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Harvesting Change
On this side of the world, it's the time of the full, strong sun. Here in Los Angeles, the hot, arid air is crisping everything so recently lush and green, as the sweet and versatile fruits ripen. Soon the time of harvest will arrive. A time to "take stock. "
Growth requires careful planting and cultivating, hard work, sweat and effort. Growth requires just enough of each of the elements. Growth requires patience and attentiveness. There is a necessary tension in growth; a tension between what is inside and what is outside; between intrinsic motivation and innate gifts and between extrinsic rules and outer measures of success.
We live in a world of paradox. The tension I feel in this growth-of-our yoga endeavor is not dissimilar to the tension I feel in marriage, parenting, teaching-and in every yoga pose. So too, tension lives between success and greatness.
As I have pointed out in this newsletter so many times before, yoga is not the absence of tension, it is tension in optimal proportions. HUGE irony that optimal tension often leads to an experience of effortlessness.
Per Darwin, nature does not reward morals or ethics, nature rewards success. In a universe of pure power, meaningful extrinsic motivations act on meaningful rules. Success follows the rules, and rewards come extrinsically. As my teacher Dr. Douglas Brooks has said, "Success is the way you negotiate relationships of possibility to your advantage." Success may be keeping your studio doors open, or paying your rent, or staff, or teachers. Success may be going to work, even if it is not ultimately your deepest vision of how you pictured your life. Certainly, success is paying the bills, putting food on the table and providing for our children. But no greatness-or even goodness- is required to achieve success.
On the other hand, notions of greatness are designed around innate gifts and intrinsic motivations. You change the world by your intrinsic motivations, and the gift of who you are. Per Dr. Brooks again, "Greatness is the capacity you have to realize your gifts, which in turn is a gift to others." In the context of teaching yoga, teaching is a path of service. It is a path of love. Regardless of whether the school budgets get cut and cut again, teachers choose to teach. Whether a teacher gets recognition, awards or a raise, teaching is who teachers are. Teachers pursue continuing education, not because it will raise salaries but because teaching is a life long commitment to studentship. But realizing your own gifts may not bring you great success (as culture defines that term) and embodying your potential does not necessarily bring the promise of great joy. Consider Picasso: an artistic genius by most standards. But fulfilled, happy? Not by the sound of it...
It seems clear that we may achieve greatness, without worldly success (think van Gogh, Galilei, Mendel, Thoreau, Kafka, Dickenson). We may--perhaps more easily--achieve cultural success without nearing greatness (think Madoff before the feds caught on). But how do we skillfully strive for both? Welcome to yoga.
If you're a yoga teacher, this tension in teaching is summed up in two questions: Do you want to be popular? Make the students happy, they come back = success! Market that! Brand that! Franchise that! Done.
Or, do you want to effectively teach someone something? In my mind, greatness is taking responsibility and accountability for what you know and what you don't. It's real and honest. A great teacher makes no false claims and avoids manipulation. A great teacher might strike the conventional and popular pose from the sequence, leaving students disappointed. Some poses are better not done, than done poorly (I recently posted a blog on this idea, if you feel like reading even more... Click here). If you missed that, I AM BLOGGING NOW.
 Here at YOGAMAZ�, we are feeling the tension of growth. Every day. #Everydamnday! Every new initiative is both interesting and engaging, and each requires seemingly endless time and energy to plant, tend, sow and cultivate. For the first time, we are experiencing a new kind of "success" in diverse areas. It's a new era for us. We have become a community. Last year at this time 3 of us occupied our offices, and this year we have grown to a team of 8- with new hires on the near horizon. We have an amazing community of students worldwide, ranging from those who are new to us to trainees to accomplished Apprentices (we have 22!) to our incredible team of YOGAMAZ� Emissaries, who are delivering quality trainings in too many regions to list (read down and to the right to learn what they are up to and where)!
