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Return Yoga

YOGA IS NOT A BUSINESS.

Studio culture can be alienating, expensive, exclusive, privileged. Superficial.  Return Yoga brings it out of the studio.  I train other teachers to social justice awareness, community engagement, and trauma sensitive standards not usually part of a training curricula.  Return is a not-for-profit who's mission is three-fold: 

1. to teach the skills of yoga and meditation to under served communities,

2. to collaborate service opportunities and qualified yoga teachers, and

3. to offer high quality yoga teaching at a real life cost.

Meet Karin

Rebel yogi Teaching
a deeper practice

Karin Lynn Carlson (she/her) ups the ante on yoga conversations and offers yoga teachings that honor yoga tradition. She’s committed to disrupting the co-option of the practices of Black, Indigenous and WoC for white wellness and spirituality. She is unraveling the dominant narrative both in her own body and in wider yoga culture.

Yoga isn’t a business. Yoga is a tool for personal and social revolution; studio culture and the white wellness industry have broken its heart.

Karin (like you put the car in the garage) lives on unceded Lakota and Anishanabeg territory, North Minneapolis.

Mentorship

YOU ARE NOT ALONE

Teachers and serious practioners of yoga often feel lost in the wind. 

There are inherent difficulties and paradoxes to taking up a contemplative life, an embodied path, not least of which is where do I go once I realize I have so many questions? 

It can be a lonely and a doubtful place.  Once we realize training only opened a can of worms, and deepening our practice only raised more questions, we start wondering about the tension between 'real life' and 'yoga'.  We tend to get dissatisfied with what's on the market.  It's hard to find teachers.

I am happy to work with ANYONE who is looking for direction.  Zoom is a great tool.  I can help you find the next right book or appropriate training.  I can help you out with questions about teaching.  I am happy to talk about what's coming up in your own practice, your own body, your own experience.  You're not alone.

I ask $108 for a 45 minute session. Generally speaking, people like to do these once a month or every six weeks. Together we’ll curate your practice (and if you like, talk about the business and ethics of teaching. All our identities.)

The Original Yoga

All Vedic chanting classes are hosted on Yoga Club, a Mighty Network. Once you’ve joined that network, you can purchase classes.

When you hear that yoga is ancient, people are referring to the Veda. The Veda are a collection of mantrah-s, exquisite hymns or poems that together present a vision or way of knowing life. Veda means both vision and knowledge.

Learning and reciting these mantrah-s is the original yoga. Anyone can recite: the only requirements are willingness and learning under a qualified teacher.

The learning process is incredible. It is ‘yoga’ in miniature. First, you approach the teacher. Then the teacher explains how to recite. You work together a little bit, receiving not only the gems of yoga philosophy and pedagogy, but personal support and feedback. Then, you take your tools and practice what you have learned on your own. After several days, you return to your teacher; you review what you’ve already covered and receive a little more. After several weeks, you have learned an incredible amount.

With every mantra - or collection of mantrah-s known as sūktams, upaniṣats, namakams etc - you have personally gone through a transformative journey. At first, you hit a few days of shock, overwhelm, and feeling like you cannot learn this thing. But after two days of personal practice, you find that you have actually learned, so you need to check your self talk. After four days of practice, the thing starts to feel not just manageable but good. You start to get excited about possibilities. Within a week of practice, you have a familiarity and a bit of fluency with what you’ve done, and you get to feel all the spiritual and psychological benefits of accomplishment. Then you return to your teacher and the process begins all over again. This is incredibly empowering. It feels like magic. This process is called adhyāyanam, which I understand as learning to learn, with support.

Only once you have received adhyāyanam for a given mantra are you able to ‘recite’, which is called pārāyanam. That is, you develop a repertoire of mantraḥs you use as meditation tools, recite in times of stress, or incorporate into your sādhana. Over the course of several months, years, even decades, you are completely transformed. You come to understand ‘yoga’. It has something to do with attention, memory, practice, coming to know, and ultimately self understanding or self realization.

Karin has been trained and blessed to teach the art of Vedic mantrah. An intro to Vedic chanting class happens for six weeks every September, which provides you with an understanding of the six basic rules of veda recitation, invocation mantrah-s, and background. You’ll learn everything you need to know to begin.

