Community

I did not know it when I started practising yoga, but yoga is very much about community. "Community" means, in one sense, a unified body of individuals. The more I practice yoga, the more I come to appreciate the unified body of individuals that I share in with those who I teach and practice with.

Josh, Hamish, Lucy and Sevahn - we are lit up!

It makes sense that yoga and community go hand in hand. Yoga is a word derived from the Sanskrit "yuj" meaning to yoke or bind together. Ultimately, that union is the linking of the individual consciousness with the cosmic consciousness. That is, in ancient yoga traditions, the purpose of the practice.

It starts with the individual making connection with and creating union within themselves. When I began yoga and for some years after, I was very much in a state of self-dislike - not self-loathing, but definite self-dislike. Under the tuition of a superior teacher who went beyond the poses to address self-perception, I was able to come into a better relationship with myself, and, as the night follows the day, I developed a better relationship with the people around me.

The longer I have practiced, the more important has become my connection with those who share in practice with me as my students, my colleagues, and my fellow practitioners. I have just spent a week in San Francisco. There I practiced almost daily at Baptiste Yoga San Francisco, a studio run by someone known to my partner and me, and at which various people, who my partner and I have met through training programmes elsewhere in the world, practice.

In visiting this studio my partner and I received a wonderful welcome. We were made to feel very much at home and our presence in the studio was announced to the classes we practiced in, which stimulated conversations and connection with locals in the classes. We had lunch with one student who we knew from a 2025 training in Iceland. We spent a whole afternoon and then had dinner with another student who my partner had met, also in Iceland, in 2024. I was invited to teach a class in the studio.

Stephanie, Gudrun (who taught the class), Lucy and Hamish - all glowing.

In 2017 I attended a Level 3 Baptiste programme in Menla, in the Catskills north of New York. There were about 105 people there, mainly from the USA with a few, like me, from the global community. One person on the course was a guy who was pretty well known to many in attendance and he was quite prominent on the training but I had relatively little to do with him. Last week in San Francisco, there he was, and he was going to teach one of the classes I had booked in for.

Before that class I lingered in reception waiting for a chance to speak to him, but he was quite engaged in conversation with some of the locals. Eventually, he noticed me and asked whether he could help. I said I wanted to say hello and recall myself to him. He then looked at me and said I had been wearing glasses in 2017 (I had contact lenses in last week) and then said that I was from Christchurch. He then told the people in reception that I had been able to recite all the yamas and niyamas on the 2017 course, something that almost no-one else had been able to do.

Even though we had not had much to do with one another directly in 2017, we had each made an impression upon the other and, reunited in 2026, we were close and shared tremendous connection on the occasions that we saw each other last week.

I really appreciated that experience. We knew of one another on the 2017 course but had little direct contact. We saw one another again in 2026, and reunited in a really connected way. We were close - much closer than we had been nine years earlier. The yoga, the thread that bound us together, had drawn us closer over the years, even though we were thousands of miles apart. That is yoga community.

Hamish, Lucy and Sean Silvera, owner of Baptiste Yoga San Francisco.

In my first ever yoga training in 2010 I met a woman from Hong Kong. I saw her again at another course in 2017. In between times we had not had any contact, but we instantly remembered each other. In the intervening seven years, we had been living our lives and practicing yoga and it was the yoga that brought us back into contact. Yoga was the cause for community. Yoga also meant that even when we were living in New Zealand and Singapore respectively, and not in direct contact, we were still in community in that we were sharing in the practice. It was a thread - perhaps the critical thread - in each of our lives.

I attended trainings with Baron Baptiste in 2010, 2011, twice in 2012, in 2017, and again in 2025. In 2011, Baron recognised me from 2010. In 2012, at the first programme I attended, Baron recognised me from the previous two years and we got into a conversation with one another. The first thing that he said in the second programme in 2012 was “Who did I just see... Is Hamish here?” Baron had recognised me and, given that that programme was being held in Park City, Utah and he knew that I lived in New Zealand, he thought it worth remarking upon that I was present for the programme.

In 2017 he recognised me again and it appeared to me that he took some satisfaction in the fact that I was still progressing by attending programmes and that yoga had become such a significant part in my life, in that I was a full-time yoga teacher and was running a yoga studio.

The eight-year hiatus between that programme and the next, in 2025, tested Baron's recollection. He runs many programmes, sees many many people and he cannot have the names of everybody that attends his trainings readily to hand. However, on day one of the 2025 programme I could see him looking at me and I could tell he was thinking that I looked familiar, older, but familiar. Periodically, through his first discussion session and then in the first yoga practise of the course, he would narrow his eyes and look in my direction as he worked to drag up from the depths of his recollections who I was.

It was during that first practice, about halfway through, that he managed to grab ahold of my name from his memory banks and there, in the middle of class, he had a little exchange with me in which he acknowledged me, used my name, and said that it was good to see me again.

What is all this about? It is about community. It is about being part of a collective, and the community exists even when people cannot see one another, even when people are not talking with one another and even when people may, in the everyday movements of life, have forgotten about one another. Yoga is the tie, the bond, the source of the community. My downward facing dogs kept me in community with Baron Baptiste across an 8-year period in which we had no direct contact at all.

Yoga is a tremendous source of community and connection. I understand that more and more the longer that yoga is a fundamental in my life. Be aware of the community that's available to you as you practise yoga. When you are in thunderbolt with prayer twist, and it is difficult, and you want to come out of the pose, be conscious of the community of people around you who are also finding it difficult, but who in their own ways are applying themselves to the challenge. In sensing that they too are not finding it easy and in sensing the application that each of the others is making to the pose, take heart for yourself and renew your focus and commitment, and know that in so doing, others will take heart from you. That is community.

Next time you walk into the room where you practice yoga, and you see someone who is familiar to you because they attend the classes but is not so familiar to you because you do not normally speak with them, engage them in conversation. You cross a bridge of connection because the yoga practice is a context for community. If you do not cross the bridge and open up greater connections with the others who you do not normally talk with, then you are not engaging in the full experience of the yoga. Yoga is community.

An amazing thing with respect to yoga practitioners is that when you open yourself to them, they receive you and the quality of connection between you is enhanced. In 2012, I had cause to apologise to a guy on a programme that I attended. I had not done anything bad towards him, but in the moment when he needed someone to speak up on his behalf to assist him, I had seen that opportunity and I had not taken it. I went to him later, and I said that I'd had that experience and I apologisde for not having stepped up to support him as I might have done.

His initial reaction was somewhat negative but then a few moments later he realised that it had taken a lot for me to apologise to him, he realised that his reaction had been somewhat churlish, and he came back to me and we sat and had breakfast together. From that moment on, our connection was really strong and we finished the programme, each having contributed significantly, with a strong sense of mutual respect and connection through yoga and our work together in the practice.

Yoga is community. Be open, at all times to the ways in which community plays out. As a teacher, I feel a certain responsibility towards my students, not just in the poses, but in their whole well-being. When a student has had an unpleasant experience or has suffered through injury, through the loss of a job, through the death of a relative, or whatever, I consider it to be a part of my role to reach out to that person and to let them know that I'm feeling for them and to tender to them my support.

Whether they take that up or not is for them to choose but my role isn't just to tell them what poses to do during the class. Beyond that, my role is to be there for that person as part of a community that they can draw on for support when necessary.

I say that is my role as the teacher, but that is my role as a yoga practitioner. That is my role as a person. Community must be our aim. In yoga, community is the means by which we can contribute and is a source upon which we can draw when we need community support.

Hamish, Lucy and Mark Stephens, international teacher and acclaimed writer of many books on yoga.