KraigWard.com

Yoga has become one of the primary niche markets that I have a real personal connection with, as I practice yoga myself 3-4x per week.  Each time I enter the studio to practice, I come out 75 minutes later feeling like I’m walking on a cloud.  My body is fully cleansed, my mind is extremely calm and my body feels flexible and my muscles toned. There is nothing quite like it, especially if you have a good teacher and the right heat/humidity conditions in the room.

I feel a very close bond with the Yoga market and the participants dedication and desire for personal mastery, which is at the core of practicing Yoga.  Yoga for most practitioners is more of a lifestyle than a workout. 

My wife Kris and I have designed both online and offline learning programs, and we are preparing to open the first of many Trikaya Yoga Schools beginning in Charleston South Carolina this summer. 

We call our unique brand of Yoga: “Trikaya” and it’s a combination of Yoga and Lifestyle Design.

Some of our fan’s lovingly dubbed us: “The Yoga That Helps You Get Your Shit Together” and we’re proud to wear the title, as we feel it does indeed encompass what we stand for.  

In the recent past, we’ve thrown several landmark Yoga/Charity events (the biggest Yoga events in San Diego’s history 2 years in a row) that brought together hundreds of members of the greater yoga community and raised thousands of dollars for our beneficiaries.  

Our Global Mala event website can be seen here, and a video highlights compilation can be seen by clicking here.

Under the Trikaya Brand we’ve also thrown a series of monthly “awareness workshops” here locally in San Diego.  

Each of these 6 hour intensive workshops had 3 phases:  

Phase 1: We began the evening with a multi-media section where we’d host a viewing of the latest cutting edge film or documentary showing such titles as The 11th Hour, The Moses Code, Humanity Ascending and many others, and we provided pillows, blankets, kettle corn, and an assortment of healthy and refreshing beverages for the perfect movie experience.

Phase 2: We then cleared the floor and transitioned into a full yoga practice.  The Yoga always built up to an ecstatic dance section and then we’d finish off in final resting pose (Savasana) to let the new awareness from the film and the opening of our bodies and minds from the yoga fully integrate before we’d transition into the final phase of the evening.

Phase 3: In the 3rd phase of the event we transitioned into the Lifestyle design  portion where we’d do various exercises and deep introspective self-assessments.  As Michael Bernard Beckwith says: “Action without vision is chaos, yet vision without action is fantasy.  We must marry the two.”  And the idea here with the final phase of the evening was to help each attendee take their new found awareness and experience from the event and incorporate their new visions into a tangible plan for their lives. 

The events were a great learning experience for us and the feedback was incredible, yet our plans to expand and host simultaneous events on a national scale were thwarted due to some not so obvious realities surrounding “scalability” that caused us to take our vision and go back to the drawing board.

The result is our new physical retail business model which we will be rolling out all throughout 2008-2010. 

If you’d like to stay current and up to date and are interested in playing a role directly or indirectly in the expansion of our retail Trikaya Yoga studios, or online programs, please visit TrikayaYoga.com and opt in to our Tribe Newsletter for more details.

Sincerely,