Off the mat

Jerusalem’s Yoga Homeschool infuses the practice into everyday life.

By ARIEL DOMINIQUE HENDELMAN
Jerusalem’s Yoga Homeschool (photo credit: REVAYA KHAKSHOURI)
Jerusalem’s Yoga Homeschool
(photo credit: REVAYA KHAKSHOURI)
Ingrid Aria made aliya four and a half years ago with a dream. Her dream was to start a yoga school by the sea that would eventually become a yoga community.
“I was in Brooklyn, doing my yoga, and feeling like something was missing,” she recalls. “I hit the peak in my own personal growth. It got to a point when I turned 30 that I got a new kind of chutzpah to just do it. I always had a vision of having a yoga studio by the sea because I love the water, coming from South Brooklyn. I wanted to bring yoga to a small city on the coast, to a place where people need it.”
In the third month following her aliya, Aria began exploring coastal cities. She really connected with Ashkelon.
She had one friend there, which wasn’t much, but it was something. Aria resisted Ashkelon at first, but she really loved it and ultimately decided to move there. She began to build a yoga community in Ashkelon from absolutely nothing.
“I had to explain what yoga was to people who had never heard of it before,” Aria says. “I started giving classes, and I was the only one doing yoga in that area.
I was there for the war in 2012, which was the first time I had ever heard a siren. The Israeli army called me during that war to teach yoga to the reserve soldiers.
They wanted to offer them some kind of stress relief and distraction. It was an honor to be approached with the opportunity.”
After about nine months of living in Ashkelon and building a community all on her own, she began feeling depleted of energy. Feeling like perhaps she had overestimated herself, she considered a move back to Jerusalem. Although it is not on the coast and she is no longer in a very religious place, she entertained the idea.
“I didn’t know the other side of Jerusalem – the cool, diverse, modern side,” Aria says. “I didn’t want to be stuck in a homogeneous place. But I had some fortunate opportunities of connecting to the diverse underground.
There are a lot of work opportunities here, so I did come back to Jerusalem in the end.”
She has been practicing yoga since she was 17. At 35, that’s 18 years of honing her practice. But her move back to Jerusalem enabled her to perceive that she was starting to feel dry. The style she was practicing was power yoga, and she began to look at her mat with resentment.
“It was one more thing that was demanding energy from me,” she states.
She entertained the thought of going to India to broaden her stylistic approach.
“For me, it felt very rigid to have to do a particular style and only pose a certain way or take on a certain lifestyle,” she says. “I needed to rejuvenate.”
It was at this point that Aria had the good fortune of meeting her teacher, Rachel Krentzman. She immediately saw that Krentzman was someone she could learn from. She learned intensively with her for about a year and a half, specializing in yoga for back care, as well as stress relief and trauma. When this period of learning ended in March, Aria decided to apply for international certification from the Yoga Alliance. She was approved to open her own yoga teacher training school, and thus the Yoga Homeschool was born that month.
“I’ve been teacher training for over four years,” she says. “I have the experience now, and it was time. I was doing what I loved, but I was doing it under someone else’s name. I have something special to add in my own voice.”
The Yoga Homeschool’s year-long teacher training course begins in November. While teacher training is an important branch, she also offers group and private yoga sessions.
“We share yoga for the Westerner who doesn’t necessarily have a traditional yoga lifestyle,” she explains.
“We celebrate that here. You don’t need to adopt a different lifestyle; it’s the yoga that’s right for us where we are. You don’t need to change your habits. If you stay up late, smoke cigarettes, curse, you can still come to a yoga class. You’re not going to be judged, and you will reap huge benefits. Our philosophy is really in line with the man who is considered to be the father of modern yoga, Krishnamacharya. He taught that the style of yoga must suit the student, not the other way around.”
At the Yoga Homeschool, they don’t teach a specific style but rather the best of what all the various styles have to offer. Aria hopes that those who come to the Yoga Homeschool will find their own style and practice, acknowledging that people are drawn to many styles at different stages of life.
“Some people can get cultish about what type of yoga they’re practicing, which not only creates division within the yoga community but can also cause harm or injury to the person practicing if they learn that yoga has to look like such and such,” she adds. “What if their body doesn’t move in that way? Yoga is not about no pain no gain. We learn a lot about our own bodies and our different goals. That is a kind of selfstudy that teaches a person a lot about the unconscious ways that they carry themselves through the world. It’s an awareness that the leads us to another way that the Yoga Homeschool is special, and that is that it makes yoga relevant to your life.”
Anyone can go and practice yoga for an hour and then return to their daily life. They may get an hour’s worth of investment and feel good, but then go back to their daily routine, where they may be moving in ways that hurt the body. Through the practice, Aria hopes that her students will notice simple things like how they’re sitting at their desk, carrying their baby, washing their dishes or even how they may be jumping to conclusions.
“This is how we begin to transform old habits that no longer serve us,” she expounds. “In that space, we can then begin to make better choices and be less controlled by our need to react to things. We cannot control what goes on outside of us. Being alive is a guarantee that you’re going to interface with stress. It’s proven.
Unless you lock yourself away in your house, there’s no way of escaping stress. So we can suffer through it and go through life trying to survive and not to break down. I think we’ve all tried that path, and it goes for so long until it just doesn’t work anymore.
The more efficient way and to really enjoy life is to maintain our well-being. Stress ages us, and it’s the No. 1 cause of disease. How do we make five minutes a day for self-care habits reset and rejuvenate us? Changing our habits goes so far in terms of our subconscious minds.”
Aria explains that it is actually smaller exercises done more consistently that have a bigger impact than doing something for a longer duration more sporadically.
Many who are less familiar with yoga may think they don’t have time to incorporate it into their lives, but everyone has five minutes a day.
The Yoga Homeschool specializes in trauma, women’s health and back care. Some people join teacher training, not necessarily to become teachers but to deepen their practice and learn more. In this way, they become their own teachers. The Yoga Alliance certified teacher training course is 200 hours. Aria also offers Yoga Alliance workshops for teachers who are already certified who are looking for more inspiration or who want to learn new tricks of the trade to stay ahead of the game.
But even for those who choose to join a regular class or to have a private session with Aria, the Yoga Homeschool encourages its students to become their own teachers.
“A great yoga teacher helps the student find their own inner light,” she says. “Yoga is not trying to create a co-dependent teacher-student relationship. We teach the formula here for a wildly transformative yoga practice.
It’s important for me to create a space where students can ask all their questions and just feel comfortable.
We’re building community, and it’s fun. I’m not into being so serious. It’s deep and light at the same time. We’re welcoming to people who practice all styles of yoga. We’re not judgmental. We don’t need to prove something to yoga. Yoga needs to prove to us its value. It will do that when we start taking it off the mat and into our day to day.”
Fore more information: www.facebook.com/theyogahomeschool/ and www.theyogahomeschool.com/


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