Dear
Yoga Yoga Students, Teachers, and Staff,
With the arrival of each New Year, we come together in our resolve
to become a little better than we were the year before. We remind ourselves
that all of life is about evolving, transforming, reforming, and elevating
ourselves as we move forward through the year ahead.
When we begin a yoga practice, whether from hope, desperation, or a
New Year’s resolution, we sometimes set goals for ourselves, a
way to mark our progress and to insure our commitments. We have a destination
in mind – to become fit, to relax, to elevate our mood, to achieve
a full-standing backbend, to sit quietly with ourselves for 11 minutes,
to go to class three times a week, or simply remember who we are.
The important part of your yoga practice, however, is not your goals
but your intention. Why are you doing yoga? Most people will say, “Well,
to get healthy.” Some people say, “To be happy.” A few
folks say, “To become holy.” All see yoga as a means to an
end, to reach a goal. In reality, yoga has no ending. It is a journey,
not a destination, and the reward comes not from achieving an expected
outcome but from becoming who you are meant to be. So in Yoga, your
intention does not come from your goals. It comes from your heart.
One of my most respected yoga teachers has taught with us for years
at Yoga Yoga, actually even before it began. On one visit after we had
just opened our second location, he took me aside before he went in
to teach a packed room of new teacher training students. “Mehtab,”
he asked me, “do you think all these people come here for the yoga?”
I pointed out that the sign over the door did say Yoga Yoga – we
didn’t offer anything else. “Well, yes, you are right,”
he told me. “They may come for the yoga – but they stay for
the heart.”
Yoga Yoga first came into vision in the winter of 1997. I knew it was
time to take the home studio practice my wife and I had built over the
previous two years to a larger space. The yoga room at our house held
8 people with some squeezing. Over the last three months, we had 15
Kundalini Yoga teacher training students in the room on the weekends.
The energy was high but the tiny closet bathroom that opened directly
into the room would soon have to be equipped with swinging doors to
accommodate the traffic flow. If we were to have a new place, we needed
a new name. For many evenings I sat in meditation and kept asking, “What
do we call it? Lotus Yoga? Yoga Austin? Yoga Works?” I knew it
had to be called Yoga Something or Something Yoga, and finally I realized
it was not Something – it was Yoga – only Yoga, always Yoga,
purely Yoga. It was Yoga Yoga.
The name sounded silly but it was perfect. At the time, my wife and
I were teaching Hatha Yoga, Kundalini Yoga, Ashtanga Yoga and Yoga Therapy.
The only name that could describe all the types of yoga we offered was,
well, Yoga Yoga. The only problem was that when you wrote the name as
a logo, it looked like a misprint or a stutter. “It needs something
between the two Yogas,” my wife said. “Something yogic, like
a chakra, or some yoga symbol to go between the words,” she said.
Some of the oldest yogic symbols in yoga are the Yantras. They are used
in meditation to aid in concentration, visualization, and eventually
in understanding the nature of consciousness. Most of them are composed
of circles, triangles, and petals. The Yantra selected for the Yoga
Yoga logo was the Eight-Petaled Lotus. I simply liked the way it looked
– a circle and eight points – simple and sun-like. Later I
found out what it meant.
The Yantra used in the Yoga Yoga logo is called the Sarvasankshobana
Chakra (chakra means circle). The circle was the oldest representation
of Unity and Connection. No ending, no beginning, all encompassing,
all containing. The eight petals around the circle represented the eight
points of the compass – all the directions of the physical world.
You could reach Unity through any direction. It was like a house with
doors on every side – many ways to enter.
For Yoga Yoga, it represented the many styles and practices of yoga
that we offered and honored. It reached out to everyone, in all directions.
Come on in -- it does not matter where you come from or what yoga you
practice because it all leads to the same place.
I also discovered that the Yoga Yoga yantra symbol is used in meditation
to govern the third chakra and the ability to manifest – to make
visions become reality. It was the energy that made the spiritual into
material. It was a perfect symbol for an earthly yoga studio whose purpose
was to serve the spirit.
The Yoga Yoga yantra also gives the meditator the ability to master
the three attitudes of rejection, acceptance, and non-judgment. When
these attitudes are mastered, you begin to live with acceptance and
service, in compassion and with passion. You come from the heart chakra.
The importance of this became more obvious to me with the passing of
last year.
In 2005, the big moment for Yoga Yoga was the opening of a new center,
Yoga Yoga Northwest (one of the eight directional compass points on
the yantra). As we moved forward with the new center, I thought I should
check the road map to see where we were and where we were going. In
the practice of yoga, the chakra system is the master road map for working
with the physical, psychological, and spiritual aspects of our being.
The chakras are seven major energy centers that contain a specific transformational
energy. Each chakra fulfills a definite purpose in our evolution and
well-being. The first chakra is about survival and building foundation,
the second chakra is about relationships, the third chakra is manifestation,
the fourth chakra is service and compassion, the fifth chakra is self-expression,
the sixth is intuition and the seventh is connection with the infinite.
I realized that Yoga Yoga had been following the same chakra road map
that governs all the paths for spiritual growth. When we opened the
first Yoga Yoga on South Lamar in 1998, it was all about survival –
just like the energy of the first chakra. I remember three months after
we had opened the center that we still had 57 more months to go on a
lease that obligated us to more money than I ever had in my life. At
the time I had no idea if we could even pay that month’s bills.
If Yoga Yoga was to survive, we had to build a foundation, a structue,
and for the first three years we struggled to do just that. I realize
now that we did survive not because of any brilliant knowledge of running
a yoga center (since we had never done that before) but because we put
our focus on serving the students who came to us. And they did come
and Yoga Yoga South did survive and that energy of the first chakra
manifested.
