Sunday, February 19, 2006

The Lease of my Troubles
On Wednesday I found out that Holiday is closing the yoga center at the end of March. I don't know all the gory details but it has to do with the lease and the building. The building apparently thinks it can get bigger, higher paying tenants and Holiday doesn't want to wildly raise the price of classes. She's looking for alternatives but the studio as we know it will be no more.

I started studying with Holiday 10 years ago in March and I don't think I've ever been away from the studio for more than 2 months, and even then, just a couple of times. It's hard to convey, without sound like a cheesy women's magazine article, what a huge part of my life this has been. Our culture loves to stupefy everything in big dramas about how something (yoga, Prozac, TiVo) changed someone's life. But yoga has changed my life.

I'm not going to elaborate because that would be boring and stupefy it, but commit yourself to some sort of intense regular self-study over a 10 year period and there's bound to be changes.

I have a solid home practice so I look to class for continued inspiration and to remind me about poses that I avoid at home. And also, during the weekdays it's usually my only time to practice. Upon hearing this news I thought about alternatives.

I also attend classes at Yoga Bhoga and I figured I'd shift to more classes at this location. The attraction to both of these studios is the teachers but as luck would have it, they are both optimally located to the office. Once my car is parked downtown, I don't have to move it for class.

This weekend I attended a workshop with Bob and Ki and while I was there I learned from a classmate that Yoga Bhoga is moving across the river at the end of April, also the victim of a building lease problem. As Auntie would say: fukola-dola.

Now I need to find a new yoga base. One woman at the workshop teaches at Shanti Yoga in Vancouver and that sounds like a good fit so I guess I'll start there and see what happens.