A YOJammin’ Good Time! By Hari Berzins Get ready, folks! The Floyd Yoga Jam is coming to the mountains near you. This Newest Festival on the East Coast combines music, yoga, art and fun and is held every Labor Day Weekend in Floyd, VA. This August 30 - September 1, 2013, festival goers from New York to Florida will gather to enjoy incredible music, awesome yoga, the YOJam’s interactive community Art Village, KidsVille and the People Playground. Fantastic local food, coffee, beer, wine, kombucha and more! Come settle in for a rejuvenating weekend! The festival is set creek-side in idyllic Indian Valley at the Burnette Farm Retreat Center, amid acres of rolling meadows, soft pine forests and incredible views. The Floyd Yoga Jam, also known in these parts as The YOJam, is a hometown production of the community of Floyd and the creative passions of the Dancin’ Dakinis (a dakini is a dancing spirit), Shirleyann Burgess and Laura Polant, two Floydian women who were lucky enough to raise their children in this wonderful town. “Devotion, music, compassion, fun and love are the basis of this event, which makes Floyd Yoga Jam a powerful means of gathering and sharing in nature, taking participants from the beauty of the music and yoga into their interior calm,” says Burgess, owner of Living Light Yoga Studio and Wellness Center in Floyd. “We want to give back to our community and offer local folks the chance to make a decent living for honest work,” says Polant. But the mission is deeper than that. “We can reach many people and expose them to unimagined dreams and possibilities. We share what our community has created and invite them to take home a vision of a healthy body, mind and community,” says Burgess. It seems they are achieving their goal—the most memorable moment from the inaugural event for both of the Dakinis was the 32
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sight of hundreds of people spilling out of yoga tents, all moving in unison like prayer flags. “I could feel their hearts opening, then my heart opened even more and tears of love and happiness filled me—once again, I knew this festival was the answer to reaching the silence and light of many,” Burgess recalls. The hope for this year is to continue spreading the love and to break the 2500 attendee mark. With leaders in the yoga community joining the line-up, they are right on track to meet their goal. MC Yogi is the headliner for 2013. He will lead two yoga classes and perform his rockin’ hip hop! “I love MC Yogi and use his music in my yoga classes. It is young yet old, fun, and has a wonderful message. I was beyond ecstatic when I heard he would join our line-up,” says Polant. National Public Radio says, “MC Yogi is changing the face of devotional music in America.” The artist’s own website says, “Wait. Hip-hop and yoga? The Ramayana with a backbeat? Stories of Shiva and Shakti, Ganesh and Hanuman and the rest of the ancient Hindu gods, all funked up and slamming up against potent, propulsive graffiti beats custom built to drive eager listeners into a divine frenzy? You’ve never heard anyone like MC Yogi.” MC Yogi is sure to bring a lot of energy to the YOJam, and he is joined by other big names of genre-bending yoga and devotional music such as Donna De Lory, Durga Das, DJ Drez, Sean Johnson and the Wild Lotus Band, Amy Steinburg, and many local Floyd favorites like Scott Perry, Deer Run Drifters, Bernie Coveny and more. The weekend is also packed full of yoga and meditation classes including Beryl Bender Birch, author of Beyond Power Yoga, who was one of the seven women named as “Innovators Shaping Yoga Today” by Yoga Journal in 2000. She has recently focused her work
Spring/Summer 2013