A group of yoga students gather on a Thursday morning across a crowded play yard. Words of welcome and handshakes are exchanged, mats are rolled out and shoes are removed. As the teacher begins to speak, attention is given. Breath is encouraged and movement begins. Simple and dynamic all in one, a slow Hatha practice is what these yogis seek and will receive.
EYI 2013: Experience Resides in the Cells
“Experience resides in the cells.” Angel Kyodo Williams
This statement slapped me in the face. As a yoga instructor this information is not new knowledge to me, nor is it something I have not said myself multiple times. Yet on the first day of the Empowered Youth Initiative training it resonated with me in a much more powerful way.
EYI 2013: Permissive Language
As I lay in bed reflecting back on my first full day at the Off the Mat, Into the World Empowered Youth Initiative training, where the day was spent discussing the importance of language, I’m left feeling speechless. Not wanting to say the wrong words. Evoke negative emotions in others. Do harm. It’s easy to become overwhelmed the more you learn.
Living Your Bhakti: A Life of Service
As a part of the Global Seva Challenge, yogis from around the globe spent a year raising awareness and funds for organizations in India supporting sex trafficking and slavery survivors through shelter, education, holistic therapies and job skills training. During this year’s Bare Witness Tour in India, I assisted OTM co-founders Seane Corn and Suzanne Sterling as they led 20 of these yogis through two weeks of visiting and connecting with the organizations whom they fundraised for.
What I brought home
India is simply amazing. In the space of a few blocks you experience the absolute evidence of a loving God working in the world to the very depths of human depravity and suffering. Before I feel possessed by the need to transform this experience into meaning and purpose I wanted to spend some time reflecting on our brutal and tender journey through the human faces of sex-trafficking.
Mistaken Identity
I’ve never had quite the experience as the one I had today. After our morning ritual of yoga and breakfast, my half of the group headed to a safe house run by Women’s Interlink Foundation (WIF) and housing a Made By Survivors work space. Before heading to the Nijuloy Shelter Home (run by WIF) we stopped for a wander through a local morning market. It was bustling with activity…people buying food, newspapers and flowers.
A Time To Reflect
It’s taken me quite sometime to be able to turn my thoughts and experiences into words.
In the beginning I was a bit bogged down by the shadows of what I’d been witnessing while trying to keep my heart, smile and energy consumption afloat for the women and children I crossed paths with. It’s been a wild journey here in India – such a different world.
Dear My Two Little Sisters
On Monday we traveled to the Nijoloy shelter home run by the Women’s Interlink Foundation and the experience has been front of mind for me ever since. The girls who live in this particular shelter home are either orphans, victims of sex trafficking who have been rescued, or have been voluntarily signed over by their mothers who work in prostitution themselves and are hopeful of giving their daughters a better life.
Send a Seva participant to India…last chance Dec 31st!
"We in the West have a hard time believing that this is really happening, that the forcible exploitation of humans for profit is not only alive and well in the 21st century but worse than ever before… But the instinct of people to buy and sell other people for economic gain did not die with the 13th Amendment. It went underground and metastasized, waiting for conditions to ripen again. Then in the 1990s, slavery exploded into new life, fueled by globalization, the post-Cold-War economic vacuum, the Internet, and rising demand for cheap commercial sex and labor." Corban Addison