Drive

Greetings and salutations!

What an awesome weekend it was. Where to start. The first two days in business for Get Yogafied rocked! We had new members of the community greet us for each of our first four practices, and everything was pretty much smooth sailing. I led a “Flow-For-All” practice on Saturday, and a “Yoga 101” on Sunday. These were the first two practices I’ve led since NOVEMBER, and although I was nervous, they were super fun and rewarding. Leanne & Victoria taught this weekend as well, and their students gave them high praise, just like we knew they would. Some of the students from Saturday also dropped by the studio on Sunday to purchase monthly memberships, which is simply super. I’m just overwhelmed with gratitude for my partnership with Kimberly, for Get Yogafied, and for the ability to bring yoga, fun and philanthropy to such an awesome community of people who both want and need us.

Besides the asana practices this weekend, we also kicked off Get Charitable on Sunday at the Community Consciousness hour. My new friend from Little Elm, Heather, was full of great ideas and knowledge about ways to help her community. Victoria also stuck around after class to join us. I’m so optimistic about the great things we’ll all do together. I’ve recently purchased the URL http://www.getcharitable.com, and will start posting things there on topic in the weeks ahead. In the meanwhile, we welcome your suggestions! We’ll be meeting at the studio every Sunday at 11:45am, or feel free to post them here. You definitely don’t have to live near Cross Roads to Get Charitable with us. =)

Amidst the many little details that had to be taken care of to get the studio ready for opening was the whole music situation. I decided a while ago to offer instructors three options for music during their asana practices:

1. Bring your own;
2. Use our iPod;
3. Turn on Pandora and let ‘er rip.

This means I was left to find music for the iPod and create yoga-friendly playlists for Pandora. I know this sounds silly, but for some reason I found this a daunting task. I was born smack-dab between disco and new wave, but always had more of a penchant for 90’s grunge and any kind of hippie-friendly rock tunes. Music has always dominated my existence, although I’ve never learned to play. Some of my earliest childhood memories are from recess in kindergarten at the private Jewish day school that my mom sent me to. Near every day I’d play “Rock Star” on the jungle gym with a fellow day-dreamer, while my portable cassette player wielding Cyndi Lauper’s “She’s So Unsual” blared at top capacity. So maybe that’s why I had difficulty. Yoga Jams have just never really been my thing. I’m just a rocker chick through and through.

Worry over iPod playlists was pretty quickly squashed by the discovery of a post by the lovely people at Yoga Journal: http://www.yogajournal.com/multimedia/playlists/. That left me to deal with the Pandora situation. So Friday night at around 10pm, while I was frantically looking for tunes with the right combination of flutes, harps and mechanically generated rainfall noises, the thought struck – this is GET YOGAFIED. The only rules are: be passionate about yoga, and be yourself. After that self-reminder, and with a little help from my friends, the playlists were done in about five minutes flat. Playlists include: Folksy, Singer Songwriter, Classic Rock, Pop Rock-N-Roll, and several traditional yoga jams.

While “Pop Rock-N-Roll” may not contain my personal first choices of tracks for download on iTunes, as the name implies, I believe it contains what will be a popular selection of upbeat tunes for some of our more fast paced practices. This weekend the station shared “Drive” by Incubus. In turn, I’ll now share the lyrics with you:

Sometimes I feel the fear of uncertainty stinging clear
And I cant help but ask myself how much I’ll let the fear take the wheel and steer
It’s driven me before, it seems to have a vague haunting mass appeal
Lately I’m beginning to find that I should be the one behind the wheel

Whatever tomorrow brings, I’ll be there
With open arms and open eyes yeah
Whatever tomorrow brings, I’ll be there, I’ll be there

Perfect.

Love and Peace,
Om Shanti,
Shana