By Amanda Mack

For many, yoga is a kind of calling. It calls us to be more present in our lives, more flexible in our bodies and minds, and more interested in the pursuit of wellness. Finding the ability to justify its importance in our lives is often the limiting factor.

Several area residents made a conscious choice to advance their yoga practices by making it a priority in their lives. Each of them continually seeks out yoga experiences beyond local class offerings to further cultivate and inspire their practices.

Taking yoga to the next level
Laura Anhalt, an avid yoga practitioner in Bismarck, found her yoga roots at the local YMCA. Her first yoga class gave her a eureka moment. Everything about it said, “This is it!”

“At first the practice [of yoga] is exciting,” says Laura. “You improve relatively quickly. Then you hit a plateau after a few years. Because I live in Bismarck, I wasn’t going to workshops or advanced anything. I was going to classes but it got to be the same old same old after a while.”

To find inspiration, Anhalt added a home practice to her yoga mix and then she attended her first Yoga Journal conference in Colorado. She went with her husband who golfed during the day while she attended sessions. Although an incredible learning experience, it was also painful.

“I was struck by how much I didn’t know. I was just totally freaked out,” recalls Anhalt. “I learned what I don’t know and what I can’t do.”

Anhalt has since come to embrace the great depth and breadth yoga has to offer. Prone to anxiety, she maintains a daily practice for both the physical and the mental health benefits and continues to seek out and attend workshops locally at Pinwheel Creative Movement Center and in the region. Of special interest to her is visiting White Lotus Foundation, a yoga retreat center in Santa Barbara, Calif. frequented by rock star Sting.

“I am probably a fanatic,” Anhalt, a state employee, confesses. “I have a bag at work – it has blankets and a block. At break, I go and meditate for 20 minutes in an empty conference room. After I eat lunch in the afternoon, I put my legs up the wall for 20 minutes. Yoga’s just in my life.”

Finding a good fit and style
Many take their next step into yoga by attending a teacher training. However, not everyone who attends a teacher training comes out a teacher. In fact, Angie Swiec Kambeitz, an ashtanga yoga practitioner and teacher new to Bismarck, wishes that teacher trainings were just called workshops arguing that they can simply serve as a great way to grow your personal practice.

Working as a volunteer at a Yoga Journal conference in Estes Park, Colo. was a great introduction for Kambeitz. She learned about different yoga styles and got unique access to a variety of top teachers. Furthermore, she was able to gain some teacher training credits.

Yoga Journal sponsors several annual conferences, but the magazine itself and its extensive website provide access to leading teachers without the travel commitment. Janis Cheney, a 28-year yoga practitioner in Bismarck, said she signed on to YJ’s 21-day yoga challenge. The challenge is designed to empower yoga practitioners to maintain a daily practice. On a recent work trip to Fargo, she kept to the challenge by uploading a yoga podcast to her phone and did the class in her hotel room.

Yoga vacations offer another avenue for exploration. Bonnie Torrance, owner of Pinwheel Creative Movement Center in downtown Bismarck and Sivananda yoga instructor, just led a February yoga retreat near Puerto Plata, Dominican Republic. She is already taking reservations for next year (for more information call 701-255-8499).

A ten day experience, participants practice tai chi at sunrise on the beach and then attend a poolside yoga class later in the morning. Although participants shared most meals together at their common villa, the remainder of the day was their own.

Cheney and spouse Stephen Crane were among the 12 participants from Bismarck who attended the inaugural retreat. Crane, who began his yoga practice on the trip, says, “We waited twenty-five years to do something like this. That was stupid!” He is now one of Torrance’s newest students at Pinwheel.

Cheney described the retreat as more of a vacation for the body and soul. “I would do it again in a heartbeat,” she says. “What’s extraordinary about that time and place…it was gloriously green and the sky was a blue – there was an intensity to the sunlight in it that we just don’t get here [in Bismarck]. The breeze…it was a feast for the senses yet a break for them at the same time.”

Attaining and maintaining teacher status
Whether a yoga practitioner chooses to take her bag of tricks learned at workshops, conferences and teacher trainings and share them with students is a personal choice. Often, yoga becomes such an integral part of a potential teacher’s life that sharing that accumulated knowledge with others is a natural next step.

Susan Thompson, a hatha yoga and meditation teacher in Bismarck, hesitatingly turned to yoga after sustaining a knee injury while skiing. After realizing its healing benefits, she became a devoted student. Thompson’s desire to become a teacher took hold after inviting her dear friend Pat Hayden, a yoga and meditation instructor in Casper, Wyo., to teach a few workshops in Bismarck. Hayden told her that she had a responsibility to her students to get training.

Thompson says it was like making the decision to go back to school. She told herself, “I am going to do this. I don’t care what I have to do.” With her children grown, her primary obstacle was getting a month’s leave from her job as a social worker at MedCenter One. Turns out it was no problem.

Thompson attended a month-long residential teacher training at Shoshoni Yoga Retreat deep in the mountains near Boulder, Colo. Initially, she tried to convince the retreat to allow her to complete teacher training in one-week increments, an approach common to other yoga teacher training programs. However, she quickly saw that a month was necessary to learn how to accurately teach yoga, how to read her students, adjust the class to meet their specific needs, and to fully develop her meditation practice.

To keep her practice and her teaching fresh, Thompson goes to Yoga Journal conferences as often as she can. She and a group of long time yoga friends, including Hayden, go back to learn from their own teachers. She particularly likes Tias Little, founder of Prajna Yoga, a yoga training center in Santa Fe, N.M. When she spoke of a workshop he conducted on the belly and the mind a couple years ago, her reflections sounded as if she had just left the course. His words are ingrained firmly into her memory. Thompson, who turns 70 this year, plans to attend a Tias Little workshop in Colorado in Fall 2011.

If you let it, yoga can become a way of life. When your yoga practice begins to follow you off the mat and into your day, advancing your practice may just move to the top of your priority list.

Amanda Mack, a Bismarck-based writer, recently returned from her first yoga vacation at the Sinvananda Yoga Ashram in the Bahamas. Although the ten-hour days without coffee were grueling, the bliss was contagious.