Adaptive Yoga

If you have felt discouraged from yoga because you are moving through chronic pain, injury, illness, or pregnancy, and have found it challenging to find guidance adapted to the degree appropriate for you in larger, mainstream classes, I encourage you to find a context that serves you. As long as we live and breathe, we can practice yoga.

Yoga for Individuals with Multiple Sclerosis

Sponsored by The National Multiple Sclerosis Society in collaboration with the YMCA, this 8 week workshop  will offer

tools, support, and community for those coping with the challenges of Multiple Sclerosis.

Yoga has been shown to be helpful in addressing and healing fatigue, reduced range of motion, spasticity, weakness, dyscoordination, imbalance, or numbness or paraesthesias in different parts of the body.  A regular yoga practice helps increase range of motion, self-reliance (since it can be practiced independently), and steadiness and quietude of mind. If you have questions about the class, please contact instructor Antonia Kao. Assistants/helpers are welcome to come with student/s.

The book to the left is a great resource and can be purchased here.

An 8-week series ran from September 19-November 7, 2008 at the Novato YMCA at Hamilton. 

Inner Sight Yoga

Inner Sight Yoga is a workshop for blind, visually-impaired, and blindfolded sighted students that can be taught as a single session or series. Visually-impaired students may opt to wear blindfolds to block remaining sight if they desire to as well.

The workshop's intention is to: 

* give blind and visually impaired individuals an introductory experience to yoga and the tools to begin their own personal practice. 

* give sighted students an opportunity to experience yoga from a non-visual perspective.

* build community between blind, visually impaired, and sighted people. 

This workshop was first conceived in 2003 when my daily route took me past the Peninsula Center for the Blind and Visually Impaired (PCBVI) in Palo Alto. In collaboration with Bonnie Rupel, the Community Relations Coordinator at the PCBVI; Paul Crowl, founder of Avalon Yoga; and Krassi Davis, another local instructor, we realized two consecutive 6-week series, held January through April in 2005. Click here to read an article about the workshop: "Visually Impaired Get a Lift from Yoga" (San Jose Mercury News 3/10/05).