What Makes A Community

I wrote in an earlier post about yoga satsang – community. (http://jenniferyogalifeway.blogspot.com/2010/11/tweets-and-books-in-yoga-community.html) 

This year has seen a welcome boom in the size of my yoga community.

Close to home, I’ve begun teaching yoga in different locations which has allowed me to meet many new and interesting people. People that you pass on the street and would never think would try yoga have stepped on to a yoga mat with me for the first time this year.

And they, in turn, have taken yoga and introduced it to other new people. One woman very tentatively walked into a free yoga in the park class this summer. She wasn’t sure she belonged in yoga. But of course, after that one morning she knew she was meant to be there. So much so, that after only a few months she began teaching yoga to her teen-girls youth group at church.

A regular yoga member and friend who did yoga all through her pregnancy, hounded me enough about prenatal yoga that I started a special class for mothers-to-be. That one special session has turned into three sessions and seven beautiful babies and future yogis. Another special class for runners has turned hard-core marathoners into devout yogis who are as proud of their urdvha dhanurasana as they are their run times!

On a bigger scale, Facebook lets me keep in touch with yoga friends I meet at teacher trainings.  We spend four or five days sweating and learning together, and then go home. But Facebook lets us keep in touch and keep encouraging each other through good times and bad. When a fellow teacher in California lost her husband recently, I couldn’t be there for her physically. But through Facebook we’ve been able to talk. Hopefully I’ve been able to take away some of her pain or at least offer an ear to listen and a forum to cry when she needs to.

Even Twitter has become a welcome addition to my yoga satsang. Where else would I be able to talk to an Anusara teacher leading an immersion in New Zealand?  Or join a book group discussion with not only a writer from Elephant Journal but also the actual author herself?

At my Anusara workshop last month, John Friend said we need to “think and act locally to change globally.”  I’ve learned this year that the local yoga community isn’t as small as I thought it was, and the global yoga community isn’t as far away as I feared it was.

When we stand on our mats together, we really are one satsang.

<a href=”http://www.reverb10.com” target=”_blank”> <img src=”reverb10button.png” /></a>