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“Hiya! How’s your breath?”
It’s not precisely frequent for a convention occasion to start with that question. However when Sundar Balasubramanian, PhD, posed that query to attendees on the Sedona Yoga Festival final weekend, everybody understood precisely what was being requested of them. Lengthy, sluggish exhalations adopted.
Dr. Balasubramanian, a cell biology researcher and TEDx speaker, was certainly one of dozens of presenters on the five-day pageant, which was launched in 2013 and shortly turned a revered and anticipated occasion the place dozens of teachers share the custom and science of yoga. The latest gathering drew greater than 700 attendees of all ages—together with newbies with no yoga expertise in addition to those that have been instructing for many years—who might entry 160 workshops, panel discussions, immersions, courses, live shows, and trainings.
Periods included discussions of neuroplasticity, Ayurveda, train chair yoga with the founding father of the Accessible Yoga Association, Jivana Heyman, in addition to a panel dialogue of sacred activism with Reggie Hubbard, Saul David Raye, and Ana Camacho-Hansen. The occasion additionally supplied a 20-hour trauma consciousness yoga training led by Lara Land.
“There’s a lot range—all backgrounds are right here, all sizes and styles are right here, each trainer right here is providing variations,” explains Arundhati Baitmangalkar, yoga trainer coach and founding father of the Let’s Talk Yoga podcast, who served on this system workforce for the pageant. In certainly one of her talks, she shared with lecturers her first rule for making a supportive surroundings for college kids, which is a reminder that “Lecturers, it’s not about you.”
It’s that understanding of scholars’ wants and expectations that prompted Baitmangalkar to rethink one facet of the pageant. “I believe college students have an understanding of a yoga pageant as this large occasion,” she explains. Though there’s nothing fallacious with that, she says, the time period might restrict one’s understanding of the training going down in the course of the 4 days.
Heather Sherée Sanders, longtime producer of the Sedona Yoga Competition, feels the identical. “I believe you hear ‘yoga pageant’ and also you assume barefoot and spinning round on the bottom,” she says with fun. “But it surely’s actually extra of convention with a pageant vibe. We’re all right here learning, working towards collectively, honoring the traditions of yoga, and exploring it actually deeply.”
Sanders considers the occasion extra of a “acutely aware evolution convention,” which has been its tagline lately. “I all the time stated you may get a masters in yoga studying about all of the courses in your schedule,” she says.
The higher a part of a yr is spent working planning the theme and taking functions for audio system in addition to reaching out to lecturers who aren’t drawing quite a lot of consideration however are doing wonderful issues, explains Sanders. She coordinates audio system and the schedule at the side of her small programming workforce, together with communications director Lisette Cheresson, who assist make sure the content material is various in all methods. The small print of the occasion are finalized at the side of a crew of gifted volunteers.
Sanders emphasizes that it’s potential to attend the convention and nonetheless obtain a really deep understanding of yoga with out doing any asana, or bodily poses. Roughly one third of attendees aren’t yoga lecturers. They range from newbies to regulars at studios who wish to perceive extra about yoga with out changing into a trainer. “We’re all right here with each other and including to one another’s understanding,” she explains.
That understanding takes many shapes. “This convention is so particular since there are such a lot of small workshops,” says Molly Nixon, director of the Yoga Mandala Project, which leads trauma-informed coaching for yoga lecturers who assist refugees.
Nevertheless, Nixon’s studying wasn’t restricted to the classes. After three days attending scheduled occasions, she spent her fourth day not attending any of the courses she’d supposed. As an alternative, she discovered herself drawn into dialog after dialog with different lecturers and panelists with related and opposing viewpoints, which she thought-about to be simply as academic. As Nixon defined, “It’s simply magic.”
Subsequent yr’s Sedona Yoga Festival will happen Might 1-4, 2025. Discounted tickets can be found till March 31, 2024.
Images by Ty Dobbs.
