Every Tuesday evening, hundreds of people flock to the Grace Cathedral Labyrinth to practice yoga with local teacher Darren Main. With Easter around the corner, SFBG talked to Main and the Rev. Jude Harmon, who manages the program, about how this unlikely class came to be, and why it works so well in San Francisco. Read more »

I teach a weekly employee yoga class at a hospital where my students are all women. Every week, a young man peers curiously into the classroom. I asked him once if he’d like to join us, and he said, “Yes, but what would my friends say? Yoga is for girls.”

This odd societal notion that yoga is an emasculating, status-reducing activity is bad enough. But to make matters worse, people like William J. Broad, the so-called New York Times science writer, have publically espoused that yoga is actually harmful to men. Why? Because, he says, men have a tendency to push themselves too hard, and their bigger muscles are more injury prone.

Wait … what?

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Some people go out to bars and drink on a Friday. But, you want to know what I do for a good time? I chant. I chill in a room full of yogis and I sing mantras in Sanskrit and I get really happy.

If you’re in the yoga tribe, you might be nodding your head here. If you’re not, you may be thinking I sound like a New Age freak who’s sniffed a little too much patchouli. I understand. I’m the city girl who first resisted yoga 15 years ago, when I moved to San Francisco, saying, “Yeah, right, I’m going to just sit there and breathe.” Like yoga, chanting can be something of an acquired taste. But, also like yoga, it can be acquired very quickly. The biggest obstacle is just getting into the room for the first time to do it.

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It’s February—feeling a little love in your heart? Srutih Asher Colbert’s been feeling the love all year long. She’s a Bay Area yoga teacher (and hairdresser) who raised $24,000 in one year through grassroots fundraising to fight sex trafficking in India, where she’ll be going next week to volunteer her time to the cause.

Om Front talked to her about how, and why, she undertook the challenge.

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Every year that I go to the Yoga Journal Conference in San Francisco, which just ended on Monday, I come away with the same realization: Yoga is so many different things. It can be a practice for health, fitness, philosophy, acrobatics, community, self-realization, deity worship, or empowerment. While traditionalists sometimes frown at what they call the misuse of the word “yoga” and declare that it’s meant to be practiced in a particular way at a particular time of day in a particular sequence and with a particular teacher, I admire modern yoga’s scope. This is because yoga, to me, is not just a mat practice -- it’s a way of raising consciousness in life.

I’ve attended the conference for the past six years (often as a correspondent for Yoga Journal, itself, and this year as a correspondent for Om Front) and I’ve always found the event to be a window into every possible avenue and expression of yoga.

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Yogis love the New Year. It’s not that we love to party till 4am and then vomit on the neighbor’s front stoop, or sing Abba songs in a frighteningly loud bar as the timid January sun makes its way above the horizon. Most of us are actually in bed early on NYE, after some Indian chanting and a decaf chai. The reason yogis love the New Year is because of the resolutions. The ultimate goal of yoga is transformation, so what yoga devotee doesn’t love the opportunity to make a positive change? There is even a term in Sanskrit for a heartfelt resolution or intention: sankalpa. 

You can make an intention or sankalpa around anything: your health, your money situation, your love life. So, on December 31, just after midnight, sitting around two tea light candles and a bundle of sage in my friend’s LA apartment, I made an intention for enthusiasm. 

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Do you feel like the world is always about to end? I do. Maybe it’s because we’ve been in a recession almost my entire adulthood. Or because I still remember everyone stocking up on toilet paper and batteries for Y2K. Or because it seems these days like there is always a natural disaster happening somewhere in the world, and if a hurricane or tornado or tsunami isn’t tearing apart a city or a village, some crazy dude is shooting people or devising a shoe bomb or proselytizing that everyone is going to hell in a hand basket lest we give up our immoral ways and fast.

But I have hope. Because dark cannot exist without light. And often, the darker things get, the lighter they’re bound to become.  Read more »