This month’s featured teachers are Kiera Penpeci and Jaya Aiyer.
Join Jaya and Kiera for a heart-centered journey into the new year, and pre-inauguration times, through the gentle practice of Yin and empowerment practice influenced by Kalaripayattu. In this nurturing workshop, we will explore the yogic principle of Ahimsa—non-violence and compassion—as a foundation for cultivating self-love and self-care. Through guided reflection with optional sharing, and intention setting, you'll learn how to embody Ahimsa in your relationship with yourself, creating a ripple effect of love and kindness in the world around you. Let this practice help you honor your true emotions, release, renew, and realign with your highest intentions as you step into the year ahead. All levels welcome.
Price: $35, sliding scale available by reaching out to hello@bostonyogaunion.com
When: Monthly, every second Saturday at 6p
About your Teachers:
Jaya Aiyer
My journey with yoga started before I fully knew what "yoga" meant. As a young child growing up in an Indian American household, my grandfather would wake up early in the morning to do his exercises. His routine included what I now know were Sun Salutations, headstands, and savasana. At the time, I thought my grandfather was just being silly! I would mimic his headstands, piling pillows in the corner and attempt to copy him. Or when he was in savasana, assuming he had simply fallen asleep, I would poke and prod him to wake up. My grandfather instilled in me the importance of two core Hindu philosophies: dharma, one's path, and karuna, compassion for all. Only years later, I realized he was my first yoga guru.
I've practiced yoga on and off since 2010. I started my yoga training in Cambridge at the Breathing Room, where I had the opportunity to also learn Kalaripayattu, a martial arts form from Southern India. After college, I returned home to Boston and found a community in Jamaica Plain at Jamaica Plain Centre Yoga. As of May 2024, I completed my 200 RYT with JPCY where I had the opportunity to delve into anatomy, alignment, sequencing, and philosophy.
Outside the studio, I have trained in Bharatanatyam, a style originating from Tamil Nadu in Southern India, for over 20 years and continue to perform around the Boston area. I am also a community organizer where my work focuses on progressive, working class AAPI-solidarity building across the Commonwealth. As an instructor and facilitator, I hope to bring a deeper awareness of body, energy, and the modality of movement. I aspire to create a space with participants which moves beyond the student-teacher dynamic and towards mutual love and acceptance for all.
Kiera Penpeci
I began my practice in studios in Boston in 2013 while in search of community. The practice was a soft landing when navigating corporate life and training for long-distance cycling. Since then my practice has evolved right alongside my professional work, spiritual awakening, and healing. Part of yoga, for me, is a way to embody healing in its various forms, so as an educator I naturally gravitated to facilitating this experience for others. To support my instruction, I completed a 200-hr YTT at JP Centre Yoga and more recently completed a certification at Threes Physiyoga.
My instruction is based on the Physiyoga approach, which combines physical therapy principles and yoga. In my classes, I use knowledge of joint mechanics and muscle physiology to teach movements for longevity and injury recovery. Students can expect sessions that prioritize sensory awareness, strength and stability before deep stretching and using props as neuromuscular feedback. In a typical class I will break a pose or movement down by each joint to make it as simple as possible, then gradually build back up adding in more resistance, compound movements, and complexity. My aim is to support students in recognizing that each joint/muscle area can perform a movement with strength and control by starting small, then progressing to more challenging poses where the whole body shares the work.
When I’m not teaching yoga at studios in Boston and privately, I’m working as an Organizational Psychologist, facilitating organizational healing and equal opportunity, and a professor in the Organizational and Leadership Psychology department at William James College where I’m focused on multicultural and inclusive leadership and organizational assessment.
The BIPOC Yoga Collective is an accessible, all-levels practice for those who identify as BIPOC. This monthly workshop style class intends to create a safe and familiar space to expose new and seasoned yogis to Boston’s BIPOC instructors, local community of practitioners, and a diversifying studio space. Classes will rotate between different instructors who will take care to ensure students at all levels are able to follow along and create a container that may leave them feeling stronger, empowered, or rested depending on the workshop design.
Purpose:
To create a shared space where Black, Indigenous, and People of Color may be in community with others who share a deep understanding of their marginalization, because of their unspoken shared experience. The intent is to create a sense of safety in one’s authenticity without the gaze of well-meaning and curious onlookers or “saviors”.
We hope to create an automatic increase of baseline trust simply by holding space for this experience, but continuing to build upon it by leveraging ongoing feedback and representation from the varied perspectives, racial groups and levels of privilege within the broader BIPOC identity group.
Our goal is to have attendees engage in the practice of yoga without the reminders of negatively racialized lived experiences within their racial identities, and create solidarity among us.