her space
Reaching out through yoga
Hoosier on a mission to help, heal
Shakti Redding knows firsthand how yoga can heal, body and soul.
She also hopes it can change the world, which is why the Indiana native founded the non-profit Yoga World Reach (www.yogaworldreach.org) in Vail, Colo., a few years ago.
The idea was partly inspired by a visit to Belize when she and friends were practicing yoga on a beach and drew a crowd. They ended up starting a children’s yoga class there as well.
“I was so inspired by yoga’s ability to draw in people from all walks of life … it brings about transformation in anybody,” she says in a phone interview.
Redding has since created yoga and meditation programs for cancer patients, domestic violence survivors, AIDS orphans and widows and others in need, everywhere from India to the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota.
Typically, Yoga World Reach staff works with established agencies in the area they’ll be teaching. In addition to yoga mats and videos, they bring food, clothing and other necessities.
“On our yoga mats we work through challenges that can be applied to daily experience. We learn patience, perseverance, forgiveness and self-love. We become more powerful and more flexible. We learn to breathe. These skills bring us into balance with our bodies and harmony with the world around us,” she says.
This world traveler grew up locally as Rachel Redding and graduated from Fremont High School in 1991. She moved to Colorado around 13 years ago (“it was the mountains that beckoned me out”) and became an Outward Bound instructor. She’s now a certified yoga and massage therapist.
She’s home again today for a brief visit to lead the fourth annual Inner Power Yoga “Blissipline” workshop at Wild Winds Buffalo Preserve in Fremont, a fundraiser for her organization. It’s all part of her mission.
She dreamt up the basic premise for Yoga World Reach years ago. But after talking to others, who raised the valid point that the people she wanted to help had more pressing needs like food and shelter, she waited.
But she ultimately decided that she still could help them through yoga.
“Finding our inner power and recognizing our choices is the most basic need of all. We can’t always choose what happens to us … what we can choose is our response to those things,” she says. She cites author and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl, who has discussed the space between our circumstance and our response.
“In that space is where we choose how we handle it, that’s where our inner power lies. Yoga or meditation gives us a suspension of that space,” Redding says.
Her travels have shown her that joy is often a choice, and not the result of having what you think you need.
“In so many circumstances, people who have nothing at all have joy, it’s something they’ve chosen; it’s something they just do because that’s what they know,” she says.
Yoga also helps us grow comfortable in our skin, a process that many women struggle with for years, she says.
“…There are so many mixed messages about how a woman should behave. Girls are subjected to images of Victoria’s Secret-style beauty and sex from a very young age. As we grow, we become vulnerable to the unrealistic ideal of how a woman should look and perform. It is difficult to make peace with our bodies, when for so many of us our bodies hold such pressure and shame.”
It’s something she’s struggled with as well. Years ago, she drifted off course and into substance abuse, a physically abusive relationship and an abortion. Yoga also helped her recover quickly when her car went off a 65-foot cliff.
“This is why I’m here, because I’ve been through it. The only way to make (the experience) into something good is to share it, and uplift and empower others. It’s just a constant healing process,” she says.
Part of that process meant adopting a new name last year. “Shakti” was bestowed on her by two yoga teachers, years apart, and refers to a Hindu goddess and the divine feminine force.
Although she loves her given name, Redding is still haunted by a Bible story she read as a child, which described Rachel as “one who weeps for her children.”
Changing her name was a way to help ease the pain and shame, she says, and to honor the woman she’s become. Even yoga teachers can strive for greater enlightenment.
“It’s a constant journey, there is no end. The journey is the destination,” she says.
sscarlett@jg.net
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