We don't offer classes in the ordinary sense. We offer practices — each one a different door into the same room.
hatha asana
The body as doorway.
The first thing people expect from yoga is flexibility. This is understandable — the images are everywhere, the body folded into shapes that suggest a softness beyond ordinary capacity. But Hatha Asana as we practice it here is not about what the body can do. It is about what the body can reveal.
Every posture is a question. When you hold a warrior pose for longer than is comfortable, you learn something about yourself that you cannot learn from thinking. The quality of your breath tells you where you are holding, where you are hiding, and sometimes — on a good day — where you are willing to let go. This is what makes asana a spiritual practice rather than an athletic one: not the shapes, but the attention they require.
We practice slowly, deliberately, with an emphasis on breath and the intelligence of the nervous system. There are no advanced students in our classes — only people paying closer attention than they were the week before. If you can breathe, you can practice.
kirtan
The heart learning
to face what is true.
Kirtan is devotional chanting — call and response, usually in Sanskrit, sometimes in other languages of the heart's tradition. A leader sings a phrase; the room sings it back. This continues for an indeterminate time, and somewhere in the middle of it, something shifts. It is not a performance. It is not music in the conventional sense. It is closer to a collective act of surrender.
What we are surrendering to is the question worth sitting with. In the Bhakti tradition from which Kirtan comes, the answer is love — a love large enough to include everything, including the parts of ourselves we would rather not examine. The chanting creates conditions for this. The repetition loosens something. The room full of voices doing the same thing at the same time reminds you, in a very direct way, that you are not as alone as you might have thought on the drive over.
You do not need to be musical. You do not need to believe anything in particular. You need only be willing to try — which, if we are being honest, is the only qualification any of us actually has.
meditation
Not emptying the mind —
learning to live in it.
The most persistent myth about meditation is that the goal is a quiet mind. Students sit down, close their eyes, notice that their mind is not quiet, and conclude that they are bad at meditating. This is like trying to breathe underwater and concluding that you are bad at oxygen.
The mind thinks. It produces thoughts the way the liver produces bile — it is simply what it does. The practice of meditation is not to stop this but to change your relationship to it. To discover that you are the one noticing the thoughts, not the thoughts themselves. This distinction, which sounds simple and turns out to be enormous, is what fifteen minutes of daily sitting is slowly building toward.
We approach meditation here as a practice of attention — nothing more. There is no ideology to adopt, no particular tradition we impose. There is a cushion, a room, and the ongoing experiment of learning to be present with what actually is. You are welcome to it exactly as you are.
devotional service
Love in motion.
In Sanskrit, seva means service — specifically, service offered without expectation of reward or recognition. It is the yoga of action, the practice of showing up for something beyond your own development. And it is, in some ways, the most demanding practice on this page.
Asana asks for your body. Kirtan asks for your voice. Meditation asks for your time and your willingness to be still. Seva asks for something harder: the suspension of the ego's need for credit. The work is the same whether anyone notices or not. You sweep the floor before class, you carry groceries for an elderly neighbor, you show up on a Saturday morning to help with a community project — and you try to do it without keeping score.
We include Seva here because we believe that yoga practiced only on a mat is incomplete. The real test is what you carry out the door. Whether the quality of attention you cultivate in practice changes the way you treat the checkout clerk, the way you listen when someone tells you about their hard week, the way you occupy your corner of Coconut Grove.
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