We love the world and we love yoga. So why wouldn’t we love World Yoga Day!?
This year the world day of continuous yoga will benefit those suffering from hunger and malnutrition – those who have no adequate access and even RIGHTS to food.
How appropriate that it’s the day after we participate in the Everybody Eats 2.0 conference, talking about food democracy?
We will be presenting about our community garden and teaching a special yoga class on Saturday at Trinity Church.
So join us one day or both days this weekend extending our practice off our mats for the benefit of the greater good of our fellow man.
I’ve been blessed to have never gone to bed hungry in my life.
I didn’t realize how close we had come until my mother shared with me and my brother after he finished college that we had been a hair away from accepting food stamps. We lived through plenty a peanut butter meal to be our protein. I didn’t always have a fresh vegetable as a young child in my meals but was grateful for whatever came in the can (even frozen was too expensive).
I got to experience shopping at a farmer’s front-yard stand in Spotsylvania County, Virginia in my summers with my grandmother. That’s where I grew an appreciation for eating tomatoes right off the vine, warm with summer sun. That’s where I learned that the dirt is where life springs from and we need to appreciate it and care for it.
As a yogi I know we also need to care for each other as a community – sangha. Our global sangha needs our help and support.
Too many people go hungry and die of starvation on the most fertile planet in the solar system. Much of this discrepancy of lack of food rights and access is due to greed and corporate or industrial interest. People are dying fighting for their land and their right to continue to cultivate indigenous crops without genetic alterations.
This is not acceptable.
This Sunday, the 11 a.m. Empower Yoga class will be a special 2-hour World Yoga Day class that will be going on at the same time as all the others around the planet.
All donations for this class will go toward FIAN International that “works for the promotion and protection of the right to adequate food, like its support of peasants in Bajo Aguan, Honduras, where more than 50 organized peasants and human rights defenders were killed during the last three years in a violent land conflict; small farmers in Mubende, Uganda, who were evicted to make way for a German company’s coffee plantation; and indigenous people in the village of Kusum Tola, India whose survival is threatened by open cast coal mining, destroying agricultural lands, forests and water sources; among others.”
If you can’t come to the class please consider donating to FIAN through this LINK.
