Dori DeCamillis

A couple weekends ago I visited Yogaville , Virginia. My intention was to take a yoga workshop with a teacher and writer I've followed for some years, Sally Kempton . I knew nothing about Yogaville, which, as it turns out, is an ashram, or Indian culture monastery. It's been there since the 1960s when Swami Satchinananda came to the USA from India. Apparently singer Carole King purchased the 750 acre property for the organization. I met two women, sisters, whose grandmother originally came to monastery. A subsequent five generations were born and brought up there, down to the sisters' grandchildren! I spent the weekend in yoga workshops, taking yoga classes, and taking long walks on the grounds which included a riverfront area along the James River, which is mightier than I imagined. I've been asked if it was a hippy dippy experience, and yes, it was, but not in a Groovy, Man kind of way. People wore comfortable yoga clothes, the food was vegetarian, and every...

"Florigami" 45" x 48" (oil on wood and copper with handmade tiles) I recently attended a fantastic yoga workshop at my local and very favorite yoga place in Birmingham, Heartwood Yoga . Visiting from the Himalayan Institute (located in Pennsylvania), was Rolf Solvik, a yogi, psychologist, and director of the HI. He comes to B’ham yearly, and oh, do I look forward to his visits. At these yoga workshops we do yoga postures and relaxation sessions, but the great majority of the time Rolf gives a talk about a particular subject. This time we learned about the Bhagavad-Gita , the famous Sanskrit text. The Gita is a small part of a much larger text, the Mahabharata , which is kind of like the Bible in that it includes blindness, a bloody battle, bigamy, backstabbing, brutality, and bargaining with God. It also has some really good people who try to stay good in the face of all this blasphemy. The little section called the Bhagavad-Gita is the part where one ...