Community articles and writings about Peaceful Presence Studio
The yoga studio overlooks a kosher supermarket parking lot. Practitioners face a dilemma: finding parking challenges the serenity built during class. After completing poses and achieving relaxation, external disruptions — car sirens, firehouse blasts, honking — shatter the peaceful state before one even reaches the store for Shabbat shopping.
The author expresses gratitude for local amenities while acknowledging the tension: should one do errands first then yoga to relieve stress, or practice yoga first to prepare for shopping chaos? The conclusion offered: "take a deep breath in, then let it out slowly and repeat, until your smile returns and it won't matter."
Peaceful Presence Yoga Studio provides calm in Cedarhurst's busy environment. The facility features:
Andrew Kahn opened the studio five years prior after practicing yoga for two decades and studying six years at the Kripalu Center for Yoga and Health in Lenox, Massachusetts. His mother served as his first yoga teacher when he was "very tense, distracted, and feeling out of sorts."
The dove represents the studio's central symbol. Kahn, a kohein and yoga teacher, seeks to follow Aharon HaKohein, who "loved people and sought peace," describing him as "truly a 'peaceful presence' who drew people to Torah."
Living in the Five Towns enhanced Kahn's Jewish observance and studio operations. The studio incorporates community feedback including closing for Shabbos, separate men's and women's classes, and no hands-on assisting in women's classes.
Kahn emphasizes that true yoga contains "no one religion" but remains "open to and beneficial to all people."
"Since by keeping the body in health and vigor one walks in the ways of G-d — it becomes impossible during sickness to have any understanding or knowledge of the Creator — it is a man's duty to avoid whatever is injurious to the body and cultivate habits conducive to health and vigor."
— Rambam's Teaching (Posted in Studio)
Students include rabbis, physicians, teachers, writers, homemakers, and artists. The studio serves Holocaust survivors, brain trauma victims, and special-needs children.
Practitioners should move into poses "with awareness and gentleness" maintaining control throughout. We never want to have an injury come out of the practice of yoga.
From a letter to the New York Times editor by Maureen Carroll, January 8, 2012:
Yoga is a wonderful way to develop one's mind, body and spirit. Just like any other form of physical activity, if done incorrectly or without careful attention to underlying physical weakness or problems, injury can occur. One of the most important and challenging aspects for me, as a teacher, is to get my students to use a block, strap or modification. Many of them don't want to take my advice, they want to do the more challenging version of a posture. The man in India who "threw himself into a spinal twist" was not doing yoga consciously and with awareness. Of course he got injured. The student in downward-facing dog who tore his Achilles tendon was not paying attention to how it felt and how much he was straining before it popped. Ego instead of awareness.