New place for south/central Austin II

As we all know, Art of Living Austin is growing and expanding, even though we loved to gather around Shraddha and Anoop’s home for the weekly long kriya, there were times (very frequently) that we were running out of real-estate and had to place yoga mats creatively to make space for more.

So, the thought occurred to move out of the private home and move to a neutral location like a community center (like we used to do) and may be probably find a place few miles north that way it would be equally convenient/inconvenient for every one. 

We combed through churches, schools, fitness studios, yoga studios, Pilates studios and dance studios. Surprisingly a lot of the churches had availability but not at the time we required (Sunday evening) for they were booked for their youth ministries. as for the yoga studios, they didn’t want to entertain us for the conflict we may have with their practice (fair enough, I guess). Schools would have been ideal but the rates were not conducive enough for our operations. While some Yoga studios were willing to work with us, it was either the location or the lack of air circulation (core to our existence)  prevented us from signing the place.

So, Austin we believe we have found the ideal place in terms of size, location, cost and accessibility.

Please do join us every week for long kriya follow ups on

Day and Time: Sunday’s at 5:30PM

Location: 4544 S Lamar Blvd #200, Austin, TX 78745 Studio 1

And help us prove that we made the right decision in renting this studio. 

I would not be fair if I didn’t thank Shraddha and Anoop on their generosity for letting us use their place every Sunday evening for the long kriya.

Thank you Shraddha and Anoop for lending us your space and wishing you luck on the new phase of your journey. 

As with any new thing it would be a learning curve for all of us so please do bear with us for the location is as new to you as it is for us :).

Art of Living Austin steering committee nominations

It is that time again, nominations are currently open for the following positions for the Steering Committee:

1) Outreach

2) Event (Program)

3) Secretary

4) Treasurer

We kindly request y’all to nominate suitable candidates to take up the lead in steering the chapter to new heights.

Please submit your nominations in private by sending an email to nominate@artoflivingaustin.org. The last day for submitting nominations is 10/31/2016.

Any member of the Art Of Living Austin Chapter can submit nominations for the positions shown above. 

We are very thankful for the hard work and time invested by our current committee. We wish them the very best in their endeavors.

The criteria in the bylaws is listed below

• Nominees must be Austin Chapter members, and must have experience in organizing courses and events. They should not be a member of any regional or national committee, and should be willing and able to serve for at least 1 year.

• The Nominations and Elections Team will strive to ensure nominations of suitable candidates for all open positions, prior to end of the nomination period.

thank you

Nominations team

New place for south/central Austin

Austin, specially south and central Austin time to get excited. Yes we heard you and your concerns and we have taken steps to address one of your comments/concerns, we have started negotiations for a new place for weekly follow ups. Yes, this location will be north of our current location, will be easily accessible through freeways, will have natural light and fresh air circulation and most of all it is not someone else’s home. 

Stay tuned we are in final steps of our negotiations and will be posting the details very soon.

ps: it could be as early as this weekend

Second International Day of Yoga celebrations

They say everything is big and better in Texas, so why should our yoga day be an exception? you read it right, Art of Living foundation in collaboration with HSS and ISHA foundation along with ~45 partners celebrated the International Day of Yoga on July 30 2016.  Did I tell you there were ~800 people in attendance doing yoga. 

Back in May 2016, when one of our teachers raised the point that we need to celebrate international day of Yoga and it will not be done on June 21st when the rest of the world celebrates but on July 31st, I admit, I was one of the few who was some what disappointed and didn’t want us to sign up to lead the effort for I didn’t see us becoming another event management  organization.

Thankfully they didn’t listen to me and took it up in a stride to organize the event, soon enough we had a Facebook page, a website,  few collaborators and lots of partners which kept on growing over the next month or so. In the end we had over 40 partners and 3 other organizations which were actively collaborating with us.

Within the limited budget we were able to flyer, conduct TV interviews and unlimited sharing and advertising on Facebook.  The only avenue I think we left untapped was Twitter. In the end, all of these created enough awareness amongst Austin crowd that we had ~800 people showed up to do yoga on a hot summer Saturday evening. Needless to say we are thankful to all those who showed up to do the yoga.

