It has been over a year since my last post. As an explanation, I was pregnant for most of that time and immediately following, adapting to being a new mother to a wonderful little babe.

For months I attempted to post, but accepted my inability to log in to WordPress as a sign that it wasn’t time yet, and enjoyed yet more cuddles from said babe. I have since fixed the issue and write now as she sleeps.

This will be a short update post with more detailed posts to follow. The short of it is that I practiced and taught yoga throughout my pregnancy (I taught until 38 weeks) and started a version of asana to heal and strengthen my body postpartum. I returned to teaching a regular weekly class three months after delivery with my schedule much smaller due to Covid (many classes never returned) and because – I’m a mom. I have also been gardening this year and continue my environmental journey which has had a new element of navigating a baby and sustainability. Posts on all of that and more to follow in time.

Time is precious and rigid these days with a six month old, it goes by incredibly fast and I have, of course, had to alter how I spend my time with the majority enjoyed with the wee one. That being said, posts will likely be few and far between until, and if, I can find a balance to prioritize writing and bulking up my thoughts.

It was a while ago that I visited Vermont for the first time on a work trip, but Evolution, the studio that an old friend took me to has stuck in my mind ever since the visit. Sure, it was only a little over two months ago, but I’ve been behind on the posting and have been formulating this post because there’s so much good to say about this studio.

I fell in love the instant I walked into the welcoming entryway which was warm and inviting with plenty of seating and a desk to sign in at. My fellow yoga trainee (we trained together in Nicaragua graduating with our 200 CYT,) a local of Burlington and also a former teacher at Evolution, got me signed in with the waiver and guided me around the studio. We dropped our belongings off in a back room where students stored yoga mats and where changing areas were located. I then headed to the restroom where, get this, there was a squatty potty. That might not seem like a big deal, but I was quite impressed, especially since I had never used one before, I’d only heard of them and their magic before. It was pretty magical, reminiscent of actual squatty potties in Asia.

It all makes sense when you learn that the owners of Evolution are physical therapists. That also explains all of the books for sale in the waiting room, many technical yoga books along with spiritual. Suffice it to say, it is my idea of a close to perfect yoga studio. When I dream of my future, commercial yoga space there’s always a library, I hadn’t dreamt as big as squatty potties, but they may have made it on to my list now.

The yoga class that we took on a Saturday morning was Vinyasa I/II, an hour and 15 minute class that was just what I needed after traveling and sleeping in hotels. The teacher taught what to me seemed to be a very traditional or Eastern style of vinyasa, it certainly was not power yoga, which I highly appreciated. There was more explanation, more description of alignment, and more guiding inwards instead of simply a physical practice. That’s not to say that it was easy, however. For my practice it was just right – steady yet full of flows to keep the heart rate up and build strength.

All sorts of styles and programs are offered at Evolution, likely because of the physical therapy background, the studio is more than a place to be guided through yoga poses strung together, it is a place to learn and, well, evolve. They even have a rope wall, which I sadly have never had the pleasure of using before and wish I had had time to attend a class.

The schedule at Evolution is full and classes are priced at $15 for a drop in, however there are multiple class passes that help students save. The studio offers yoga for families, prenatal, and kids yoga – information can be found here. Physical therapy sessions can be scheduled, massage, and they lead frequent continuing education for yoga teachers.

I am grateful for the opportunity to visit Burlington, a city that I have had interest in visiting for a few years, to meet up with an old yoga friend, and grate to her for showing me such an impressive yoga studio. Evolution is everything in a yoga studio that I enjoy – community, healing, continuing education, and more. If you find yourself in Burlington and are itching for some yoga, then I highly encourage you to go no further than Evolution. The studio is located at 20 Kilburn St, Burlington, VT.

The 2018 Winter Olympics are in full swing in my second homeland of South Korea and watching expert athletes push themselves to their best has inspired me to push my physical yoga practice as of late. Shaun White especially inspired and impressed in his final run that won him gold in the men’s halfpipe finals.

Concurrently with the Olympics I have been taking part in my very first Instagram yoga challenge, which has turned out to be very beneficial to my yoga practice, keeping me constantly practicing and practicing poses that I generally shy away from.

Let me get back to Shaun White for a moment, though. Sexual harassment settlement aside, the man has skills. He performed a physical feat that most of us can hardly even comprehend. One of the most impressive things about Shaun’s performance is his age. He is one of the older Olympic athletes at 31, one of his biggest competitors was Japan’s Ayumu Hirano, aged 19. More than a decade separates these two, on paper the 19-year-old should have looked better based on youth, but Shaun gave one of the best runs of his life in his 30’s.

Just as Shaun White showed the world, ability is not solely determined by age however, great for us yoga students in or beyond the 30s Club. My good friend and international yoga teacher, Mindy Sisco is training her body, through a lot of hard work, to do yoga poses that she couldn’t do just a few years ago. I witnessed her transform her handstand practice in a matter of years to a point where she can now confidently lift up into a handstand and handstand straddle as if she was born doing it.

