MIND AND BODY

Class warfare, yoga-style

By Amrita Narayanan Bruce

“Yoga for Poor People” cried the yellow flyer that had stopped me in my tracks. “They want us to be sad, unhealthy and poor,” read the advertisement, “but now we have a chance to break down the overwhelming socio-economic glass walls that separate the spiritually rich but financially strapped from achieving physical and mental nirvana.”

The posters around town left me, a yoga practitioner, confused. The word “yoga” means “union,” yet this poster had an “us vs. them” positioning I’d never seen in an ad for a yoga class (and I’ve seen many).

However, when I showed up at 10:30 a.m. on the Western Prom Sunday morning, I quickly saw that the class did not really carry the combative energy that could perhaps be read into its ad campaign. “My boyfriend wrote the advertisements,” confessed yoga teacher Shana Tefft right off the bat. “[The ad campaign] was kind of a joke but it also sort of illustrates how I feel about over-priced yoga classes.” “Pay what you can: yoga for poor people” simply proposes equal opportunity for spiritual enlightenment, regardless of economic background. “My boyfriend also thought it’d be funny to say I had ‘international certification,’ ” said Tefft. “I trained in Canada.”

Teffts’s “international certification” comes from the well-reputed Sivananda yoga school teacher-training program in Canada. She has been practicing for six years and teaching for about three. Aside from “pay what you can yoga,” she has also taught yoga at an after-school program for young boys at a low-income housing project and at the Bay Club, and currently teaches at the Regency Hotel.

Tefft’s idea for “pay what you can yoga” was inspired by her feeling that there is a lack of affordable yoga classes in the city. “I have a lot of friends who are artists or just don’t have a lot of money to go to yoga studios,” she said. “The studio claöses are wonderful but out of reach for most people.” The average per-person contribution at Tefft’s two classes so far has been $4. This is in contrast to a drop-in class at any of Portland’s yoga studios/centers, which usually run $10 to $15.

“I’d love to get like 20-30 people out here,” Tefft said. “It wouldn’t matter if none of them paid anything. It gets me to come out and practice outdoors and it gives me an opportunity to share yoga with others.” This Sunday there are three takers, including one of Tefft’s roommates. “At an earlier class we had five people,” said Tefft. “Other times it’s rained and I’ve had to cancel.”

Each week Tefft repeats a routine of simple yoga postures beginning with energetic sun-salutations and flowing into other poses. The class begins and ends with a lying-relaxation in the yoga pose known as “corpse-pose.”

“I’ve always felt that health and wellness related missions have been limited to the bourgeois and the privileged,” said an earnest yoga student afterward.

But, to be fair, it must be said that options do exist in Portland for the poor and yoga-hungry. The weekly YMCA “yoga-workouts,” run by Ken Blonder and Gary Guerny, for example, are low on instruction but affordable to all at a dollar a class. In additiýn, most teachers at Portland’s yoga studios/centers are open to work-study or payment plans for financially strapped students. That said, Tefft deserves props for her selflessness, described in the yoga world as “karma yoga” — the yoga of doing good work without a profit motive.

My humble opinion? Keep the free yoga (kudos). Lose the un-yogic and somewhat misleading ad campaign.

—Amrita Narayanan Bruce