Gaia Yoga Gardens
Pahoa, Hawaii,
United States
Gaia Yoga
Gardens is a permaculture homestead, holistic culture experiment, and
fledgling intentional community on Hawaii’s Big Island. We’re dedicated
to living in harmony with the Earth, connecting with Spirit, engaging
personal growth and healing, fostering cooperative community, and
developing holistic and sustainable life patterns.
We practice and teach
Permaculture and other sustainable food systems, Nonviolent
(Compassionate) Communication, natural diet (including raw foods / raw
meat and Instinctive Eating / Primal Diet), connection parenting,
cooperative living, and spirituality.
Our lifestyle includes:
1) Living simply, sustainably,
and close to nature - rurally and off-grid in low-impact eco-dwellings;
growing food; operating eco-businesses; and trading for goods and
services.
2) Cultivating a healthy self
through eating an organic & (optionally) raw diet; having an active
work/service life; engaging personal growth work; balancing autonomy and
interdependence; having a life-affirming orientation toward sexuality;
and being clothing-optional.
3) Establishing a land-sharing
community that's intimate, caring, and feels like family. This includes
practicing cooperative decision making, nonviolent communication;
cooperating relative to resources and land development; having community
businesses; sharing childrearing; and having fun together!
4) Integrating spirituality into
our communal life through morning circles, prayer, hatha yoga, rituals,
shamanic journeying, rites of passage, and spiritual study, all
according to individual preferences.
Our dream is for Gaia Yoga Gardens to be a beacon of light and love and a living example of the kind of world we want.
Gaia Yoga, itself, is a vision and
practice that is being pioneered at Gaia Yoga Gardens intentional
community. It is the integration of many other teachings into a
cohesive consciousness and lifestyle that is intended to support a
person in living from their deepest humanity. More than an individual
practice, it includes developing bonded-human-social-structures
(cultures, tribes, clans, and families) that express our true nature as
human beings. GaiaYoga is in many ways the antidote for the
predominant culture designed around unchecked capitalism, fantasy,
car-and machine-based human settlements, dysfunctional family-systems,
emotional illiteracy, fear and oppression of nature, chemical
dependence, absence of integrity, and broken relationships.
GaiaYoga goes much broader and
deeper than most “yogas” which primarily address an individuals’
body-mind -- supporting inner peace and connection to Spirit.
GaiaYoga
is a dynamic and holistic “yoga” that addresses Spirit (realizing,
integrating, and enjoying the Divine Masculine and the Divine Feminine),
the Self (including the physical, emotional, spiritual, and mental
bodies), Community (including the intimate, personal, local, collective,
and universal spheres of community), and Earth (developing strategies
to sustainably live as an integrated “cell” of The Earth, individually
and culturally).
GaiaYoga is a holistic practice
that is modeled after the cultural and spiritual wisdom of many of the
indigenous cultures of the world, who lived sustainably for untold
generations. Sadly, these indigenous cultures have mostly “lost their
battles” (literally) with the current “beast” that is running the world.
Most of us were raised by this beast and intentionally or not we
continue the pattern. To change direction and make life work naturally
and be sustainable, we require a new vision, teaching, and daily
practice that can heal and transform our lives and our cultures.
GaiaYoga provides a way to emerge out of the world that we see now, and
create something that has the beautiful elements of indigenous cultures,
and knows how to wield the new power that’s been found through
technological and social evolution, without losing touch with our true
humanity. It’s a “take the best and leave the rest” approach.
What does it take for us have the
kind of world we want, and be the kind of people we want to be? How
can we grow through the huge pile of compost left by previous
generations and find our way to the sunlight, creating both a healthy
and full expression of our individuality, and a “container,” a culture, a
community for us to live in? For this we need a holistic cultural
template. Truly, humans are no different than dolphins, or wolves, or
bees, or ants, or giraffes, or apes, or even banana or bamboo: we are
naturally “designed” to live in-and-as a bonded social organism. Our
full human expression is to live as a unified multi-generational people.
Call it a tribe, or a community, or a clan, or a kin, or whatever.
This is a huge aspect of the yoga
we all need to do to create a beautiful and abundant and peaceful and
Spirit-filled world. We need to take the energy of yoga – of
unification – and bring it to culture. This is a big “stretch” for
someone who grew up in a city, or the suburbs, or a fragmented and
dysfunctional family. There’s lots of healing, lots of new skills, and
lots of buttons to be pressed and worked through. Read more...
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