When I first moved back to Columbus after having completed my Kundalini yoga teacher training, I was gung-ho to create a community like the one I had experienced in Vancouver. Since then, for nearly a decade now, I have learned that community grows on its own, mostly from the shift of each participant.

One day I looked up and was in the midst of this group, Samyoga Institute and all of its members, past and present, for we are affected by our community ancestry as well as our biological. The goal I thought I was aiming for in creating community had already been accomplished, not because I did anything, but more because I was welcomed. Samyoga Institute is a place to rest and be in authenticity, even in the itchy moments of growth.

As Janice mentioned in her blog, this community has been evolving over the years with the intuitive, grounded and driven people who care about it. It is from each community we participate in that we ripple out to affect the rest of the world. I wish I could draw you a picture of what that looks like in my head. It’s part of why practicing yoga in a group can be so powerful; we multiply its effect by practicing and learning together. The resonance we create goes out and out and out. One might imagine it to be exponential.

Samyoga Institute being community based means that most of our teachers go out into the world and do their thing where they already are. Students take their offers to yoga mats all over town and even into “off the mat” settings, kind of like putting ripples in a whole bunch of ponds or streams or oceans.

In Samyoga Institute’s vision of moving forward, the program and its participants continue to reach many communities, and it evolves to be more on par with being accessible to all while also calling yogis home to connect with one another. Yoga finds a way — it’s good like that. This age of our planet calls for collecting and connecting in ways that serve us personally and globally, and it is our hope to serve that movement.