Anyone can join a chant class, even before having taken the Intro to Vedic chanting class. You will be able to just listen and enjoy the invocations, and you’ll get enough of an understanding to make do and learn a few sūktams to begin with. Chant classes are generally 6 weeks long. Every class includes live classes, handouts and audio tools to support your personal practice, and the option to send in an audio recording of your practice for individualized feedback and support. Do know that you’ll be asked to sing on mic and expected to practice at least 4x a week on your own (using your tools!).

The benefits of Vedic chanting are fascinating, a little apocryphal, and ultimately only a thing you can come to know by experience. If you want to uphold lineage, understand Yoga beyond the Yoga industry and āsana, take your yoga off the mat and radically re-wire your brain, this is it. This is the vision of human spirit overcoming all concievable odds, over and over again. This is why yoga has lasted 5000 years and become a global phenomena. This is the real thing.

 Community - Join our Mighty Network Space

The most common thing I hear yoga teachers say is that they are lonely. The most common thing I hear yoga students say is that they are confused; they have questions and no where to go with them.

In my lineage (Desikachar), we are told over and over again that yoga IS relationship. Yoga isn’t poses. It isn’t even a philosophy. It isn’t a hobby or a product. Yoga is the relationships we have with teachers and the material. It is the friendships we make along the way. It is the way our relationships improve once we begin to have a regular practice. Yoga is, ultimately, our relationship with ourselves. But that relationship is so confusing and overwhelming, it helps to have relationships outside yourself of support, guidance, laughter, co-regulating, and even sometimes accountability.

Because the yoga industry is so screwed, creating community has long been my primary teaching modality and skill. I come from a social justice and therapeutic background, and understand how groups work. I understand the need for affinity spaces. I understand the need for a time to ask questions. I understand the ways in which a studio can be alienating, inappropriate for us personally, or water the yoga down.

The internet is becoming a crazy place. It’s definitely the central relationship most of us have to, well, anything. I’ve created a Mighty Network community called Yoga Club where we can work with all the tools of interconnection, behind a gate in which people have agreed to be respectful. We can share photos, ask questions, give a word of support. I put up a weekly prompt, and have a whole collection of resources available. But the most important thing is the people. You can join a Vedic chant or yoga philosophy course there. But you can also just be there, without a need to subscribe to anything or constantly be buying more CEUS and memberships.

Join us. Yoga is relationship.

Ethics

In it's modern expression, (postural) yoga can appear to be a personal endevour.  That is, we work on ourselves.  Typically, yoga is a thing that you go to a studio to do; it is done under the tutilage of a guide; your relationship and the topic of conversations between yourself and this guide will primarily be about the physical feats of a yoga asana practice and the questions that come up along the way.

One could be forgiven, with all this focus on the body, for thinking that yoga is a personal enrichment program.  A kind of self-help. Generally speaking, we all come to yoga looking to fix something about ourselves.

Somewhere along the way, we will hit barriers.  We might be humbled.  We'll realize that we can't, through will power alone, get what we want.  We'll also start to realize aspects of our own character we'd not understood before: how we react to difficulty, for example, or what we tend to do with fear.

So even a purely physical practice, in which no text or philosophy or psychology is mentioned, we'll find ourselves in much deeper territory than we'd intended.  Yoga asana can be a kind of proving ground: some of us find this depth intriguing and jump in; others of us turn away and find some other way to exercise or deal with our problems.

With it's focus on the body and the physical benefits of yoga asana, the deeper teachings of the yoga tradition are often neglected.  They aren't exactly in demand; in a commercial society the customer is always right.  

But there are deeper teachings. 

In a post (post, post) modern society questions of justice, equality, personal and social liberation are more important than ever.  They are also more confusing and overwhelming than ever before.  So many people turn to a yoga tradition because traditional places of ethics and morality no longer speak to us: we come to a yoga studio because we're running away from a church.  And yet we're concerned about meaning: it can't all be relative, or it's every man for himself.  There is such enormous suffering, and through global connections we are more aware of suffering than ever before.  Without morals, life boils down to cruelty.  

Without hope, humanity rots.

Yoga's clarity of ethics have appealed to me from the very beginning.  Understanding them and studying them in greater depth has been the work of my entire teaching career.  As the world spins deeper into turmoil and individuals are more and more aware of how they can't get away from social troubles, teaching yoga as ethics fills a profound need.

Endorsements

STUDENT REVIEWS

Asana

MOVEMENT IS REVELATION

Yogic movement - as I understand it - is not accomplishment or dependent on any kind of 'mobility' or strength.  Yogic movement is an inquiry. It is a process of discovering our own hearts, minds, hangups and habituated reactionary patterns.

