Sarah Yukie Gingrich is a yogi, yoga teacher and founder of Create Karma, an organization with a mission to empower individuals to become embodied leaders. In our conversation about how she structured the curriculum of Create Karma, she explored with me her philosophy of yoga and why she decided to start the program in the first place.
“I wanted this to be a space where people who would not traditionally come to a yoga training would come, get these skills to radically transform their ability to hold space, to down-regulate their own nervous system, to be someone in their leadership who could balance and heal their body. I think a lot of the people that do this incredibly powerful work have sensitivity and are motivated to be of service because of their own history. It can be generational trauma, it can be race, class, gender, whatever it is, there’s something in their own upbringing, in their own story, that has them be moved to be of service in this way. And I think a lot of people who get moved to be of service, energetically they are better at moving almost outside of their bodies to help other people... For there to be sustainability and longevity for us as leaders you have to learn to create … about yourself a container that will support you. If you’re going to create a movement and a revolution you need to be able to sustain a HUGE container for yourself to have that change be enduring. With the amount of people we move with and work with and the amount of energetic change that happens through our organization, I need to be able to be grounded in my leadership...Those are the skills that occur for me to teach. That is what I think there is about yoga at the core essence of it, but that’s also not always what shows up at yoga teacher trainings necessarily. For me I took yoga in some ways out of the title because I wanted to bring all of those leaders in. I wanted to bring the leaders of churches, I wanted to bring the leaders of the Black Lives movement into our organization. I wanted to impact people that were working in community benefit organizations or the non-profit sector. The people that are moved to be of service, tend to be the people that move outside of their own self interest, frequently in a way that’s not sustainable...How do we get people first inside of themselves, leadership internally and then partnership and community. … Why are you doing what you’re doing?...It’s not superficial. The types of things that occur in our training and the things we’re asking people to do are profound. … I hope it comes through that we make it powerful and compelling to be vulnerable in our work.”