Hi there! 
I guess I have arrived in cyberspace with my humble little Yoga Blog. It feels a little bit like setting up a cardboard lemonade stand on a Midtown Manhattan street corner surrounded by sky scrapers and scurrying urban professionals!
I am not selling any lemonade.
Since I began teaching Yoga in Stamford, CT I have had an ever-growing hope that a more actively connected Yoga Community could grow. When I started out, I ran my own classes, from renting a space, to promoting classes and teaching. I did not belong to a studio and found it difficult to connect with other teachers. As a student, I bounced around the handful of studios in town and I also felt no sense of belonging.
Yoga philosophy offers much about the inter-connectedness of all things in the Universe. The more I learned and taught the more I have wondered why a place like Stamford with a large population has no sense of Yoga Community?
Think about it, you might have some friend or friends that you go to class with or practice with, you might be very well acquainted with the other students that appear in your regular weekly class but is there a strong sense of inter-connectedness within the Yoga Community in Stamford? Do students know where to find like minds or how to share information about Yoga or Yoga events? Wouldn’t it be nice to know about special events you could attend with like minds?
Most of the Yoga teachers I know are ‘independent’, teaching in various locations. We have clusters of students in different places. We teach ongoing classes by the Season or offer Series’ that last from 4 - 12 weeks. We devote ourselves in the moment to all of our clusters of friends and students. It’s pretty much…Have Yoga Mat - Will Travel and trying to keep presence of mind and heart…Home is where the Heart is.
From a professional standpoint, it works if we keep our heart in the practice wherever that may be. Sometimes our venues change and students have the opportunity to try a new teacher which is always a practice expanding experience - good or bad. Sometimes students follow their teachers becoming a little nomadic themselves.
So what calls to me to build community? Well, it’s the students AND the teachers.
Students can benefit from a one stop website to check the schedules of their favorite wandering teacher as well as find lots of useful information to build a home practice or find resources on the web and have a place to ask questions about Yoga.
Teachers can benefit by having a place to post their schedules, share information with other teachers, make new contacts in the community and find resources on the web.
It’s a labor of love and a work in progress. A bit of a grass roots effort - yeah, lemonade stand! I hope that new teachers will come visit, offer some inspirations for teaching, register for the site, post a comment or contribute an an article of interest.
I hope that students will come and find schedules, read stories and feel free to register, comment or get in touch with me to recommend a teacher you would like to see present here.
Check back often, I plan to keep the blog active and growing to share not just Yoga news, but Earth friendly links and stories but also information for students in a category called “The What is Department…?”. Send me a question and I will post an answer so others can benefit from the answers too.
Let this be our community and while the pages right now seem to be limited to self promotion about my classes, I hope that soon those pages will be joined by lots of other teachers and articles of interest.
Love and light and thanks for stopping by.
Jen Irwin