Mindy is the yoga teacher responsible for my first Instagram yoga challenge which just ended yesterday. I have seen these challenges before and the first thing I thought when invited to participate was – that looks like it takes up a lot of time – the reality being both yes and no.

Yes, to participate fully in an Instagram yoga challenge, which to clarify, is a predetermined list of poses, one for each day for every day of the challenge; yes it does take time and commitment, but yoga as a whole takes time and commitment. Mindy’s challenge took place over 16 days and included poses such as urdhva dhanurasana (full wheel) and adho mukha vrksasana (handstand). For each day of the challenge I had to prepare my body for the pose that was to be photographed. Many of the days involved backbending, which is a shape that does not come easily to me, and therefore, a shape which I do not much enjoy. That meant that I had to warm up and prepare my body more than I would have for a different type of pose that m body is prone to, such as a forward fold. I joked on my Instagram feed that I was annoyed by yet another backbend, but to be honest, I was partially annoyed and partially grateful, because in my own home practice I barely ever incorporate backbends, but this Instagram challenge forced me to practice them.

Yes, the challenges take commitment and time, but not a lot of it. I would say I averaged ten minutes of warming up and taking pictures. That’s not that much time. By completing the challenge I completed 16 days of challenging poses, the practice may have been short at times, but at least I got on my mat. I believe it is Jason Crandell that says, “Fifteen minutes of yoga is better than zero minutes of yoga.”

Shaun White and IG yoga challenges are two recent places where I have garnered inspiration from lately. It was exhilarating to watch all of the winter athletes display their skills in the Olympics, such precision and expertise which surely means a ton of conditioning, practice, and discipline. A good reminder that any type of practice is also a discipline. If you practice an instrument daily, then it is a discipline; if you practice an instrument every other month, then it is a waste of time and you will never see much improvement. Yoga is a practice that requires consistency and diversity in poses practiced.

What’s inspiring you these days?

You can find Mindy on Instagram at @kaizenkorea You can follow me with yoga, travel, and sustainability posts at @karabemisyoga

This  is a bit overdue, but three months ago I visited a somewhat local yoga studio to attend my first gong bath at a wellness studio in Warren, Pennsylvania, which is a short drive from my home. Warren is an old oil town with monstrous Victorian homes and a little downtown area next to the river, which is where the yoga studio is located. To call Peace, Love & Wellness a yoga studio is a little bit of an understatement however, because the studio also has massage space, an inviting seating area, a sauna, and Kelly, the owner offers wellness coaching to individual and corporate clients. Peace, Love & Wellness is not a yoga studio, it is a well-rounded wellness studio.

Back to the gong bath, my only other experience with gongs in yoga had been at another local studio attending a Kundalini class with the same teacher offering the gong bath at Peace, Love & Wellness. My first experience was magical, the gong vibration flowed up and swirled around the room before crashing down on to me. That may sound hippy dippy, but try it for yourself. It feels great.

The gong bath class at Peace, Love & Wellness also involved some Kundalini kriyas, which can be more challenging than a vinyasa practice. A lot of dynamic endurance is required, as opposed to a still, static endurance for a yin practice. I have done Kundalini kriyas in which I swore that my arms were going to fall of. Luckily, difficulty did not reach that extent at the class in Warren before it was time for the gong bath. After some sun salutations we were brought down for relaxation. I layered up because I am always cold, and closed my eyes to absorb the gong. It was similar to my first experience except that this time the teacher had a second gong that offered a sharper sound, reminiscent of whale song, and it lasted for a longer time. I left the experience feeling relaxed and settled.

Classes at Peace, Love & Wellness are various and plentiful. Check out the schedule, here.  Yoga styles offered include hatha, buti, vinyasa, and kids yoga.  Classes can be bought as a part of a monthly or yearly package, which include massage and sauna services, or as drop in classes. The gong bath that my husband and I attended was reasonable at $15/person.

To get to the studio, go to downtown Warren, PA right on the Allegheny river and the studio is located at 338 Pennsylvania, Ave. You will see large letters spelling out YOGA in their second story front windows. The studio is located right above a lovely little cafe that I enjoy visiting when in Warren, the Arbor House Coffee House Cafe & Tea Room. Might I suggest that you make a day of your trip to historic Warren and visit the cafe after your yoga class, a plan for a fantastic day trip.

I hosted a clothing swap this past weekend in Jamestown, NY. It was the third swap that I have hosted in the area and I was determined to speak at this one about the ethics behind the event. At the previous swaps that I hosted in Korea I spoke to attendees about my reasoning behind hosting, how I disagree with the modern, fast-fashion industry, and the primary problems with the industry in terms of labor and damage to the environment. However, back on U.S. soil in the small city near the small town where I reside and teach yoga, I could not give a similar speech.

