Return is located at 805 West Saint Germain Street in downtown Saint Cloud.  You can see a live schedule here.  Return hosts 19+ public classes a week and charges $10 a class; there is no need to pre-register and no experience with yoga is required.  All bodies are welcome, all mobility levels can find a yoga practice healing, and advanced students find Return’s classes a step up from classes in gyms and commercial studios.  Return offers private sessions, fertility yoga, youth and family yoga, a project for Veterans, first responders, and high risk populations through the Strong Body, Quiet Mind Project, and hosts a workshop the last Sunday of every month.

I am a yoga teacher. I believe in the raw power of yoga to transform, empower, and return us to a sense of aliveness. But I also think that yoga is exclusive. In studios, yoga is too fast, too expensive, and too intimidating to be of use to those who could most use it. There are studios everywhere, and thousands of yoga teachers who can teach American style, workout based classes.  In most cases, yoga is a business.

Return sees yoga as a system of ethics, practices, and spiritual exploration. The focus is individual human lives, service, ethics, social justice, and personal transformation.  Return offers yoga’s practical ways for people to integrate personal development and healing with engagement in the world.  Return is incorporated as a non-profit.

Yoga has scientifically proven results in terms of chronic pain and illness, cancer treatment, anxieties, depressions, trauma histories, self esteem issues, eating and sleep disorders, addictions and self-defeating behaviors. If this sounds like a bucket list of emotional and physical instability, realize that depression is slated to be the #1 illness in the world by 2015, that our world is inherently stressful, and that emotional IMBALANCE is more common than emotional balance. Yoga has proven to be revolutionary in returning us to ease, aliveness, and personal power.  But it can’t help if people can’t find a safe place.

Karin has worked as a crisis counselor and has extensive training in both yoga and interpersonal support: the goal is to meet you where you are, rather than bring everyone into the same poses.

Return’s mission is threefold:

a) to teach the skills of yoga and meditation to under served communities,

b) to collaborate service opportunities and qualified yoga teachers,

and c) to offer high quality public yoga classes at a real life cost. Yoga is not a business.  Yoga is a revolutionary practice on both the personal and the community level.

We all know someone who could use this.  Please forward this information to them.