The event day truly saw each organization bring out their expertise to the game. We from Art of Living brought our expertise of overall organization and had our hand in every single aspect of the event, be it on stage with yoga, music and meditation or the ground work of  crowd management. HSS and ISHA had the man/woman/student power to handle the masses of people who were heading to the capitol  (on a side note, volunteers of HSS had come from Houston and San Antonio to help out/assist the event), Agni the dance studio handled the whole stage setup, microphones, speakers, the yoga dance and the other logistical side of the event, last but not the least our yoga partners who spread out on stage and all around the capitol grounds leading the Yoga.    

Yes we did it, the second ever yoga day celebrations was a grand success beyond all metrics. We do have a lot of people to thank both inside our organization and outside and more importantly he Counsel General of India, Houston. 

Keep an eye on this area for I will be posting the pics and videos as and when I receive them.

Art of Living center address – update on Google

Some reason, Google believes that our new Art of Living center is located at 13699 Pond Springs Road Austin TX 78729 and it is permanently closed.
You all know our new center address is 13091 Pond Springs Road, Suite 208 Austin TX 78729 and our center is open and thriving. I request your help in fixing this. It is a simple 3 step process,

1. Search on Google for Art of Living Austin and it comes with permanently closed link like below  
   

   
2. Please click on the feedback and suggest the new address 13091 Pond Springs Road Suite 208 Austin TX 78729
3. Hit submit and you should get an email in your account saying that your feedback is being reviewed

I have done my part and few of us have done it too and I am hoping if more people do submit the change then hopefully Google will act on it fast and change to the right address and show us open.
We appreciate your effort.
We have one more issue with Yelp which believes we are still in our Lamar location, if you are the owner of Yelp account for Art of Living Austin please ping me.  

Podcast on Creativity

I am a recent convert to podcasts, turned to them specially after my good friends visit from California. Anyways, off the many things I subscribe to now one thing I am regular with is Ted Radio hour from NPR. The podcast runs for an hour or so in which they combine multiple ted talks on a particular topic, in essence it is a superset of ted talks. 

One such Ted talk that I recently heard were on Creativity, they covered few different aspects for creativity

1. Not being selfish, no me and mine 
2. Ability to fall on your face and make mistakes
3. Frontal cortex of brain or as we call Ego which monitors me and mine to be off
4. Practice a lot of it also helps
5. Creativity needs to be nurtured
6. Showing up every day and being consistent about the process

All good points, one thing I really loved if they had covered was aspect of meditation. For a good meditation more than a few criterion listed above are to be met and in my experience more and more creative ideas flow right after a good meditation. As Shri Shri Ravishankar says for a good meditation, you want nothing, you are nothing and then sit with that attitude and meditation will happen. 

Our Art of Living center here in Austin do offer Meditation courses among others. Needless to say there is the Happiness Program which is also offered on a regular basis which helps one with the awareness of interaction between the different layers of existence.

On other hand people say, meditate on the issue that you want to solve and I believe that is the most useless thing to do.

One world meditation

The title might seem off but no it was an actual event hosted by Art of Living foundation on January 17 2016. The event was a curtain raiser for the bigger event World Culture festival to be held in Delhi, India from March 11-13 2016. As you may already know we in Austin are also planning our own local curtain raiser and our folks decided a face to face meeting to be had right after the meditation.

My mind was completely occupied with the logistics for the event and how best we could make this event a grand success and so on, on top of it somehow we didn’t have the right link and when we tuned in for the meditation it had already started. This I believe was the first time that Facebook was hosting, unlike the previous times when youtube used to host and there were some delays in the audio. All in all when everyone else in the room was feeling wonderful after the meditation I didn’t pack the punch.

It was as though the universe heard my dilemma and on screen Sri Sri started talking again (we didn’t realize then but were re telecasting the meditation event) and out of curiosity the volume was increased and lo behold there was one more meditation to be done and this time with no breaks in the telecast and don’t know however many minutes later I opened the eyes and it was a peaceful and beautiful moment.

In case you missed the meditation and the Q and A that followed, don’t worry you can find it here.