Movement is revelation.  I've never paid attention in this way before.  I've never felt these kinds of things before. I didn't realize the way I feel - about myself, about the world, all of the time - could change.

Through movement we can feel our own self.  The soul, what have you.

We watch our emotions and stories and terrors flit and flicker through experience, through the muscle, across the senses.  As we watch, we begin to know: in our bones: in the pulse: in the gut:

our feelings are not so entrenched as we thought they were.  It is possible to let go.  We can feel more than we ever believed we could feel. Through movement we see how our lives live on in the flesh; a story of our uniqueness, a riddle of our characters, an invitation to change.

We fall into an openness in which our history is not the end of the story, but the beginning of a new story.  Movement is revelation. Movement is grace.  Movement is the long needed liberation from our petty and ancient and societal suffering.  This is profound. Movement is a reclamation of our curves, our wounds, our sadness, our pride and our vulnerability.  Movement is an expression.  A reclamation of our voice and of our time.  Movement is the embodiment of our sweeter emotions, a dance we accept, a bow to everything.

Anatomy

become literate in your body

The body is a terrible and a beautiful thing.  When a relatively innocuous practice of yoga began to change everything about who I was, I got curious:  why did movement so effect my mood, and why did my body seem to have such direct influence on my character? What was happening to me? 

Standard yoga teacher training doesn't talk about the human body or anatomy in much detail (it can't, at 200 hours.  It's not med school).  Everything I've learned about the body I learned after training. 

I've worked with leaders in the fields of yoga anatomy, trauma studies, functional movement, fascial lines, adapting yoga asana and reading bodies.  Along the way I've figured out that I can't answer most questions we have about the body; we can only stand back in wonder. 

And I've learned that this learning itself is enough, even without final answers: exploring the body changes the way we look at everything.  Coming to know the body even provokes changes in the brain, opening us to empathy, courage, and an ability to tolerate unknowing.

This is a beauty.  To realize that even though we will die, even without ultimate answers to soul or suffering or disease, we can come to be literate in our bones, our fibers, and comfortable in our own skin.

Pranayama

BREATH-CENTERED TEACHINGS

Breath is the threshold.  It is the threshold between man and nature, the bridge between body and mind.  Breath is the thing in us that most closely mirrors the nervous system: it catches or accelerates, is restricted or inhibited, it seethes or settles.  It is one of the few things in the body and in life that can be both: voluntary and involuntary.

Therefore, if we want access to awareness, attention, underlying states of mood and character, breath is the door.

Yoga teachers tend to talk about breath a lot, but rarely teach it.  I don't care what postures you can do - if it isn't related to the breath I'm not sure it's yoga.

Transformation

BECOME MORE ALIVE

It's only on the most superficial level that yoga is 'about' the body in an exercise context, or even about stress reduction, though those are popular and wholly appropriate places to begin.  Nor can we say, exactly, that yoga is a kind of spirituality or religion.  It isn't concerned with gods or theologies.  It's only concern is humanity.

There is nothing so deeply revolutionary, so kind and yet so moving, as being concerned with our own humanity.  As exploring the cave of our own heart.

This is a process of becoming more and more our selves.  More and more tacitly alive.

 Ancient Lineage

How does an oral tradition express itself in modernity?  (Intimately, over time). How does an ancient practice, traditionally handed down from mentor to student, find relevance in a post-modern society? (by changing your life). How do we find personal meaning in something so old and abstract and strange? (by connecting ourselves to the source, directly).

I try to teach the things alluded to but never arrived at in classes: chant, philosophy, the vocabulary and teachings of the sages, yogic psychology and subtle body awareness.  These are direct routes to personal transformation. This is the stuff that actually works you over and leaves you wide open in wonder.

Teachers & Inspirations

These are my teachers and folks I have trained with in various ways over the years,  with no hierarchy implied.  In my early practice I sought out 'the tradition' in Ashtanga and Iyengar yoga, as well as Ayurveda.

I was also coming to yoga with a background in psychology/counseling/social justice and training as an anthropologist: that led directly to seeking out the neuroscience of trauma, resilience, and recovery.  As my practice and understanding evolved, I was drawn to somatic and breath work. I consider myself to be within the Desikachar lineage, and much of my study these days invokes Vedic chant, understanding the intersection of traditional practices and contemporary bodies, resisting oppression while honoring yoga’s deep roots.