Simon Park at Village Yoga & Teacher Training: Why every good teacher needs to also be the lifelong student of a great teacher.
Ok, grab your cup of coffee or mug of tea, it's story time -- the story of Village Yoga!
We can pick a couple of origin points for the story of Village Yoga (like how I started doing yoga VHS tapes in the wrestling room during high school gym class instead of playing dodgeball in the late 90s or how Sam went from 250lb football player to a limber yoga teacher during college).
But I'm going to start our story in Philadelphia in 2007. I was living in Philly attending law school.
And I quite quickly realized I wouldn't survive the stress & pressure without a counterpoint of ease and calm.
So I started practicing yoga everyday, first at a gym and then at one of those old-school, wonderfully crunchy yoga studios that smelled like nag champa and sounded like a sea of Oms over the harmonium, where the schedule was filled with every yoga lineage from Jivamukti to Ashtanga Mysore to Iyengar and, of course, Vinyasa.
The studio had a couple of different locations around the City and I tried every style and every teacher and every class. I would walk miles each day to clear my head and get to my favorite class.
And that is where I met Simon Park. He was *just* my regular Tuesday night yoga teacher down in Old City. (I think the class was at like 9pm or some wild time I am no longer awake for ;)).
To see Simon move and breathe is to watch yoga, the practice, embodied in human form.
I was amazed by his quiet poise, the elegance of his movement, and how sometimes -- in savasana -- I would peek open my eyes in the utter stillness and Simon would be silently floating in handstand in the middle of the room, as restful and at ease as any of us lying down.
In 2010, when I was graduating law school and moving to Washington, DC for a job as a corporate litigator at a Big Law law firm, I casually asked him if he had a studio to suggest in DC.
"Flow Yoga Center," he said confidently. "There's nowhere else you need to know."
And he was right. Flow became my yoga home, where I did my teacher training and eventually where in 2012, Sam -- who was living and teaching in Annapolis -- came to Flow for a weekend workshop.
Taught by -- you guessed it -- Simon Park.
One of the studios he worked for in Maryland saw the workshop posting, and bought a 24-year-old Sam his workshop pass.
By this point, Simon was already earning his reputation as the "Yoga Nomad," traveling the Yoga Festival Circuit and just starting to teach internationally and was visiting his favorite DC studio, Flow.
Sam had an almost religious conversion during that workshop, realizing the grit and sweat and fast pace of his power-yoga, Baron-Baptiste-style practice could yield to something even more powerful: the fluidity of water, a quieter sense of a deeper strength, easeful levity -- all set to a groovy rock & roll soundtrack.
Sam kept coming back to Flow, commuting hours each day because if that was where Simon came to teach, that's where he needed to practice. A few weeks later, Sam and I had our first conversation when we laid out our mats next to each other in a crowded Sunday morning class at Flow.
The next Thanksgiving, when Simon was back in DC, Sam & I hosted him at our place while he taught at Flow. I'd quit Big Law by then and Sam & I were already teaching side by side at Flow.
It was Simon who then set us off on our own little international yoga adventure, securing us a teaching post in Sydney Australia one summer, bringing us to the French Alps to assist his teacher training and teach at the Chamonix Yoga Festival at the literal base of Mont Blanc. Together, we've co-hosted retreats in Costa Rica and Simon even read Dr. Seuss's Oh The Places You'll Go! at our wedding.
Simon is our dearest teacher, mentor, and brother, and we are GRATEFUL to be the only stop in the United States on his worldwide teaching tour.
Please join us this weekend, Aug 22-24, 2024, for our third time hosting Simon at Village Yoga. What a GIFT it is for us to practice with him again.
One thing to know about Simon is that he is immensely generous. That generosity, combined with his playful sense of adventure and community, means that he is usually at the helm of a traveling band of yoga merrymakers.
And we're lucky that he's brought fellow teacher Alex Perez with him. When Simon says that someone is *the* inversions teacher in Europe right now, you happily have him teach a Handstand Workshop (all levels are welcome. I'll be there and I'm totally nervous -- we can do this together ;).
Behind every good teacher is a great one. We couldn't teach here at Village Yoga without still being students ourselves. Whenever we get the chance to practice with Simon, Sam & I get an infusion of wisdom, knowledge, capacity, and presence to enliven our own teaching (and always fresh songs for the playlists!).
So it's also perfect timing for us to host a FREE Info Session for Village Yoga's first Teacher Training, which will begin January 2025. This is the first Teacher Training we have hosted in FIVE YEARS! (You may know a graduate of our last one, Samar Ayyub ;))
Teacher Training is not only a space designed to give you the tools and technical know-how to teach, it's also fundamentally a place to deepen enliven your own practice, whether you want to teach one day or not.
Stick around after Simon's master class on Saturday for a very casual teacher training info session!
Thank you SO much for being here & we can't wait to catch you on the mat with Simon & Alex this week!
Cath