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Even as someone who’s not exactly a social butterfly, I love my yoga study group. After four years of monthly get-togethers, this tribe of five—a motley crew of teachers, students, gurus, and beginners—still reminds me of Little League, when I couldn’t wait for the next game. Except now, I’m playing in the vast field of consciousness.
We meet on the last Wednesday of each month and I’m always uplifted and energized afterward, sometimes for days after we meet. (And my wife, who knows what’s best for me better than I do, is relieved to see me get out of the house.)
If you’d like to deepen your understanding and practice of yoga, I highly encourage you to start your own study group. When you’re surrounded by like-minded people also interested in the power and practicality of yoga’s teachings, starting a discussion is as easy as citing a passage or asking a question.
You need not be a yoga teacher with decades of experience to do so. In fact, a beginner’s mind can be a tremendous advantage. If you’re at all curious about the wisdom this ancient practice holds for our lives today, you’ve got the job.
The hard part, at least in my experience, is wrapping it up and going home.
How to Start a Yoga Study Group
Following are a few things that I’ve learned in my years of helping orchestrate conversations about yoga.
1. Cast a Wide Net
Invite everyone you think might be interested. They need not be teachers nor students of yoga. It’s always nice to bring in different energy and perspectives.
As your group becomes established, continue to welcome newcomers, even if they simply want to observe.
2. Keep it Small
Your group does not need to be large. The fewer participants you have, the more each person gets to participate. One time it was just me and one other person, and we had a powerful discussion.
3. Be Consistent
One meeting per month seems doable for most people. This gives everyone ample time to read, absorb, and reflect. Try to meet on the same date and time each month. If somebody can’t make it, you can record the meeting and send them the audio file.
4. Allow Enough Time
Studying yoga is like deep-sea diving. Once you get down there, you want to keep exploring, and it’s easy to lose track of time. Give yourselves two hours. If someone has to leave after one hour, that’s okay. If any of you want to stay past the two hours, allow for that as well.
5. Mix It Up
We like to take turns choosing material and leading discussions. A meditation teacher in our group wrote a curriculum on the topic of consciousness and tried it out on us. It was a big hit, and he ended up incorporating it in the class he teaches at a local yoga studio.
6. Choose Short Books
Taking in and considering a lot of content can be overwhelming. Keep the monthly readings to 100 pages or less. If it’s a longer text, divide it into digestible chunks over multiple meetings. Go for depth rather than breadth.
The Yoga Sutras might be a good place to begin. You can opt for sutra 1.1 and proceed from there or begin in book two with the yamas and niyamas and then jump around.
7. Consider Your Translations
If the original work is in a different language, opt for a word-for-word translation, at least at the beginning. (I prefer the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali by Mukunda Stiles.) Refrain from assigning everyone scholarly commentary to read, at least until everyone’s had a chance to unpack the teachings on their own.
8. Know That It’s All Yoga
You can stick with various traditional yogic texts, such as the Bhagavad Gita or The Upanishads, or dive into congruent teachings from Buddhism (such as The Heart Sutra by Red Pine), Christianity (Revelations of the Aramaic Jesus by Neil Douglas-Klotz), stoicism (Meditations by Marcus Aurelius), or psychology (Man’s Search For Meaning by Viktor Frankl). Our group had a blast with Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. As the saying goes, it’s all yoga.
9. Drop the Seriousness (Sometimes)
Laughing helps. At the beginning of a recent discussion, somebody shared that the book she had ordered was delivered and left in the rain. When she removed it from the package, it was so waterlogged, only the cover survived. The title, Zen Is Right Here, is the book’s main message—to meet life where it is. Zen was right there, rain and all. She got the teaching without having to read past the cover.
10. Make it Your Own
You could meet in person, online, or both. Start the meeting with a meditation or end it with a prayer. Prepare ahead of time by emailing questions for reflection or keep it spontaneous. If you need to skip a month to allow for holidays and vacations, simply pick up where you left off. Take turns hosting or meet somewhere equidistant.
During the cooler months here in Phoenix, our group likes to convene at a park. A Vermillion flycatcher usually shows up in the same tree, his orange-red plumage catching our attention and reminding us to get out of our heads every so often and not take ourselves too seriously.
Do whatever works for your group. As you get into your collective groove, it will unfold exactly as it’s supposed to.
