Posts Tagged ‘accessibility’
Stuff, stuff, stuff! Do we really need more stuff? Do we need to give more stuff?
This holiday season, give the gift of yoga by supporting the Acorn Fund. The Toronto-based fund offers annual grants to local organizations who help share yoga with those who would otherwise be unable to access the practice. It was formed with the intention of stimulating the Toronto yoga community’s interest in sharing resources for philanthropic concerns.
The Acorn Fund, which is coordinated by the good people at Yoga Community Toronto, also “places priority on supporting projects that seek to demystify, legitimize, and naturalize yogic practice and thought in the public sphere.” This includes community health, rehabilitation, employment and transition services, and public education, among other services. Past recipients of Acorn Fund grants include the New Leaf Yoga Foundation and the Centre of Gravity Peacemakers.
Donate to the Acorn Fund here.
And do you want to give the gift that keeps giving? Consider using the Acorn Fund as a model for engaged yoga philanthropy in your own community!
“Come back to life,” invites the tagline for this Yoga Outreach video which is making its way around the Internet. The clip is a promotion for a 30 day Yoga Outreach challenge that’s raising funds to deliver healing and life-affirming yoga programs to people who can not directly access these resources.
Yoga Outreach is a Vancouver-based non-profit organization that provides free yoga in the correctional system, women’s shelters and addiction recovery centres in British Columbia. All the yoga classes within these facilities are taught by volunteer teachers.
Yoga for Round Bodies logo: Ganesh was the original round bodied yogi!
There is an old Chinese proverb: “Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.” Tiina Veer, founder of Yoga for Round Bodies, is living this wisdom. Not content with simply offering yoga classes in her hometown of Toronto, Tiina has created a teacher training program to give others the skills to teach safe and effective classes for bigger bodies. In this email interview, Tiina talks about her experience as a round bodied yoga practitioner, her vision for a practice that is accessible and available to every body, and empowerment through anatomical knowledge.
What is Yoga for Round Bodies?
Well, now it’s about two things. First came the Yoga for Round Bodies classes (and occasional countryside retreats) offered in my community, downtown Toronto, which I am still teaching. The classes motivated me to evolve it further by filling a much-needed gap: training yoga teachers in Yoga for Round Bodies.
The Yoga for Round Bodies (YRB) classes are about Hatha and Restorative yoga practices specifically geared toward the rounder-bodied student. Only practices that can be modified for everyone are included. Yoga props are well-used tools in our classes, both for Restorative practice, and for creative pose modification. Offering YRB classes provides an opportunity for people who otherwise may not come out to yoga classes at all the chance to have a safe, fun and non-judgmental environment in which to practice and explore yoga.
The YRB teacher certification program is about preparing yoga teachers to better meet not only the round students who attend their “regular” yoga classes, but further to offer Yoga for Round Bodies classes within their communities.
What do you mean by “round” bodies?
Our cultural concept of “round” (fat) is clearly warped. Women think of themselves as fat if they don’t look exactly like the airbrushed and PhotoShopped models and celebrities that are impossibly thin even before the digital alterations. One of Cindy Crawford’s famous quotes is, “I wish I looked like Cindy Crawford.” As we all know, there are multitudes of women who consider themselves fat who are nowhere close to being so, and in fact can even be slender (or even emaciated, as with many of the eating disorders) by comparison. There are women who are simply svelte and voluptuous – in a Marilyn Monroe kind of way – who consider themselves “fat,” but where yoga is concerned, they don’t have a belly or thighs that impede their practice at all. Continue Reading
It’s catchy, eh? “Tax hot dogs, not down dogs” is a new mantra that West Coast yoga teacher Eoin Finn is rallying for, in his ongoing mission to keep yoga accessible and available to all. Eoin is speaking out against the HST (Harmonized Services Tax) in British Columbia, a new tax system that was imposed last year and is now in a referendum process. Between June 13 and August 2, BC residents will vote by mail-in ballot on whether or not they want to keep the tax, which increased taxes on services – including gym, health club and yoga studio memberships – from 5% to 12% (this is a simplified explanation: for more details on the HST, see HST in BC).
On his Blissology blog, Eoin wrote:
… this extra tax is not just in proportion to where the tax dollars mostly end up, in our health care system.
In my yoga classes and workshops after the introduction of the HST, I had to raise the rates, which I had been trying to keep affordable for people for the last 11 years. I believe that a good government will incentivise things that keep people healthy like gym memberships, yoga classes, massage, etc. But adding 7% tax is going the other way.
What really bothers me about this: Most of our tax dollars in BC go towards health care. It doesn’t seem right that things that keep people out of the health care system have an extra tax applied to it.
Eoin goes on to propose a third option: “If most of the tax income raised is going to health care, why not shift the tax burden to the things that contribute to people being unhealthy and ending up using the medical system in the first place… like fast food.” Continue Reading
- maybe this is why more men aren’t doing yoga… (image via chiropractic-help.com)
The old “where are all the men in yoga class” conversation is making a quiet return in the popular press and the blogosphere lately. Even the most casual observer of yoga culture would notice that women outnumber men in the average yoga class, despite the fact that many of the highest profile teachers in North America (and traditionally) are men.
As an article on Yoga Modern last week noted, women make up 72.2% of the 15.8 million people who practice yoga in the US and thus the yoga community feels a need to reach out to men. The title of the article asked, Does marketing yoga to men reinforce gender stereotypes? “Surely there is a way for the yoga community to be inclusive without falling into reductive and overgeneralizing gender stereotypes. After all, are men and women so different that they can’t practice yoga together?” Staying true to the name of the website, the article gives a historical overview of women’s place in the world of yoga, and cites “the non-dualistic philosophies of Vedanta, Yoga, and Tantra.” Continue Reading
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