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Namaste and welcome to the May edition of our Conference Connection.
A warm thank you to all those who joined us for our recent sold-out conference in Boston! Nearly 1,500 yogis filled the Sheraton Boston with sun salutations and lined the hallways with shoes!
Our Yoga Journal Conference Team also acknowledges your generous donations. Thanks to you we raised over $13,000 for two incredible
organizations: YogaHOPE and the Urban Zen™ Foundation.
Join us in September at our flagship conference—the 13th Annual Colorado conference in beautiful Estes Park, CO! This annual escape in the Rocky Mountains is sure to inspire and engage your practice. We encourage you to register soon—classes are filling up!
As a Yoga Journal Work Exchange Coordinator, Nicole Dunas sits at the registration desk at our conferences and witnesses the coming & going of all our conference attendees. This month she gives us a glimpse of what she's seen.
Also this month, Sally Kempton shares her story of how her radical awakings, one in 1971 and another 20 years later, brought her from a twenty something hipster in New York City to the yogi she is today.
Namaste,
The Yoga Journal Conference Team
Elana Maggal, Conference Director
Renee LaRose, Senior Conference Manager
Heidi Hill, Conference Marketing Manager
Alden Conant, Conference Coordinator
Sara Mesing, Conference Marketing Coordinator
Estes Park 2008
September 21-28, 2008
Registration is now open!
Take advantage of our vast assortment of classes, workshops, and intensives, which have been carefully crafted with you in mind. Reunite with old friends and meet new ones. At Estes Park, anything is possible. So take a deep breath of mountain air, leave the day-to-day world behind-and be prepared for magic.
This year we will be hosting the first-ever 3-day Anusara Gathering with John Friend and other senior Anusara teachers and scholars, September 21-24, 2008. This Grand Gathering is almost sold out!
- Each day of the Gathering will feature:
- A master class with John Friend
- Inspiring philosophical talks by Anusara scholars
- Early morning meditations
- Break-out classes with top Anusara Yoga teachers
- Live music by Shantala (Benjy and Heather Wertheimer) and evening entertainment.
This is the first Anusara Yoga Gathering designed for all levels of students, including those new to Anusara Yoga as well as intermediate, advanced students and current or aspiring Anusara teachers. It will be an unforgettable event for the Anusara Yoga community!
Following the Anusara Gathering, the conference will continue through the week with a Beginner's Track, All Day Intensives including the Eight Limbs of Yoga and Yoga & Rock Climbing.
Not to be missed are musical performances by Deva Premal & Mitten and the YouthAIDS benefit concert with Trevor Hall.
Florida 2008
November 14-17, 2008
The Westin Diplomat Resort & Spa
Hollywood, FL
Registration for the Florida conference opens the week of June 9th!
With a top-notch luxury location right on the beach, world-renowned faculty, one of the country's most sought-after speakers, activist Trudie Styler, the Florida conference will be one of a kind. We hope you're there to experience it first-hand.
by Nicole Dunas
Over the years, I have seen many acts of kindness at Yoga Journal conferences. In Boston, a participant made two trips to carry three forgotten yoga mats and a set of props to our lost and found. After an Estes Park conference one year, a vendor asked me to pick out something from his booth to thank me for "working hard all week." In class, Sharon Gannon gave me a forward bend adjustment that was so deep and full of presence, I burst into tears. At the conferences, I am moved by how much yoga-in-action I witness. It occurs to me that it's easy to put the body into an asana, even one that feels challenging, when one considers what it takes to consistently embody generosity of spirit.
That said, asana practice is a great forum for discovery. In a recent practice, while pulling my legs into a lotus headstand, I felt my intense struggle and realized in a burst of attention that it begins with me. To be truly generous, I must be generous with myself. In that moment, it meant allowing that my legs aren't flexible enough yet to move into lotus without using my hands. It meant relocating the integrity of my headstand, and finding gratitude in exactly where my body was in that moment.
I sense strength in our culture's tendency to advocate individual pursuits, yet when this focus becomes too narrow, even charitable activity can be framed in terms of achievement. I should give. I should be kinder. If I figure out the best way to help, I will be worthy. Where is the experience in this kind of thinking? I sense that true generosity comes from connecting with the love we feel from the inside out, love that I feel devoted yoga practice invites. When I can actively practice self-love, I give in a more free and delighted way.
For the abundant generous actions I've witnessed at Yoga Journal conferences, and for the profound teachers and practitioners living generosity at each conference, guiding through kindness, this yoga student thanks you.
Nicole Dunas, M.F.A. candidate at the Bennington Writing Seminars, has been a devoted yoga student of Sofia Diaz for five years, and is a Yoga Journal Conference Work Exchange Coordinator.
Editor's Note: Sally will be presenting at the Estes Park Anusara Yoga Grand Gathering and the Main Conference. Click here for more
information.
Like so many yogis of my generation, I've had several wildly disparate lives, moving through at least three incarnations. In my early 20s I was a hipster journalist covering New York's downtown scene. An early marriage was followed by the mind-expanding shocks of the second-wave feminist revolution, and then, in 1971, by a full-fledged spiritual awakening that radically shifted my priorities and turned me on to yoga and meditation practice. Being an extremist by nature, I soon found myself practicing several hours a day, and inhaling the few available writings on enlightenment. In the mid-seventies, I encountered my teacher, the powerfully electric enlightened master, Swami Muktananda. This was followed by a headlong plunge into the yogic culture he embodied. For the next eight years I lived and traveled with my teacher. My counter-cultural values morphed into a full-hearted acceptance of an ascetic lifestyle of a classical Indian ashram. I offered my heart and mind into the fire of the guru-disciple relationship. Eventually, at my teacher's urging, I became a swami in the Saraswati order of monks, and for the next 20 years traveled, studied and taught sadhana and spiritual philosophy inside the context of the tradition. My book "The Heart of Meditation", was published under my name as Swami Durgananda.
In the 90s, I had another radical awakening, which included the recognition that the world itself is the teacher. I left the ashram community, moved to California, and began teaching workshops and classes in meditation, non-dual tantric philosophy and psychology, and an approach to life that I call practical enlightenment. It's also my privilege to write the Wisdom column for Yoga Journal, and to correspond with yogis all over the world, who write in response to these columns. The more my life in yoga unfolds, the more deeply I recognize how crucial it is that our spirituality be embodied, fully cooked in the fires of practice, self-examination, and audacious interaction with life. I try to offer my students the yoga of balance-not just meditation, yoga and movement, and philosophy, but psychological work, art, and a deep commitment to life as it is. Meditation practice is hands-down my favorite activity, but always in the service of what I have come to see is the true gift of a spiritual life: the ability to meet existence with naked awareness, to recognize delusion and bow to it while squirming out from between its coils, and, always, to recognize that blissful presence that lurks at the heart of everything we encounter.
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Upcoming Conferences
Estes Park 2008
YMCA of the Rockies
September 21-28, 2008
Registration Now Open
Save the Dates
South Florida 2008
Westin Diplomat Resort & Spa
November 14-17, 2008
Registration opens June 9, 2008
2009 Conference Tour
San Francisco 2009
Hyatt Regency
January 16-19, 2009
Grand Geneva
Grand Geneva Resort & Spa
March 26-29, 2009
New York City
Hilton New York
May 15-18, 2009
Estes Park 2009
YMCA of the Rockies
September 20-27, 2009
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