At first they giggled.
Last fall when the Martha’s Vineyard Regional High School swim coach introduced yoga meditations to the team’s practice routine, the swimmers exchanged quizzical looks and snickered with one another.
“Yoga?” the students asked.
Yoga.
Yoga Teacher Training
Husband and wife, yogi and yogini, Robert and Sherry Sidoti are both helping to expand the yoga experience by training teachers at their new studio, Yoga Haven.
In November, Sherry will begin her third teacher training course conducted on the Island under the auspices of her Fly Yoga program. The course is a 200-hour certification that begins on Nov. 5.
On Oct. 14, Robert began his first teacher training course; a 25 hour, four-day, certificate program in Broga, a brand of yoga tailored for men.
The volume of yoga practitioners on Martha’s Vineyard is almost overwhelming, yoga teacher Mollie Doyle said this week. “We have an amazing yoga community here . . . there are nine or 10 classes practicing on a Tuesday morning, and they are all full,” she said.
“It’s kind of a yoga mecca.”
And next week, the yoga-friendly Island will be the site of even more asanas and oms than normal at the third annual Martha’s Vineyard Yoga Festival.
The riff of the Rolling Stones’ Emotional Rescue had segued into more mystical rhythms by the time the students in Sherry Sidoti’s — and Martha’s Vineyard’s — first yoga teacher training course were wrapping themselves into lotus position on the wooden floor of a Chilmark barn last Friday. Without pretense or pressure, Mrs. Sidoti gently showed several variations on the cross-legged pose, most not requiring the flexibility of an unbaked pretzel.
The Vineyard is a place of healing. It’s a community of healers, with acupuncturists, chiropractors and other alternative medicine practitioners, where yoga practice is a mainstay in many people’s lives. In yoga they say wherever you are is perfect, whether you’re halfway up in downward dog or halfway down in eagle pose, but sometimes half the battle can be getting to that pose among the overwhelming number of yoga options available here.
Tucked into the corner of the Woodland Business Center in Vineyard Haven, between the bakeries and offices in this off-the-beaten-path part of town, is an office door. On a recent Monday, just shy of 9 a.m., workers passed right by it in their beeline pursuit of morning coffee. Not one paused to look in.
Had they done so, an empty hallway is all they would have seen.
