W2C & Nancy Yates at Ed Roberts Campus. April 2012
On this very summery Berkeley day, 12 students flitted and rolled and navigated with white canes into the Bay Area Outreach and Recreation Program's Fitness Center (housed at ERC). Nancy has been an adaptive yoga teacher for many years--working with seniors and folks in the disability community. primarily, she has adapted much of yoga instruction for people who are blind or low vision. She asked me to collaborate with her and use my Write To Connect skills to weave poetry in to a yoga class for people with mixed abilities. I felt like this was fitting. Many people cannot make their bodies into the shapes traditional yoga poses seem to ask of us. Just so, many folks struggle to understand or appreciate poetry. But there is a sea of breath and language in any body or mind's pattern of moving about or thinking in the world. So, why not bring poetry into the flowing realm of movement that is the yoga studio, outside of language. And why not bring the demanding movements in