Indy, Support your Local Yoga Community!
As a yoga enthusiast, I dig community. I love to hop around the local yoga scene, hitting major events and intimate classes. Yoga in Indy is both a big city with lots of little neighborhoods and a small town where everybody knows your name. There is the big Indy Community and smaller communities.
Back in the day, there were few teachers and fewer yoga studios. You didn’t have a lot of choices. Now Zionsville is becoming the Santa Monica of Indy. Once the gyms, CrossFit boxes, community centers, churches, and schools reach their limits on hosting yoga, classes will probably popup at the Super Targets. Yet, there will still be yoga ghettos and vast swaths of population who will remain unaware of yoga world. The yoga community is open and insular at the same time.
It’s easy to drop in almost anywhere. The odds are you will know the instructor and/or some of the students (many of whom are also yoga instructors). It’s like going to Cheers except you drag your bar stool around with you. Walk in, drop your mat, and you are at home.
Because you don’t actually have to know anyone to practice on your front porch mat, you can enjoy a solid practice anywhere. You don’t have to be afraid to roll without your besties. While it may be tough to play tennis without reassurance someone will return your serve, dropping into yoga is like hooping at the gym or the park. You can always get buckets. While the courts are competitive, yoga is not supposed to be. It should be easier to throw down your mat when you aren’t worried about throwing down. Plus, trash talking in yoga class is highly discouraged.
You can meet up with friends, run across friends, and meet new friends in the shared class experience. That’s community. What’s interesting about the pastiche of the community is that while you can see the same people at different times at different studios, you will still find some people that only go to one studio. This preference might be geographic, practice, or price driven, but it might also reflect a teacher/vibe preference. While an athletic yogi generally doesn’t prefer a devotional studio and vice versa, cross pollination does happen. For some yogis, their community is strictly the free community class. You may only see them at the weekend mall class, but it is as much a tight knit enclave as any studio or gym.
While you may only encounter certain yoga students at their singular space, you will almost certainly encounter the same instructors at many spaces. Somewhere, teaching yoga is wildly financially lucrative, but in this community, teachers must lead many classes in many places to garner any income. Wherever, you see a teacher, if he/she emits a friendly vibe and knows your name, the community becomes more accessible.
If you practiced yoga in a super metropolis, you could easily go to one or many studios on a regular basis and remain totally anonymous to the instructor and other yogis in a mega class. In this community, not so much. The connectivity of the community can be annoying and heartwarming. When you want to go here and not there, friends wonder why you didn’t go there with them or formally invite them here. When you go to one teacher’s class, another wonders why you didn’t/don’t come to “my” class. (Sigh). Yet, it’s so nice to be welcomed, wanted, encouraged, appreciated, and missed. You just can’t get that from anonymity.
Perhaps our Indianapolis yoga community is less established and less sophisticated than others. Perhaps are numbers are smaller. Maybe our community has unique practices and quirky ways, but it is ours. Join in my enthusiasm. Get to know the neighborhoods and be part of the big picture. Participate in community wide events like Monumental Yoga. Check out Indy Yogi and its calendar to stay in the community loop. Let’s support our community. Namaste.
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1 comment:
You Rock, Ellen!
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