Category: yoga

books, courage, creative process, creativity, innovation, writing, yoga

Beginning: Advice for Writers and Innovators from Kathryn Stockett – There’s Genius in Pain

Christa Avampato
Emma Stone, Viola David, and Octavia Spencer in The Help

“Write about something that bothers you and nobody else.” ~ The Help by Kathryn Stockett

The holiday slew of movies at the box office makes this one of my favorite times of year. I love going to the movies, watching movies on my couch, on a plane, or in an outdoor venue. One of my favorites this year was The Help, based upon Kathryn Stockett’s wonderful novel.

The heroine, Skeeter, wants very much to be a writer. (I can relate.) A publisher in New York gives her just one piece of advice – write about something that bothers you and nobody else. In other words, find what gives you pain and invent something to alleviate that pain. Pain in its many forms – anger, angst, anxiety, sadness, disappointment, heartbreak, injustice – is useful for writers and innovators. There’s genius in there.

I founded Compass Yoga on this same philosophy – simply, I was irritated. I’m glad that there are so many beautiful, shiny studios in New York City for people like me to take classes. What really bugs the heck out of me is that there aren’t a lot of places for people to go if they don’t have the financial or physical means and the confidence to take that first step. I’m also highly irritated that there isn’t more scientific research about the benefits of yoga in treating disease.

It’s terrific that 16 million Americans practice yoga. What about the other 291 million, especially those who don’t even know how much they could benefit from yoga because no one told them it could help? Who’s going to get to them and teach them and help them? And why are we so astounded and pleased that a measly 5% of Americans practice yoga when 100% of Americans could benefit from it? And why on Earth doesn’t it seem to bother anyone else? You see, my irritation is readily evident. And growing, right along with the Compass Yoga business plan.

People sometimes ask me what my big, audacious, out-of-this-world goal is with Compass Yoga. My answer: I’m going to get to those other 291 million people and at least give them the chance to give yoga a whirl. We, as individuals and as a society, have so much to gain and all I’ve got to lose is my irritation. It worked for Skeeter and this thinking can work for all of us.

New York City, teaching, yoga

Beginning: The Truth About NYC Yoga Teacher Salaries

Christa Avampato

Well+Good NYC published a very brave post this weekend that should be required reading for anyone interested in pursuing a yoga teacher training program. I believe it is the first and only article of its kind to publish actual salary ranges for yoga teachers in New York City.

I understand why most studios and teacher training programs have shied away from putting together this type of post – it’s not good for their business. To be completely fair, the article does mention several NYC teacher training programs that are very honest with their students and I applaud their honesty. I wish more training programs would follow their lead.

Give the whole article a read when you have time. Here’s the cliff notes version – “super-established and highly credentialed yogis earn anywhere from $40K to $400K. While the salary range is huge, most yoga teachers in New York can expect to make $35K or $40K. Even if you become a really popular instructor, with 50 people in your class regularly.”

With some back-of-the-envelope math, this is how the numbers shake out:

1.) Start with $40,000 take-home pay
2.) Subtract 25% for taxes –> $40,000 – $10,000 = $30,000
3.) Assume a low rent of $1500 / month –> $30,000 – (12*$1500) = $12,000
4.) Assume $1000 of monthly expenses which includes:
food
transportation
electricity
health insurance (you need to buy your own)
clothing
personal care items
and maybe a movie or a cup of tea with a friend once in a while

You’re out of money. No savings, no room for travel or to visit family and friends, and let us hope there’s no emergency incidental that comes up (but let’s be honest, there always is!) So what do yoga teachers do? They don’t teach full-time. It’s a part-time gig that needs to be supplemented, many times by tending bar which in NYC is just about the least yogic activity I can think of.

Most teacher training programs won’t tell you this because they’re selling you the bright shiny dream of buckets of karma-filled days, luxurious retreats in tropical places, rainbows, butterflies, and unicorns. They are playing on your emotions rather than helping you to understand the current landscape. You need to be your own reality check. Reality is our friend because like a good yoga and meditation practice it grounds us. It gives us a place to build from.

I am a big believer in dreams and change. Though this is the current landscape of yoga teachers in New York City, I don’t think it will be or always has to be this way. After reading about Yoga Sutra’s bankruptcy filing, I wonder if change has already indeed begun in the NYC yoga market. It’s begging for a new and improved business model. It needs a better way forward than the current crappy business model that dominates the traditional studio scene. I’m so tired of seeing my incredibly talented teacher friends get sold a bill of goods that is as real as the emperor’s new clothes.

Change isn’t going to make itself. It requires rainmakers and firestarters to shake things up. I can take that role and run with it.

At Compass Yoga, the board members and I believe we have hit upon something really unique and interesting, something that might just get us part of the way toward cracking this nut of how to make a good living from a career dedicated to wellness. At the very least, we’re going to give it our very best shot because someone has to.

