The Offering
If the word "yoga" makes you think of painful attempts to bend your body into positions it simply won't accommodate... think again!
Yoga for Geeks is for anyone and everyone – even and especially if you've never done yoga before. If you are tired of your aches and pains, if your posture is suffering, if you are tired of living inside your head 24/7, and if you sense that it doesn't have to be that way, then Yoga for Geeks just might be for you. Part stretching (nothing contortionist, unless you're naturally inclined that way), part conscious breathing, and part body awareness, Yoga for Geeks is for people of all shapes, ages, and levels of flexibility.
You'll learn ways to counteract the physical effects of too much time spent hunched over your computer, and you'll taste for yourself why a bit of time spent in the body is an essential antidote to a lot of time spent in the head. In the process, you'll start to get to know your own unique body, and how to give it what it needs.
I am available to teach Yoga for Geeks sessions at conferences, tech or otherwise (see a list of past offerings here). If your conference is very far afield, or I'm not available, then I encourage you to find another teacher sensitive to the needs of geek bodies, and bring them to your conference to lead a class!
The Story
Yoga for Geeks was born in early 2006, shortly after I returned to the working world following a year on hiatus. I had left a desk job to pursue my yoga studies, motivated in large part by the pain that my body was experiencing thanks to so many hours in a chair.
I spent four months at Mount Madonna Center in central California, practicing all kinds of yoga, and then took a 200-hour teacher training at the Salt Spring Centre of Yoga in the summer of 2005. I had been practicing yoga since 2001 and the decision to start teaching felt like a natural one.
Upon my return to "the real world", however, I found myself swept into the Vancouver tech community, accepting offers for freelance web communications work, and once again spending many hours a week on a computer.
I began to realize that I didn't have to choose between these two parts of myself. In fact, I saw a huge need for yoga and its lessons in the "geek" community that I am a part of. And so Yoga for Geeks was born, and the first class was held at a Drupal conference in Vancouver in February.
The Gratitude
So many different people have influenced me along the way, and I am deeply grateful to all of my teachers.
A few of my past and present yoga influences:
- Grant and Rhonda at the Wandering Yogi in Vancouver - I couldn't have hoped for better first teachers.
- Gioia Irwin in Vancouver, and her lineage of Vijnana Yoga
- The lineage of Baba Hari Dass, through Mount Madonna and the Salt Spring Centre of Yoga
- Diane Bruni at Downward Dog in Toronto
- Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen and Body-Mind Centering