Community Yoga Center

07/03/2024

Dear Friends,

Have you ever thought about deepening your understanding of yoga’s transformative potential? Are you interested in gaining the skills and knowledge necessary to practice and share yoga in ways that are most beneficial and hold the potential for self-realization?

If so, yoga teacher training with Community Yoga Center may be just what you’re looking for. The program organizers are still accepting applications for 200 & 300 hour yoga teacher trainings. Both courses are in-person, 9-month experiences beginning September 7, 2024 in Riverside California. Enrollment will be limited to a small group of committed participants. We are getting close to reaching maximum capacity of participants. So, if you’d like to apply, please do so within the next week to ensure we are able to consider your application before closing admission to the 2025 cohort.

Yoga teacher training really is one thing that can change everything - it can change how you experience Life itself. It can be a game changer on every level – just ask anyone who has participated in our courses. Yoga has touched my life with profound love, and I hope CYC’s yoga teacher trainings are a continuation of that love. ♥️

With Gratitude & Love,

Kristin

yoga teacher training kristin varner

05/13/2024

This is a beautiful yoga community. ♥️-K

05/02/2024

Yoga is samadhi-centric. The “practices” or “supports” of yoga revolve around samadhi and hold the potential to move us toward the samadhi center where we experience ourselves and all of life as a dynamic continuum of consciousness beyond distortion of subject and object. The samadhi core is where consciousness spontaneously experiences itself in an ever changing field of possibility uncaged by the body-mind. An asana-centered concept of yoga is a modern and misinformed idea about what yoga really is and does. Alienating postural practice from the other supports cuts into yoga’s totality and potential so severely that it can actually reinforce egoic conditioning and a sense of separateness. Too often, asana fundamentalism dominates mainstream yoga today - with emphasis on idolized alignment, perfect sequencing, and all variations of body-based pretentiousness. This kind of asana zealotry and body-based obsession - and ego driven power play that goes along with it - can really blind us to the bigness that yoga really is. ♥️

03/20/2024

The yogi sees sky - the fertile no-thingness and no-whereness that is the womb of absolute reality - the charnel ground from which all arises and passes away. 🤍🖤🤍

02/22/2024

Yoga, at its essence, is a kind of continual subjectivation - a process of experimentation where we experience ourselves in relation to life itself - including our relationship to whatever we think we need to feel ok - our addictions and fixations. Yoga helps us recognize how our intense fears and desires cause us to contract into self-imposed cage of our own making that obstructs unification with nature’s creative impulse. Yoga reminds us how resisting what we don’t want - how pushing away pain and chasing pleasure - keep us bound to suffering because such resistance ignores the infinite process that life is.
Sri Aurobindo pointed to this when he wrote: “The whole world yearns after freedom, yet each creature is on love with his chains; this is the first paradox and inextricable knot of our nature.” ♥️-K

01/31/2024

We associate yoga with feeling good. We often come to yoga to feel better – physically, mentally, and emotionally. And we find incredible relief and benefit – a more vital body, relaxed mind, and open heart. Yoga feels like a salve to our pain, and we notice many healing, healthful, and happy effects. We feel great – even ecstatic – and are motivated to continue practicing.

But, at some point, we begin to realize that yoga is more than a “feel good” experience. We discover that yoga is about getting real with, being present for, and developing a wise relationship with all of experience – including the unwanted aspects of life that make us uncomfortable. We learn that yoga can help us expand our capacity for meeting life’s difficulties and feel an unconditional kind of “okayness” – an inner freedom that is not conditioned on getting what we want or avoiding what we don’t want.

Yoga helps us sensitize and attune to our pain, fear and desire - so we can “play the edges” of our physical, mental, and emotional limitations. Exploring the edges of our experience can be messy and feel unsettling because the edgy space contains the unfinished business of our hearts and unpleasant aspects of ourselves that are products of our deep insecurities and compulsions. It takes immense courage to explore this space. Yet, doing so can help move through pain, fear, and desire - to the natural state of being - a limitless space that is our essence nature. ♥️

12/11/2023

So many beautiful yoga students in the process of becoming yoga teachers. We know we are holding the energy of a yoga teacher when:
1. We show the possibility of presence, honesty, and love;
2. We share knowledge and practices that cultivate presence, honesty, and love; and
3. We bring awareness to internal patterns and conditioning that obstruct presence, honesty, and love.
And the truth is, we are forever moving into and out of the energy of student and teacher - and that feels like a beautiful grace for which I am so thankful. ♥️ -K

11/25/2023

If you feel at all drawn to take a step into the world of meditation – to create and sustain a meaningful meditation practice that can cause lasting change – a practice that literally changes your brain and how you experience life – I so hope you’ll consider meditating with us on Saturdays at Community Yoga Center!

These weekly opportunities follow the concepts and practices in The Art of Meditation course (https://www.theartofmeditationcourse.com/Learn-to-Meditate), including the Trinity Meditation Method - a powerful technique that cultivates conditions for significant change – for a shift into deeper truth and love.

Consider these meditation opportunities now - so that in the new year you’ve created the rhythm necessary to stick with the practice!

Meditation has touched my life with profound love, and I hope these opportunities are a continuation of that love. - Kristin ♥️

11/21/2023

Really knowing ourselves is a radical process - it requires enough raw awareness, honesty, and love to engage with all of Life - including the unfinished business of our hearts and all the unknowns and uncertainties that fuel our fears and desires. The self-inquiry that is the root of yoga asks us to hold on to nothing in order to experience everything. ♥️

10/17/2023

Feeling the WE in wellness! A beautiful gift of commUNITY. ♥️

09/30/2023

YOU’RE INVITED TO COMMUNITY YOGA PRACTICE! Come and join us for ashtanga vinyasa and meditation - every weekday!!! 8-10am Monday, Wednesday, and Friday mornings. 4-6pm Tuesday and Thursday afternoons. We will plan for 90 minutes of ashtanga vinyasa and 30 minutes of meditation - come for all or part. WE WELCOME THE CONNECTION and hope to practice with you in commUNITY.