Rooted: A Small Beginning

by Jeff Fazio

I recently had the opportunity to teach Rooted at Whole Body Yoga Studio.

Rooted is a four-week beginner yoga series for men, and I’m very grateful to the studio for giving it a home and supporting the idea from the beginning.

It was a small group. Just three students: Neil, Keith, and Andrew. There was something really intimate about that size. By the second or third class, it felt less like teaching a class and more like building a shared practice together.

Each week centered around a different theme: awareness, balance, stability, and integration.

This series also brought a new edge for me personally. One of the students, Neil, is deaf, which invited me to slow down and teach more consciously. Cueing became more visual. Presence mattered more. Eye contact mattered more. At times I was figuring things out in real time and learning alongside the group.

Before each class, we would gather props together, settle into the room, and begin exploring practices that many of them had never encountered before. Over the course of the series, we learned Dirgha breath along with three pranayama techniques, worked through almost the entire posture training sequence, explored awareness practices like the witness, and even wove a five-minute meditation into our final class.

And they showed up fully for it.

One of the things that stayed with me most was hearing the feedback afterward. Each student came looking for stretching and flexibility and left talking about breath, awareness, and parts of themselves they had not paid much attention to in a long time.

That felt important.

In the Pranakriya tradition, yoga is not really about becoming someone else. It is about slowing down enough to notice what is already here. Breathing enough to listen a little more carefully.

I truly hope the series offered these men a new and intriguing way into yoga. Not as performance or achievement, but as practice. As curiosity. As a different relationship with themselves and the world around them.

I know it gave some of that back to me too.