Own Your Own Yoga is new in Gardiner
and its owner, Laura Faye Walls, credits the Gardiner Library with helping her to launch her business. Laura Faye is a certified Kripalu Yoga Teacher who received her training at the Kripalu Center for Health and Wellness in Stockbridge, MA.
“The training I received was broad and deep, yet I found teaching to be a humbling experience and I needed to get into it slowly,” explained Walls, “so the library’s community room was the perfect resource to spread my wings by offering yoga workshops in the space. The library served as a business incubator for me.”
Once she felt ready for regularly scheduled classes, Laura Faye arranged to share space with John Chiarolanzio, of Aikido of New Paltz who runs the dojo at 19 Osprey Lane in Gardiner.She feels it evokes a sense of harmony.
Laura strives to “creating accessibility” to yoga. “Yoga is calming and restorative, a natural sedation. It’s an opportunity to scan the body and get in touch with how you’re feeling. Movement with breath helps to bring our attention inside and in tune with the body, creating awareness.”
Laura Faye makes the point that once people understand that yoga is not about how you look while practicing, it’s about how you feel, they begin to see yoga as accessible to them. “There are exquisite yoga postures often used as icons of yoga practice and, as beautiful as they appear, those iconic pictures too often leave people feeling as if they are too inflexible or too this or too that to do yoga. That makes me sad, because if you can breathe, you can do yoga.”
Own Your Own Yoga is presented as technology for your use, particularly helpful in calming the incessant brain chatter many of us experience known as “monkey mind.“ The practice of yoga can be calming—an antidote to the stressful, frenetic and distracting aspects of everyday life. Laura explains that the tools, methods and systems of yoga enable you to do yoga in your own way whether on or off a yoga mat, in a class, at home, or while you are out-and-about. Laura helps her students to apply the technology of yoga to their lives and reap the benefits of aligning body, mind and spirit.
Each class offers a collection and sequence of yogic techniques from breath work, postures, and movement to meditation and relaxation. Private and small group classes are also available. Find out more at www.FaceBook.com/OwnYourOwnYoga or LauraFayeWalls@gmail.com or 914 466-5180.