Summer 2010 Kid-Fit Yoga

Enroll your child today in a safe, fun, healthy, summer activity: Kid-Fit Yoga. Your children, ages four to ten, can learn to incorporate fitness into their lifestyles now. Our kid-centered yoga classes will be offered more info.

Yoga Fuel- Free Samples

We will are giving out samples of Yoga Fuel at the front desk!

Yoga Fuel combines time-tested herbal remedies from the East for energy and stamina with the best modern, scientific research on electrolytes from the West for proper muscle function.

Give it a try and let us know what you think!

Read all about 49er's safety, Tony Parrish and his Bikram Yoga practice in Sports Illustrated magazine.

Official Bikram Yoga Website

Bikram Yoga on CBS 60 Minutes Wednesday, June 8, 2005 (requires QuickTime)

Bikram Choudhury, founder of Bikram's Yoga College of India, World Headquarters, Los Angeles, California, began learning Hatha yoga at the age of three in Calcutta, India. At age five, he began studying with Bishnu Ghosh, one of the great physical culturists of our time. At the age of eleven, he was the youngest contestant ever to win the national India Yoga Competition and at fourteen he was declared "King of the Yogis." [more]

Bikram’s Yoga is a health system that provides everyone an avenue to enhance personal performance and assist to correct physical ailments. It uniquely provides the perfect marriage between the health and fitness industry as both are achieved by practicing one integrated approach. [more]

I strongly believe that there is a correlation between my yoga experience and the clarity I have achieved in my intention as a mentor and educator. About two years ago in the spring of 2007 I decided to make a change from an office job and reconnect with academia as a faculty member in the art department at Lone Star College -North Harris and San Jacinto College-South. I currently teach a variety of lecture courses (art appreciation) and studio art courses (2D design, drawing, painting, and color theory), in addition to my own professional practice as an artist/painter. In pursuit of a faculty position I was required to write many things, one being a teaching philosophy.

From an academic stand point they were looking for very specific information regarding my pedagogy and how I teach. Did I instruct through observational drawing/painting vs. imagination, or do I have a direct approach vs. conceptual. Personally, I was confronted with many other questions in addition to ones regarding my teaching methods. Why was I teaching, and was this really my path. As I have experienced with professors of my own, some of them were quit articulate and exceptional at creating there own work, be it a mathematician, scientist or artist, yet were not the best teachers. That being said, I also believe we are all teachers, whether as a yoga instructor, professor, mother, father, sibling or even stranger to stranger in the supermarket. We look to others for guidance when we do not have the answers. This can be as profound as searching for a greater understanding of life to learning how to pick the best mango at the super market.

In yoga, from the mat we are asked to set our intentions for class, or at the end of class for the day with a clear/open mind and heart. This clarity has guided me in searching for the same experience in my own class room.

One of my first yoga instructors and spiritual guides, wrote the book Meditations from the Mat. The book chronicles Patanjali's yoga sutras via the Eight-Limb Path of Yoga over a period of 360 days. Day 23 begins with the following yoga sutra that relates to a realization I came to at a recent yoga class at the Bikram Yoga Studio- The Woodlands:

When the practitioner is firmly established in the practice of the truth, his words become so potent that whatever he says comes to realization.

The passage goes on to talk about the experiences of satya (truthfulness) and ahimsa (non-violence or love) both under the first limb of Yamas (the five moral restraints). It goes with out saying, that the philosophy of yoga is a teacher-guide to life, and the voice of the practitioner (yoga instructor) plays an integral role in that experience. The last class I took from Arnie at Bikram Yoga Studio in The Woodlands brought me to a stronger understanding of truth and love regarding my role as a teacher-educator. While guiding us through postures, he expressed that "yoga is love." For me this means that after the fear and anxiety subsides, love is waiting on the other side. I akin this "love," to little wings that lift us out of our rubble and give us a glimmer of our true self. The growth and clarity that happens in a room full of individuals searching for active silence coupled with an instructor that stems from love and truthfulness, is truly a holy experience. Many times this love and support has carried me to another phase of my yoga practice; when I am open enough, another phase of life. The same is experienced when my students have the aha moment. The light goes on and all of a sudden the 9 values on an object that I told them they could see just appear in plane sight. Was that shadow always there? My answer is yes, it has always been there, and you just now were able to see the shadow inside the shadow. In order to experience the little wings on the mat that begin to lift us out of the rubble, or the aha moment, we have to stay long enough, and come back long enough for the light to go on. Marianne Williamson gracefully and simply puts this notion, in her book A Return to Love. "If you want to end darkness, you cannot beat it with a baseball bat, you have to turn on the light."

I constantly come to the realization that there is no separation between my daily life outside the yoga studio and my yoga experience. For so long, I had an internal desire for the two to merge, where I let go of the baggage or contradictions and followed the path. What I have learned since my very first vinyasa power yoga class in Boston in 2002 till today in 2009 where I practice at Bikram Yoga - The Woodlands, is that this is a constant path. When I am actively involved in a yoga practice (doing the work) then that work becomes closer to effortless, closer to truth and love. There is something magical that happens in the yoga studio when people come together as Arnie says in a room full of love, that is similar to what goes on in my class room. Clearing the mind and focusing on breath or drawing, done over and over again, a light bulb comes on. It is that magical moment that has helped me set my intention to lead my class with the same valor as the guides I interact with in yoga. I want to be there for the magic, I want "to be present at the birth of"........when the light goes on. It is truly a spiritual moment to full experience the joy of teaching. Yoga and the instructors I experience on a weekly basis have given me that gift.

Marie Valdez
Art Professor, Lone Star College