DESPERATELY
SEEKING SERENITY
ing attention to my breathing can
actually shift the way my brain is
holding that thing.”
The veteran yogi and Art of Attention co-author invites thousands of students into her SoHo
studio each week to help them get
away from the stress of the city.
“Yoga is the time where we
don’t have our phone, we are just
with ourselves, our bodies and
our movements,” Brower said.
“There’s something very magical
about that time; something very
important and healing about giving yourself that time.”
Her work as a teacher, Brower
explains, is to simply give people
that opportunity for self-healing.
“The job is one of just holding
space for people to do their own
healing. That’s all.”
With the fitness era giving way
to the explosive growth of interest
in wellness and mindfulness practices, more and more Americans
are taking health and healing into
their own hands, and the role of
yoga is evolving yet again, making
the gradual move from a purely
physical activity to a tool for holistic healing. This time it’s not
just focused on the body, but also
the mind.
“There’s a level of conscious-
HUFFINGTON
12.22.13
ness and an evolving way that
people are talking and thinking,”
Jivamukti Yoga teacher Celina
Belizan told The Huffington Post.
“It’s this new language that people
are talking in more and more.”
More and more studios, like
Jivamutki and Virayoga — popular
downtown Manhattan yoga centers — are embracing the spiritual
elements of the practice, drawing
students into their studios with
chanting, meditation and traditional teachings.
The rise of “spiritual but not
religious” has supported this return to yoga’s traditional teachings. More than 1 in 3 Americans
describe themselves as spiritual
but not religious, according to a
2012 Pew Forum survey.
Goldberg explains that this
inward-facing spirituality — in
which individuals, whether or not
they ever set foot on a yoga mat,
turn inward to develop a connection with something larger than
themselves — is fundamentally a
yogic one, and that in fact, we are
becoming a “nation of yogis.”
“People are t