Ashtanga Class Changes - Dec 1

Starting in December, Intro memberships will no longer be accepted for Mysore classes. New Mysore students will be expected to already have at least three months of yoga experience in Yoga East classes. Before coming to Mysore classes, new students must have attended a minimum of 10 led Ashtanga classes, and will need to know the Sun Salutations and the order of standing poses.

All "Ashtanga-Inspired" classes will change to traditional Ashtanga Yoga in the method of Pattabhi Jois. All classes will be full Primary series. The afternoon led classes will move to Holiday Manor. Monday and Wednesday will start at 4:15 pm and the Friday class will start at 4:00 pm. The Friday morning class at Kentucky Street will change back to a led format and start at 6:00 am.

Erin Kinder, Kim Eisner and Tom Keenan will be teaching the led classes and they are going to encourage students to stop at the appropriate points, and to keep working on the correct expression of the postures without making modifications or using props. Since there will be a led class somewhere 6 days a week, there's more of an opportunity for students to develop a strong Ashtanga practice. Those of you who have a daily practice can attest to the value of a daily practice.

Volunteer Yoga Teacher Training

Dedicated, experienced Yoga East students who are interested in offering yoga classes to the community are eligible for our volunteer training program. This program provides free teacher training to those of you who are interested in offering yoga to cancer survivors, teens and children, the elderly and other under-served segments of our community who can benefit from yoga but who often lack the ability to pay a teacher.

If you're interested in sharing your love of yoga, have a minimum of three years of yoga class experience at Yoga East, and enough free time to teach one class a week for one year after completion of your training, you may qualify for this unique teacher training program that begins December 12, 2009.

This program will offer five free teacher training classes to volunteer yoga teachers who will be trained to teach beginning yoga classes to the elderly, teens, children and other beginners. Art of Teaching classes meet Dec 12, Jan 16, Jan 23, Feb 6 and Feb 13. See the Calendar Page of our website for specific times. You can also contact Laura Spaulding by phone during office hours: 1:00-4:00 pm, Mon-Fri, 502-585-9642, to get more information.

New Blog Format

I decided to discontinue our old Forum/Blog, which was a phpBB bulletin board. The phpBB format required maintenance and updating. In spite of various security measures it also allowed hackers and spammers to have access, and I had to continually monitor the Forum to delete them. This blog format allows our blog to be concealed from web crawlers, so I'm hoping we won't have the same problems.

Welcome to the Yoga East Blog

My teacher, Pattabhi Jois, used to have conference at the old shala every afternoon. It was an opportunity to be with him, ask questions, and discuss issues of yoga practice. There were many moments when no questions arose, and we simply sat with each other in silence, and that was great, too.

It's hard for us to have conference at Yoga East. Students and teachers have busy lives filled with family and other responsibilities. We have three studios and many students find it hard to travel from one studio to another. It's difficult to set the right time and location for that purpose.

Our blog is a way for us to be together in cyberspace and have a conversation about yoga. I hope you enjoy the blog and I welcome your comments.