Let me explain that technically I could have and the people attending would most certainly have been polite and receptive, but at each of the three swaps in the U.S. the time for speaking came and went. I felt that there weren’t enough people and if I spoke to a handful of swappers, then it would have felt too much like preaching. At this last one I even advertised that I was going to speak on the ethics, but as the clock ticked closer to my time to speak everyone seemed to funnel out of the door. Do I think that this was intentional? Maybe on a few accounts, or maybe they had elsewhere to be and had already done their swapping for the afternoon. There wasn’t a massive collection to browse, so this is a very feasible option. Whatever the reason, my audience left the room.

I was bummed, but upon reflection I realize that “preaching” to happy people swapping their clothes for others’ may not be the best way to go about it. Posting on my website might be a better way to share my views on fast fashion and why I avoid it. For if I were to have spoken to people who happily (and blindly) shop fast fashion then it may have been perceived more as an attack, like a vegan lecturing a gang of omnivores on the detriments of factory farming at a party, at a Korean BBQ restaurant.

There is also the sad truth that environmentalists can come off as being major Debbie Downers (I have been extremely guilty of this in the past) when they share how the world is slowly ending at the hands of consumers, also known as people. That last statement, was of course a cynical joke – mostly, but on a serious note, people having a good time may not want to hear about pollution and labor rights. But if you have made it this far into the post, then you may be curious enough reading about exactly those two things and more depressing facts of fast fashion, if so, then carry on reading.

Why I Host Swaps… My Unspoken Speech at My Most Recent Swap (altered slightly for word and general public, main ideas the same)

The reasons that I host swaps can be summed up in four words: labor rights and environmental degradation.  The fashion industry today looks completely foreign to how the garment industry of the last century looked. As recently as the 1990’s, 50% of clothes sold in the U.S. were made in the U.S. Thirty years prior to that in the 60’s, around 97% of clothes were made in the U.S. for a U.S. market.

Today? A measeley  TWO PERCENT or in numerical langauge – 2%. Two percent?!?! We went from almost 100% in my mother’s generation to almost 0% in mine. For the United States that is an entire industry nearly completely lost. Jobs lost. Skills lost. The reason being? Globalization.

The textile and sewing industries were shipped to developing nations where labor could be paid far less than an American worker. Where labor rights were skim, so workers could be forced to work 10 to 12 hr. days, for very little pay, and in unsafe conditions. My fashion revelation and shift in consumerism occurred as a result of learning about the tragedy at Rana Plaza in 2013. Rana Plaza was an eight story building that housed seamstresses in a shoddy building. In a day in April, 2013 the building collapsed killing 1,134 people.  Read more details here about Rana Plaza.

My other gripe with fast fashion is how utterly unsustainable it is. We do not need even a fraction of the amount of clothing that we buy these days and we certainly do not need close to the amount of clothes that companies and the media try to convince us that we need. Fashion trends come and go, and come and go, and come and go again and again and are so in our faces that we feel lesser-than if we don’t keep up. Luckily for us we can generally afford to keep up with the trends because clothes are becoming cheaper with the outsourcing of the work and lower grade fabrics. Clothes have become so cheap, that they are disposable.

We buy without limit. Sometimes we buy without even liking what we buy and definitely without knowing anything about the item. Without knowing that a lot of water, air, and soil pollution was created by production. By material being shipped around the world to be dyed, cut, sewn, and shipped to a shop near us. That those dyes are harmful to the communities that live near the factories that produce them. That most of the items at fast fashion shops are made of synthetics, many of which (polyester & acrylic I’m glaring at you) are plastic based – i.e. come from oil production.

[Sidenote – It is this sort of information that makes me feel slightly sheepish for sharing. Nobody wants to be the bearer of bad news, but isn’t it better to be aware of how our choices affect others half way across the world? Anyway, it’s about to get a little more positive.]

This is where the clothing industry has evolved to. It is totally different from the past when people used to make their own clothes or buy from a skilled, local tailor in their community. But we don’t have to shop fast fashion all the time. We have options that are more ethical that we can use to supplement our closets with.

A clothing swap is one, or second hand. Buying fair trade or organic is another way. Or simply getting by with what you have and ignoring the billboards of what’s new and desireable. Ask yourself when you shop: “Do I really need this? Do I have something in my closet already that fulfills this need? Is there a more sustainable way that I can obtain a similar item? Can I just borrow from a friend?” And hopefully by having that dialogue in your head you will realize that you can happily go without another polyester tank top in your closet.

That is roughly what I would have said if I had had an audience to say it to. Changing habits is hard, especially when the habit you are changing is one that brings you a lot of joy. Retail therapy, anyone? But you can still feel the buzzy high of finding a good find a thrift store, or a really well made top of environmentally friendly fabrics and made by fair trade labor. The shift may take some time, but it’s still fun and much more rewarding.

“slow fashion” fair laobr