The Well+Good NYC article just added more fuel to our fire. The yoga scene in NYC is ripe for change in 2012 and we mean to be a part of moving it forward.

choices, clarity, creativity, writer, yoga

Beginning: Create Something Beautiful and Good in 2012

Christa Avampato

“That which you create in beauty and goodness and truth lives on for all time to come. Don’t spend your life accumulating material objects that will only turn to dust and ashes.” ~ Denis Waitley

It’s with more than a bit of irony to find this quote among my reading during the holiday season. It seems that almost everyone except me went on a buying frenzy in the midst of Black Friday madness. Then they got their credit cards statements and logged an unprecedented number of returns. This is a good sign for American society – perhaps we’ve turned a corner when it come to how we think about stuff. It is all just stuff.

I think about stuff a lot because I am, by profession, a product developer. However, most of the products I’ve created aren’t tangible products. They are Broadway shows that inspired people, nonprofit programs that benefited worthwhile causes, and experiences that celebrated our creative spirit.

The tangible products I’ve created over the last few years for my current employer are things I am less than proud of, actual things that I have relegated to the back of my mind, and conveniently left out of my portfolio. Creating them has afforded me a salary that has helped me to pay back a good chunk of my student loans from business school and to save an emergency fund as well as another savings account so that I can chase my dream of starting my own nonprofit. I am grateful for this gift, particularly in a time in our economy when so many people have struggled financially.

If I think about the last three years of my professional career strictly from a product development perspective, they have been wildly pointless. I have churned out product after product that I don’t believe in, would never buy, and would never counsel anyone else to buy. These three years were really just about survival in a bleak financial market. The joy has gone out of my work.

Personally, these three years have been staggeringly exceptional. I have learned more in this time than I ever thought possible – about myself, the world, and my purpose. I have made oodles of friends along the way, reinforced my confidence and convictions, and found my voice as a teacher, writer, and leader. It has been nothing short of a blessing. It has been a transformation. I found and live the dream of my life, even if at the moment it is only after regular working hours.

This dichotomy – an enriching personal life and a stagnant professional life – has been brewing for some time now. I’d say it was at a slow boil for about a year, a rolling boil for another year more, and has been at a flat out screaming boil over 2011. The only thing that can possibly come next is a quick evaporation altogether. And that’s rather what my latest career decision feel like – an evaporation of what doesn’t matter in favor of activities that do matter, to me and to the world. Compass Yoga is my attempt to follow Denis Waitley’s advice to build something beautiful and good.

It’s going to be a beautiful 2012 – just wait and see!

teaching, technology, wellness, yoga

Beginning: Compass Yoga Gets a YouTube Channel and We Want to Feature You!

Christa Avampato

Last weekend, Michael and Amy (friends and fellow Compass Yoga board members) came over to my apartment to shoot our first set of homespun yoga instruction videos to upload to our new YouTube channel. The channel is now live and we would absolutely love to have you stop over there and let us know what you think!

For veterans and their families
We created this first set of videos specifically with veterans and their family members in mind. As many of our troops in Afghanistan and Iraq return home in the coming months, they will go through an adjustment period as they transition. These videos are meant to be a resource to turn to in moments when they feel anxious, are unable to relax, and feel tension, depression, or fear. Though inspired by the needs of veterans and their families, the videos are available for free and unlimited viewing to anyone who has an internet connection so give them a whirl and let us know what you think!

How you can be a part of our YouTube channel
Additionally, we’d also like to post videos that inspire people to live lives that have a focus on health and well-being. If you have a video that you’d like us to upload – and it could be something as simple as you speaking into a camera and explaining how you’re living a healthy life – then we’d love to post it. Drop me a line and we’ll talk about how to send it over.

In the coming months, we’ll be filming and posting more short sequences as well as guided meditations. We hope they will be of great benefit to a wide range of people across the globe. Stop by and let us know what you think!

art, creativity, religion, yoga

Beginning: The Spiritual Nature of Yoga

Christa Avampato
© Rassouli

“Being ‘spiritual’ simply means being willing to look into the nature of life, to ask questions and to wonder, and to listen. It also means seeing art everywhere.” ~ Quang Ho via Daily Good

I’m often asked by friends, family members, and students who are new to yoga whether or not they can do yoga and still maintain their own religious beliefs. They’ve heard about yoga being a spiritual practice and they’re concerned that they will walk into a yoga studio only to have a competing belief system pushed onto them.

My answer is always the same – yes, there is a spiritual side to a yoga practice and yes, you can still keep your own religious beliefs. Yoga respects and welcomes anyone and everyone, just as they are. With Quang Ho’s beautiful words in mind, yoga will ask us to check in, observe, ask questions and wait for the answers. There is no way to hurry the process of getting to know our true nature – it unfolds in its own time, on its own terms.

