Street Yoga Newsletter, April, 2008

Greetings

From all of us at Street Yoga, we want to wish you a splendid and rejuvenating season, be it Spring or Fall wherever you are. We also wanted to update you on the latest Street Yoga happenings, classes, events and goings-on.

If you'd rather read this online, just click here.

Upcoming Events

Feel free to join us for any and all of these public events coming up.

• Street Yoga Training, San Francisco, May 9-11, 2008. This training is nearly full, and, as with all the trainings we have done, promises to be a sweet and splendid mix of participants: teachers, parents, nurses, therapists, mentors, people from all over who share a desire to share yoga with people who have few avenues to learn and practice yoga with others. If you are interested in this training please check for availability and an online registration form.
  If you are interested in Street Yoga training, but can’t make it to San Francisco or Portland, please consider hosting a training in your part of the world. Feel free to contact us to talk about it more.
• Samarya Yoga Therapy Training, Portland, May 30-June 1, 2008. Street Yoga is proud to be sponsoring, in conjunction with the Yoga Shala of Portland, a training in Yoga Therapy, offered by the founders of the Samarya Center of Seattle. They will be teaching from their core IMT curriculum, which offers a holistic therapy approach for people of all ages, using yoga's philosophical, physical and spiritual framework in conjunction with conventional neuro-physiological perspectives to address unique challenges, including: chronic pain, depression, stroke, MS, Parkinson's, traumatic brain injury and anxiety.
• Karma Yoga Day at the Yoga Shala, Portland, June 29, 2008. The the Yoga Shala of Portland will be hosting a super-fun Benefit Day for Street Yoga! There will be kid’s yoga classes, adult and family yoga classes, music, t-shirts, events, and a great spirit of community and connection.
• Street Yoga Training, Portland, OR, July 25-27, 2008. This training is filling up, but there is definitely still space for this weekend. If you are interested in this training please check online.
• Street Yoga Training, Gananoque, ON, Canada, Sept 19-21, 2008. More details coming soon.
• Being Yoga Conference, New York City, October 10-12, Mark Lilly and Katie Arrants will be offering two workshops on yoga and service. This event is sponsored by the Omega Institute.

Happenings

Elsewhere, around town and around the globe...

• Street Yoga is providing free yoga classes for a Youth Wellness Day at SMYRC (Sexual Minority Youth Resource Center) in Portland later this month.
• Christopher Springmann of Life, Love, and Health is producing a show for public radio about Street Yoga. More details soon.
• Street Yoga offered a demonstration of yoga and hosted a booth at the Lloyd Center Mall as part of "Roots and Wings", which was put on by Morrison Child and Family Services, one of our long-standing partners. We made a good contact at "Roots and Wings" with the folks at the Bradley Angle House, and are looking to add yoga classes there in the near future.
• We are going to offer a free night of yoga for families at the Native American Rehabilitation Association next month.
• You can read a big write-up about Street Yoga and two other local groups in the Portland Tribune last month. Photographers and writers came to one of our teacher training classes, and to a yoga class (held outside that warm winter's day) at Outside In.
• Street Yoga will be participating in the Outside In Homeless Women's Wellness Fair, May 29th, in Portland

Helping Out Street Yoga

As always, we value all the support you offer Street Yoga, psychic, material, social, community and financial. If you want to make a donation now to help us deepen our work, we would greatly appreciate it. Please feel free to click here to donate now. Thank you.

Ongoing

Notes From Mark on the Board

We’re continuing to teach at community sites all around Portland, and regularly get asked to create new programs. We are working to stick close to our mission of serving youth who are homeless, or are at risk of homelessness, but we find ourselves tempted by other adventures: serving homeless adults, or Native American youth, or families living in subsidized housing. We move mindfully into these new areas, exploring our own boundaries of service. We learn every time, how interconnected we all are, in countless ways small and large.

We had a booth and taught a free class at an event at a local mall with Morrison Family Services. We taught on the ground floor next to the cell-phone shack, just down from the indoor skating rink. All the young people who did yoga with us that Saturday were from families whose first language was Spanish. And just like always, yoga crossed over such a frail boundary that might separate us, and we moved and breathed our way through a small practice together. When we were out of time, one boy, maybe 5 years old, didn’t want to stop. He wanted more yoga, more poses, more time moving and breathing with us. And for me, as has happened countless times before, I wondered if perhaps he’s done yoga in other lives, in other bodies, because he seemed so familiar with something we learned he had never done before, in this lifetime. We breathed together, at the mall, one Saturday in March, connected in ways older than memory.

Growing Wings

Street Yoga is also exploring ways to grow as an organization, and provide ourselves with a sustainable footing for years to come. We are having discussions with the folks at Living Yoga, a yoga outreach program in Portland which has served at-risk populations for years. They primarily serve adults, and have gained a tremendous reputation for their work with prison populations, and other at-risk people. We are discussing with them the possibility of merging the administrative work of our two programs, to allow for much greater efficiencies, and to allow both of our organizations to devote a greater percentage of our resources on the direct service of yoga. We’ll keep you informed about this as it evolves.

Evaluations and Research

Street Yoga is working with researchers at Washington State University to devise and implement a comprehensive evaluation program for Street Yoga and Street Yoga partners.

Namaste

With sincere wishes for your wellbeing, thank you for continuing to support our work, and to share the bounties of your own life.

Blessings,
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