then, Laine had an idea: to create a surprise lending library for the director. So, people donated what they were comfortable donating and Laine ordered the books on Amazon. Now, when I teach at the Collective, I can just pull a book off the shelf for the dharma talk and future trainees don’t have to worry about scraping together the funds for their book list.
What strikes me about these personal examples and the examples Mycoskie provides is that they are simple, don’t involve a lot of effort, bring tremendous sustainable rewards, and can be done anywhere, anytime, by anyone with any amount of resources.
So maybe I will teach yoga in Haiti this summer. Maybe I’ll have an internship where I can find more creative and less obvious ways of giving. Who knows? But what Start Something that Matters gives me is confidence of happy progress into a future of giving.
To finish this post off, I will leave you with a quote from that last chapter:
“You owe it to the world to act.”
The New York Times continues with their yoga enthusiasm! Fave quotes:
Krishna in the Bhagvad-Gita defines them: karma yoga (the yoga of action), bhakti yoga (the yoga of devotion) and jnana yoga (the yoga of knowledge). Volunteering at a soup kitchen is yoga; raising your voice in praise in a gospel choir is yoga; trying to understand how the galaxies shift and why the poor lack shoes is also yoga.
In this sense, the greatest teacher of yoga is not Iyengar or Bikram, but Gandhi. “The yogi is not one who sits down to practise breathing exercises,” he wrote in his interpretation of the Gita. “He is one who looks upon all with an equal eye, sees other creatures in himself.” That’s one pose that will truly reduce your stress.
awesome karmic yoga organizations round-up!
this post is a work in progress. more will be added.
my friend recently asked me if i knew of any yoga organizations worth looking into for work post-graduation. here’s a round-up:
YOGA FOR SINGLE MOMS - Boston & NYC
Our mission is to provide valuable information and instruction for using yoga as a mind/body resource along the path of single motherhood. We partner with yoga spaces across the country to offer affordable and accessible classes and workshops that work for moms and kids.
BENT ON LEARNING - NYC
Bent On Learning is a nonprofit organization committed to teaching yoga to New York City public school children. We bring yoga to as many students as possible—not after school, but right there, in the classroom, where the learning happens.
ONE HEALING ARTS - NYC
The Mission of ONE Healing Arts COMPANY, Inc. is to produce theatrical work that opens hearts and minds; to create a nurturing environment for artists; to promote wellness and healing of mind and body; and to elevate collective consciousness.
Through the vehicle of yoga, KYP is facilitating change both locally and globally by conducting research studies, educating high school students and adults about the benefits of volunteerism, and by making yoga available to underserved communities.
OFF THE MAT INTO THE WORLD - California
OTM helps individuals take the path of yoga “off the mat and into the world,” expanding the sphere of change outward to local and global communities. We do this by facilitating personal empowerment through leadership trainings, fostering community collaboration, and initiating local and global service projects.
STREET YOGA - Portland & LA & Seattle
Street Yoga is a non-profit organization that teaches yoga, mindful breathing, and compassionate communication to youth and families and their caregivers struggling with homelessness, poverty, abuse, addiction, trauma and behavioral challenges so they can grow stronger, heal from past traumas, and create for themselves a life that is inspired, safe, and joyful. Our programs are based on solid evidence that yoga helps with physical well being, depression, anxiety, trauma and PTSD.
BOSTON YOGA TOUR: DAY TWO - take, take, teach!
I started off the day with a 10:30 yoga class at Karma Yoga Cambridge, in Harvard Square, recommended to me by another college yogini blogger, Yoga Fiend (yogi blogger virtual friends are the shit). The class was nice and easy, easing my way into the day, and had a familiar feel to it, but what was most excitingly unfamiliar was the studio space itself. Karma Yoga is not just a yoga studio; it is also a tea lounge/cafe, which apparently includes a full-service gym stowed away upstairs. Oh, and if you take a class before noon, not only is this college version of the early bird special $10, but your class comes with a free cup of tea and their selection looked pretty impressive. You can tell that the tea cafe is what cultivates a sense of kula (community) and svadyaya (self-reflection). Why? Let me put it this way: I was not the only one with an open moleskine and colorful pen, journaling away as I waited for class to start. There were strangers introducing themselves to one another (magically, yoga studios have an ability to make anonymous cities feel like small towns). Teacher trainees shared stories. And the teacher was out and about, socializing with the students before class. I wrote the following in my journal: “The only yoga clothes they sell is a shirt that says, ‘Yoga is my boyfriend’ and the only thing I can think of after my night last night [out to dinner with the directors at the BU Women’s Center and hanging out at the feminist anarchist collective] and my overall stay here in Boston is, ‘That’s so heteronormative.’” After class at Karma Yoga, I met up with my friend for coffee. Sitting on the top floor of Crema Cafe in Harvard Square, we talked about what it means to take more than you offer. My thoughts drifted back to my New Years intentions for 2012. One is “to produce more than I consume.” But I am learning that we take in order to have something inspiring to give. It is not up to us to decide how apparent those opportunities to give are when they arise or when they come up, but it is up to us to seize them when they do. This is especially true in yoga. Every single day, more students sign up for trainings to become teachers. They have been storing the fruits of asana, pranayama, meditation, and philosophy. There comes a point when there is no more room in those subtle bodies of ours to store all that spiritual information; we have to give it away in order to create more space. Studentship is a wonderful kind of taking and teaching is a gorgeous kind of giving. Yoga shows that these roles are two sides of the same coin; they work in tandem. So on my second day of Boston, I took two yoga classes (the second one was back at Back Bay Yoga and it was a Hip Hop Yoga class at the place where Hip Hope Yoga was founded as a style) and was given the opportunity to teach one to give back to the collective, which freely housed me for two days. We only had two mats for four people so we spread them out horizontally and stabilized a towel between them. It was a great experience to teach these powerful college feminists, all involved with the BU Women’s Center. I adjusted one student in a forward fold/paschimotanasana and she exclaimed, “I didn’t know I could stretch that far!” I responded, “Usually we can stretch way farther than we think we can.” Then I got a pretty big compliment for a yoga teacher: “Whoa, that’s deep.” P.S. to college yogis strapped for cash: Hip Hop Yoga at 2pm on weekdays at Back Bay Yoga is only $5! Take advantage of this quality fun 90-minute class for supah-cheap!