And if we can be both persistent and patient, we will find that our true nature is indeed a work of art.

adventure, career, celebration, change, creative process, creativity, yoga

Beginning: Move Toward the Obstacles

Christa Avampato
Ganesha - our great friend and the keeper of obstacles

“The obstacle is the path.” ~  Zen proverb

On Sunday I was thumbing through the new prAna catalog and found this proverb. Obstacles tend to be things we want to jump over, crawl through, duck under, go around, or blow up into miniscule pieces. And with good reason – they prevent us from doing exactly what we want to do exactly when we want to do it.

Or do they?

What if we could find a way to weave our obstacles together like cobblestones that form a path up and away from where we are right now and on to the path we’re meant to take? Obstacles, just like triumphs, are teachers. And they are generous. They force creativity, give us grit, and usually necessitate the formation of partnerships and relationships to overcome.

My path has been loaded with obstacles of all shapes and sizes. They have made it difficult to navigate, and yet I am now a better navigator for having them on my course. I wouldn’t trade them; I needed their presence so that I could work with my yoga students with compassion, authenticity, and empathy. To make the decision to pursue Compass Yoga full-time, I had to face obstacles in the other areas of my professional life. If that other way had been free of challenges, I may have never found the courage to leap.

This is how life goes – in the moment, we don’t understand all of the change swirling around us. In hindsight, the pieces settle and we understand why the exact path we took was exactly the path we had to take. Those obstacles are the inflection points that caused us to take a necessary turn so that we could live up to our potential.

May your road and mine be littered with obstacles of real value!

business, medical, medicine, meditation, yoga

Beginning: What It Really Means to Invent

Christa Avampato

Estimates now show that there are 70,000+ yoga teachers in North America. 70,000 people do exactly what I do. We all have roughly the same basic level of training and seek to do the same type of work.

On its own, a statistic like that could be enough to scare me into hiding. But here’s the real trick of inventing, whether you’re trying to invent who you are, a new business idea, or any new adventure:

We don’t need to reinvent the wheel – it’s a damn fine piece of machinery. What we really need to do is invent a new way to make it roll.

Yoga is my wheel.  

I’m grateful for the 6,000+ years of yoga teaching lineage that is available to all 70,000 yoga teachers in North America. What I want to do with Compass Yoga in expand reach. I want yoga and meditation teachers to stand side by side with MDs, medical scientists, and pharmaceutical companies in the collective and collaborative pursuit of optimal health for all people everywhere.

And that’s how I roll.  

blog, business, celebration, economy, hope, inspiration, writing, yoga

Beginning: My Features on Sour to Sweet, a Blog Focused on People Defying the Great Recession

Christa Avampato

Lauren Murray is striking back against the idea that our economy has ruined all of us.

Her blog, Sour to Sweet, is “my attempt to counterbalance the doom and gloom that’s already out there. Let’s celebrate the successes that, seemingly against all odds, have occurred despite the economic downturn.” Lauren reached out to me a few weeks ago after reading my book Hope in Progress: 27 Entrepreneurs Who Inspired Me During the Great Recession. She asked if I would be willing to share my own story through an interview (Not the Same Old Yoga) and if I’d write a guest post on the topic of inspiration (How to Survive the Uh-Oh Moment). I was both honored and thrilled by the offer.

I hope you’ll stop by Sour to Sweet and support Lauren in helping her to get the word out that it’s not all darkness out there!

fear, learning, yoga

Beginning: Richard Nixon, My Dad, and Making Friends With Fear

Christa Avampato

We pack up fear; we push it away. We focus our efforts on beating fear, and when we can’t beat it we try our best to ignore it. What if we could embrace it? What if we could make it our mission to do exactly the thing that scares us most?

I’ve been thinking a lot about fear and how to hold it close. Compass Yoga scares me on a daily basis, not because I’m worried that we can’t live up to the mission but because what we’re taking on is such an enormous, gangly, unwieldy mess.

We want to greatly alter the healthcare system. We want yoga and meditation to stop being “alternative therapies” and fully integrate them into traditional treatment plans. As accepting as society may be of yoga and meditation for the well, it’s still quite new to think that yoga teachers could and should be on par with medical doctors and therapists when it comes to assessment and treatment of those who have serious health challenges. And yet, in spite of the fear, I know this is the right direction for our healthcare system from a moral, scientific, and financial perspective. This thinking is new, and scary.  

Fear is not remarkable. Everyone, every day has fears of varying degrees. It always interests me to know what keeps others going, especially when they’re petrified of what they’re doing. I used to think that we could move ahead once we got rid of fear, and so I set about looking for ways to banish it from my system. I have always met a bit of frustration in this area because my fears never seem to fully dissipate. They stick with me – sometimes as just a little nagging voice in the back of my mind and sometimes as the star on center stage with a big ass microphone. Fear and I hang out on a very regular basis.