Rocky Heron, of Yoga with Rocky has recently moved to LA to be a full time YOGAMAZ� teacher. We just finished two weeks of Teacher Training at YOGAMAZ� Los Angeles and we had the chance to work together closely. Our very own Nichol Chase is launching a new curriculum "Yoga for Performers" in our LA space beginning this summer. I am nothing but ecstatic to share the teacher's seat, with Rocky and with other of our incredible Apprentices. This past round of TT 200 I shared the seat with not only Rocky, but Hope Buchbinder, Becka Janse, Leo Cheung, Paula Gelbart, and Nichol Chase. It was been kind of a long time since I have really collaborated deeply with others, and I am so happy for a new season of growth.
Emissaries, Sarah Bohairy and Amy Petty just started our first ever intensive YOGAMAZ� 200 YTT in Bali. I will join them in a couple of weeks. Bali? Yes please! In Jakarta, Mona Jahja and Deera Dewi have commenced Module 2 of YOGAMAZ� 200 YTT and I just launched a 300 hour YTT. Jakarta may not be on your destination list like Bali is, but the studio there, Gudang Gudang is arguably one of the most beautiful I have ever experienced--And I experience a lot of yoga studios.
Many others are doing wonderful and inspiring work of cultivating their gifts and offering their voices. Too many to list in this newsletter, but each teacher a gift to me and to our world.
Our production team (including the talented Nichol Chase, our visionary creative director, Stacey Harper, and me) are hard at work designing and planning curriculum and our newest Online Course, Fire, Nectar & Flow, which I will launch in September, with my friend and sadhana sister, Sianna Sherman. This will be our online course debut together, and the first of many online collaborations to come.  This course will focus on Vinyasa sequencing strategies, and is a part of our broader in person Vinyasa 100 Training, also set to fly in September. We are having a one time
Right around the corner, is Anatomy Week here in LA. We are offering our Annual Anatomy Intensive, which is open to the public, AND a weekend with Dr. Ray Long (who is visiting Modo Yoga LA - our neighbor a few blocks to the south) for a 2 for one price(@ yogamaz� pricing). Register with us for the opportunity to attend both of these amazing programs, which span one week in August. Inquire about Anatomy week here. Of course, there is much more- Always more. As usual, it's not that busy here. Oh, and did I mention I started a BLOG.
Tracy has proven to be the underlying, enduring and driving force behind so many of the YOGAMAZ� initiatives 
and growth. She is the glue that holds it all together. Her big vision, her ability to attend to every detail, and her unwavering tenacity and perseverance truly awe me. I am not easily awed... Without her, I would be pursuing the yoga with all my passion and focus, completely off the grid in a cave or forest somewhere. My beloved Tracy is the necessary missing piece of my greatness. Of course, she is the necessary driving force of my success (that's a surprise). And I think I am those same things, in different ways of course, to her.
Each of us has the innate power and gifts to choose both success and greatness; and I think there is a necessary conflict always present as one strives for both. The tension is necessary, and it keeps us in balance. Sort of like gravity. Success and greatness do not resolve into each other, but we bring them into relationship, and that's yoga. The earth stays on its axis, and if we are lucky, we keep moving . Two steps forward. One step back.
Our children are thriving: Madeleine has graduated TK and will start Kindergarten in September. Her confidence is emerging. Last year she encountered some major anxiety and confidence challenges. We created a great team that involved her teachers, the director of her school and a family therapist who helped me and Tracy to update our skills. Madeleine has taken some tremendous strides recently. We are crazy in love with our girl and oh so proud.
Oliver completed his first cycle of swim lessons and will start School in September. Oliver resisted every day for the first week of swimming lessons. By the second week, he stopped crying and started smiling. I got in the pool with him during the last lesson and experienced his joy of being able to swim. Now he needs to be dragged out of the pool!
How is it that they are growing so fast? I imagine they will be off to college soon...
Tracy and I are off with the kids to run the festival circuit today, I am teaching in my home state at the Telluride Yoga Festival and then at Wanderlust. We are navigating the challenges of work-that-never-stops and young-children-who-never-stop. Somehow, sometime, and from time to time we find the ways to cultivate the greatness of intimacy, and not just the success of the corporate endeavor of marriage and family. I'm sure many of you relate.
And so it is with every yoga pose. I'll say it again--it is not the absence of stress, it is the optimal proportion of stress aligned in just such a way to spark effortlessness.
Embrace the paradox.
Saprema, Noah
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