Vision: How Yoga is Transforming a Kenyan City

[katty]

more: http://www.alternet.org/story/149883/vision%3A_how_yoga_is_transforming_a_kenyan_city

AlterNet / By Anna Clark Vision: How Yoga is Transforming a Kenyan City

In Nairobi, the Africa Yoga Project is training HIV+, poor, and disabled citizens to be yoga instructors, creating jobs and changing lives.

February 10, 2011
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Here is what the Africa Yoga Project wants you to know: it is not religious. Nor is it a collective of devil worshippers. If you come to AYP’s free and rambunctious Saturday morning class in Kenya’s capitol city, you will certainly not be lured into practicing an unfamiliar faith. Also, AYP will not give you money to do a few downward dogs.

Given the missionary tradition of East Africa, these are the not unreasonable suspicions AYP instructors face when they invite Kenyans to practice yoga. But just over three years since its founding by American ex-pat and yogi Paige Elenson, AYP has gathered enormous momentum. Those Saturday classes? About 70 people come each week, many traveling some distance to the studio in Sarakasi Dome on Nairobi’s Ngara Road. Students show off their acrobatics before the opening child’s pose—balancing on each others’ knees, pulling themselves vertical.

Throughout the two-hour yoga class in a sunny room marked by colorful graffiti and gleaming mirrors, students noisily whoop and groan and sigh with relief as they move through a vinyasa flow.

[PuraVidaDreamin]

1. Yoga has transformed my life

And I've watched it transform others. Physically it has strengthened me. Mentally it has calmed me. I have lower blood pressure, I'm more focused.
Anyone can do yoga- any age- any shape. The key is learning how to breath.

[katty]

2. yup-i always feel better after yoga-on many levels

[peace13]

3. A+ for this.

We need to get yoga into our schools and help the young people grow mind and body! Peace and love to all. If you haven't already, make a little time for yoga in your life! Peace, Kim