There are two people who keep me moving forward: my dad and his story and the too-soon ending of his life, and Richard Nixon. When I saw the play Frost/Nixon, I began to understand how disappointment can take someone down, how enough shame and embarrassment about our circumstances and choices can fundamentally warp our view of the world and the people around us. In that moment, I also began to forgive my dad. The play contains a very dark scene where Richard Nixon, played brilliantly by Frank Langella, calls David Frost and explains a part of his back story that helps us to understand how pride, when taken too far, can move us into a dangerous state of unsupported arrogance that consumes us.

I hate to say this, but I actually felt a great deal of sympathy for Richard Nixon as a result of that scene. Me, a liberal through and through, felt badly for Richard Nixon. I understand now that the sympathy I felt for Richard Nixon in that moment is the same sympathy that has allowed me to understand my dad.

Like Richard Nixon, my dad was an incredibly insecure, embarrassed, and disappointed man. He lived most of his life that way and he died that way His fear of never living a worthwhile life eventually consumed him. Beneath that thin veil of arrogance, there was a man who feared his life would never amount to wait he wanted it to be. And he couldn’t take in that fear. Eventually it overwhelmed him.  

The irony in the midst of this sad and unfortunate story is that my dad’s example has saved my life, and continues to save it every day. I keep moving forward with Compass Yoga, my writing, and my teaching because I have seen what becomes of someone who can’t embrace fear, who looks in the mirror and sees too much time gone by without doing what he really wanted to do with his life. When I look in the mirror, I see him in my eyes staring back at me. We are not so different; all that separates us are our choices about fear: to keep moving or become paralyzed.  

We could all be my dad. We could all be Richard Nixon. Every day, we all come to a fork in the road, “two roads diverged in a yellow wood“. And at each junction, there’s one common underlying choice: do we embrace fear or do we vow to wait it out? If we embrace it, live the very thing that frightens us, then we can keep moving. Choose to wait it out and the world will eventually pass us by.

Which way would you rather go?

curiosity, education, running, safety, yoga

Beginning: Learning How to Breathe, Run Barefoot, and Ditch Conventional Wisdom

Christa Avampato
http://www.runningmetronome.com/

Last week I attend my first class at The Breathing Project with Leslie Kaminoff. I used his anatomy book as a part of my yoga teacher training, and since then have been curious about his renegade style and obsession with how we breathe. In traditional yoga classes, we learn the 3-part breath by filling up the belly, then the chest, and then the collar-bone area. Leslie flips that around, literally and figuratively. He advises students to fill up on breath from top to bottom. At this suggestion, my brain began to twist and turn, trying to rewire its thinking about breath.

Similarly, last week I began reading intensely about barefoot running after an article in the New York Times Magazine, The Once and Future Way to Run. I’m entering the lottery to run the New York City marathon in 2012 and looking for the most efficient way to complete my training and beat my time from the Chicago marathon that I ran in 2001. For a number of years, I’ve heard about these barefoot runners and mostly written them off as just a hair shy of completely insane.

Turns out I may be the crazy one. Heel-to-toe running, which most of us do, is just about the worst possible way to beat up our bodies. Making contact around the mid-foot / toe region takes advantage of our bodies’ natural springing motion, protecting the body from undue injury, increasing our speed, and making our motion more efficient. Like Leslie’s class on breathing, this idea from barefoot running sent my mind happily reeling toward new possibilities.

Both of these ideas ask us to harken back to childhood, remembering how we used to act as children and how we have been misled as adults. We pick up so many bad habits on our journey into adulthood and sometimes we forget to question the new learnings that generate these bad habits. The result of losing our courage to question conventional wisdom? Harming our own bodies and minds.

This questioning of how to breathe and how to run, two very basic actions that we all do all the time, got me thinking about all the other “truths” that I may have accepted to easily. Business is loaded with them. “Experts” tell us that we MUST have a fully baked business plan, perfect products, and so much market research that we scarcely have time to look at all of the findings, much less make sense of them. Phooey!

What if we try this: go against the grain. Go ahead and put some kind of business plan in place, and then be prepared to change every blessed word of it. Launch good-enough products as quickly as possible to get real-time input on design from a live market, and then commit to iterating future versions just as quickly with real feedback. Forget market research composed of focus groups and other traditional methods. Make the business one giant market research experiment.

Here’s what would happen: our rate and level of innovation would increase, more people would create things of value to others, more people would take their futures into their own hands through entrepreneurship, and we’d all learn more. Oh, and we’d have a greater rate of jobs creation – quite possibly the biggest hot-button economic issue in our country today.

What do we have to lose by ditching conventional wisdom? Bad habits – we’ll breathe more fully, run with greater ease, and have a healthier economy. The value of taking conventional wisdom at face value? Staying right where we are.

Which option sounds better to you?