FIGHT STRESS and find serenity By: Fiona Stolorz
M oments after getting into pushup position, she eases her left leg up onto the top of her right
tricep, bringing her right leg back into full splits behind her. Her movements are precise and her body is unwavering. “Alright everybody, this is Eka Pada Koundiyanasana I. Give it a try. Be sure to keep your feet flexed and your face loose.” Charina Cabanayan tells the class as she lowers down from the scarily confusing pose. A few brave souls take a shot at it, although most crumble to the ground within seconds. Cabanayan giggles and heaves herself to a standing position: “Don’t worry, I didn’t get that pose down until three months ago. Would you guys rather work on core today?” A giant, communal sigh of relief fills the room. She weaves her way through the twenty or so mats in the room, adjusting and stabilizing each student as she walks them through a much simpler pose. This seems to be a common class with Cabanayan--she asks the students what they would prefer to work on, and crafts the instruction around that. She understands the principles and techniques of yoga to a point where she is able to tweak her lesson plan at any moment to satisfy specific needs. Having a routine personalized to the accessibility
“I needed to do something that I felt would be more balanced.”
of each student is clearly in high demand, as Cabanayan’s Monday and Wednesday classes fill up quicker than any other class at the JCC (Jewish Community Center). She has become the food connoisseur of yoga--the widely renowned chef that can adjust the spices and ingredients of a meal to achieve an exact flavor. Which is exactly what spends her time doing off of the mat. Cooking has become an enjoyable pastime for Cabanayan, especially when making her famous crab linguini. “ I make two versions-- a spicy and a non-spicy. My daughters love it. It’s really simple to make... with lemon juice and chili peppers. When
I make it, they’re all happy,” she tells me. Yet, it seems that this isn’t always the case when living in a home with both pescatarians and omnivores. Cabanayan describes this situation as “making shopping and cooking extra challenging. You have to connect to cooking if you’re going to connect to a certain way of eating.” It is clear that this has become a principle that Cabanyan follows not only in cooking, but in all aspects of her life, yoga included. Yoga was not on the horizon for Cabanayan while growing up as a dancer in Chicago. It wasn’t until she moved to the west coast to attend college in California that she was introduced to the practice. A friend of hers convinced her to take
a Bikram class (where the temperature in the room is turned up to 105 degrees Fahrenheit), and she fell in love. “I was tired of running and tired of doing more weight lifting type of exercises, and I needed to do something else that I felt would be more balanced,” Cabanayan recalls. Since her discovery of yoga, Cabanayan is still grateful to have found such a strong passion. However, it took some time before she was able to get to this state in her life. After spending the majority of her youth seeking a job as an artist, Charina was faced with an important decision following her college graduation: pursue her dream of becoming an artist or find a stable, reliable career. At this point, she knew that it would be more logical to
take a job offer in health care--in a place where she could count on bringing in a monthly paycheck. However, because this was such an unfulfilling job, Charina found herself seeking refuge in her recently discovered love for yoga. Over the next year and a half, Charina’s love for the activity would continue to grow. She would again be forced to decide between the comfort and support of her job and her passion for the yogi lifestyle. She chose the latter. Her fiancé, Dmitry, has said that her decision “required a lot of courage… to abandon a predictable career path, and to wander into the unknown. But with her patience and dedication, she was able to develop her own teaching style and to generate a strong following within a rel-
atively short time so far.” Since her first exposure to yoga in 2004, Cabanayan has earned teaching certification and is now working at six different studios across the Bay Area. She has established a strong following through her blog, www.yogalyfe.com, as well as her social networking sites. Through these sites, she has been able to integrate her yoga practice into the 21st century by sharing some of her more notable experiences--such as the 375 Day Headstand Challenge--with the world. While sitting across from each other on a park picnic table, Charina asked me if I would be
willing to photograph her in a headstand for the daily challenge she created with a friend. As I questioned her about the specifics of this now worldwide challenge, she began to roll out her mat onto the grass field for the pose, “It started out as kind of a fun project. [A friend of mine] started doing headstands. She started posting them up on her facebook page. And I was like ‘That’s so cool, let’s do this challenge together--I wanna join you cause I’ve been practicing on hand stand.’ And t hen she was like ‘That’s a great idea,’ and then she told someone else and that started the whole challenge thing. There’s peo- ple from pretty
much all over--there are members that are in Croatia, Tai Pai…’” Cabanayan tells me with excitement.The pride she takes in her accomplishments radiates across her face as she lifts herself into a stick straight headstand. It is this genuine passion and dynamic teaching style that has helped Cabanayan develop into a well-known yoga instructor. She now dedicates all her energy to the art form, which is evident when you first step foot in one of her lively classes. While sitting in on her Monday night “Yoga for Athletes” class, I caught a glimpse of the time and effort Cabanayan puts into every moment of every class. The common protocol for each practice is to ask the students which area of the body they would like to focus on. She then plugs her ipod into a compact speaker, and sets the atmosphere with a soft, relaxing noise. Reserving fifteen minutes for breathing is an “essential to the practice,” as Cabanayan finds that “it’s a simple way to just kind of pause and just arrive to yourself.” Whenever she senses a strenuous pose, or can feel the class growing uncomfortable, she is quick to remind her students to “keep smiling,” and “find a way to fight past the pain.” These words of encouragement and her ability to create an accessible yoga environment is what Cabanayan is known for.
My eyes dart across the room as I observe her careful steps and instruction, picturing her back at home in her kitchen, cooking her family dinner. She knows which moments need a dash of salt, and which students need a few more minutes to cook in the oven. Her word selection is so carefully chosen, and spoken in such a way as to calm her students while still keeping them motivated to move forward. It is clear that from here, Cabanayan will con-
tinue to gain a strong student following as she works on perfecting her teaching style. She plans to write a book detailing her experience with yoga, and specifically her 375 day head-
stand challenge. One of her closest colleagues, William Cristobal, who works with Cabanayan at the Yoga Belly, “thinks that Charina has a long yoga career ahead of her with workshops, retreats, and maybe even running her own studio under her belt.” It seems that from here the possibilities are endless. As Cabanyan continues to grow as a yoga practitioner, she hopes to finally achieve her “impossible pose”—the King Pigeon. And she will approach this goal just as she
would with any other—by dedicating all of her energy to it. Cabanayan chooses to live her life by this motto, because for her,“anything you want to obtain takes a long time, but anything that’s worth obtaining is bound to take a lot of dedication.”