The other day I bumped into a friend at a local neighborhood eatery between teaching my two Saturday morning classes. She had just come back from a vacation in Isla de Mujeres, a small island off of the east coast of Mexico, which I had visited in the mid-1980’s. Her husband, who is a fellow yoga teacher, had taken a few yoga classes while they were there. How marvelous, I said, that there are now yoga classes we can take almost where we visit. It gives such a sense of friendliness and welcome to be able to go into a yoga class wherever you are and whatever your state of mind.

My friend’s story reminded me of a visit to Dublin a few years back. My most lasting impression of my time in Dublin was one of welcome, which is not something that I have felt universally as an American when traveling. Although the friend with whom I was traveling has long settled in London and I in Washington, DC, we both grew up in the environs of New York City. Everyone we talked to in Dublin had family or friends living in New York. Instead of seeing us just as “Americans” (with all the implications of that label), they saw us as cousins and potential kindred spirits. We had walked the streets where their distant family lived and connecting gave a sense of proximity rather than otherness. Such a sense of unity in diversity is, fundamentally, what we seek in yoga class, and why it is wonderful to be able to share the practice in so many places.

There are tens of thousands of people practicing yoga in the Washington, DC area and dozens of teachers and studios offering a wide range of styles – from power and hot yoga to gentle yoga, from yoga as a fitness exercise to very classical forms of yoga. After exploring various styles, I chose to study and teach Anusara Yoga (see www.anusara.com), the style established by John Friend. It is a uniquely American style of yoga that invites us to practice asana from an embracing, integrating, healing, life-affirming perspective and to bring what we learn from such an asana practice into our daily lives.

What is yoga’s appeal here in Washington, DC at the center of American government? For me, much is about infusing work with a sense of spirit and service; seeking a sense of unity of spirit in a system that is based on distinctions, power divisions, and competition; and integrating how we eat, work, and consume into our daily lives in a way that is true to the spirit of service and unity.

I practice on my yoga mat to learn how to bring yoga off the mat. The physical and technical aspects of yoga reveal much about how we relate to challenges and successes, sweet feelings and discomfort, joy and stress. Sometimes when I practice I cannot hit an arm balance or bend my back or hips into the full form of a pose, just as some days, my words or actions are ones I wish I had said or done better. As my teacher John Friend advises, though, sometimes we learn the most from the practices when we have struggled. What is important is that we keep showing up and seek to learn and explore our edge (whatever edge that might be).

My experience in studying and practicing is that the more I soften and open to a non-judging consciousness of experience – a central tenet of Anusara yoga, establish boundaries that nourish and embrace without hardening, and then open again to more of myself and of life, the better able I am to recognize the good in myself and others. I am thus led to serve more fully and to eat, consume, work, and play in a way that recognizes that all beings on the planet have the same divine right to seek the spirit. It is an extra delight that I feel healthier, look better, and am happier from a steady yoga practice.

In choosing to teach yoga in addition to working full-time for the government and doing volunteer work, I seek to offer what I have learned and experienced in my own studies and practice, to spread the ability not only to self-nurture and heal, but to inspire my students, who are all wonderful people whom I think of as my friends and teachers as well as my students, to have more joy, health, and energy to serve themselves, their friends and families, and all those suffering around the world.

Elizabeth Goodman is a certified Anusara® Yoga instructor who lives, works, teaches, and blogs in Washington, DC. To read more about her and her classes, please visit www.rosegardenyoga.com.