By Huck Fairman
Princeton resident, founder and lead instructor at YogaStream on Spring Street, Lara Heimann has long sought to combine her interests in anatomy, creative movement, positive thinking, harmony, and the world. And she has succeeded, by creating yoga with a difference — indeed a yoga revolution.
Her approach is to see yoga as a discipline requiring that we move and live fully and responsibly both in the class, paying attention to our alignment and strength, but also beyond the class, paying attention to those close to us, and to our environment.
By taking mindful movement into ourselves, we become more aware, and from that strength become more responsive to others and the world around us.
YogaStream instructors investigate each new member’s physical and attitudinal needs and adjust that member’s regimen to those needs. In addition students are introduced to a holistic view of health, body, and mind, which extends to one’s natural surroundings, to our animal neighbors, and to the state of the world. At the end of each class, instructors invite students to take the benefits of the lesson into their lives and the world in order to be stronger and kinder to all around them.
To practice itself what it preaches, YogaStream has signed up for the town’s composting program, has installed a water filtration system so that staff and students do not have to buy and bring plastic water bottles, and once a month, the studio holds a pot-luck community dinner where people are encouraged to bring and share favorite dishes (but bring their own plates, cups, and utensils,) and the money collected is donated to animal and environmental organizations.
The germs of these ideas were introduced to Lara by her parents in their North Carolina home. Her mother was an early environmentalist and recycler of cans, bottles, and paper. Her father was an orthopedist who introduced her to the structures, systems, and functions of the human body.
Lara graduated from Duke University with a degree in biological anthropology and anatomy and then earned a masters’ in physical therapy. In high school she had pursued an interest in dance; in college this shifted to joining the track team where she competed in long distance races. All along her mother encouraged her to follow whatever direction she felt was most compelling, and she has.
Following a boyfriend, she moved to Princeton and she was soon hired by Lawrenceville’s St. Lawrence’s Rehabilitation Center. There she began to apply and expand her knowledge of the human body. She found that she was particularly interested in how the brain works and in helping stroke victims who, in many cases, needed essentially to be re-educated. And she found that in cases where intervention was timely, this re-education was possible by using parts of the brain to now govern functions they had not before.
In Princeton she continued her interest in running, joining in local races. At one in New York City, a free yoga class was offered; she took it and has never looked back, beginning to teach, and earning her 200-hour YA certification, followed by the 500-hour RYT certification. She first taught at Momentum Fitness, before she opened YogaStream.
Not long afterward, she married and 2002 saw the arrival of her first child — she has a son and daughter — and with her life growing more multi-faceted, she found that her approach to yoga was even more important and beneficial.
As interest in YogaStream grew, (she now has 14 instructors/therapists and has trained another 80) so did her knowledge of how the human body works, and she applied this new understanding to her classes. For instance, she learned that weight-bearing activity positively effects neurological and muscle development. Similarly, she learned how stress enhances bone growth and psychological development. In short, in order for one to reach her or his potential, our bodies and neurological systems require something to struggle or work against.
All of these interests came together when she started YogaStream. As she adapted classical Vinyasa yoga, with its prescribed poses, to her more personalized approach that acknowledges how we are individually different and have developed in our own ways, a number of her innovations came from her experiences with physical therapy and her deepening knowledge of our bodies.
Her holistic approach also took her to an investigation of nutrition, which informs us of what we need, in healthful quantities, and don’t need.
As most of us now know, our American diets can lead to a variety to health problems, but beyond our personal health, our diets, and particularly our taste for meat, have had a number of adverse impacts on our environment, namely: the forest-clearing necessary for animal feeds and grazing, the polluting and exhausting of water supplies, the over-usage of fertilizers and chemicals, the usage of fossil fuels to transport animals and meat products, and the production of methane from the increasing populations of those animals.
In fact it can be argued, as it has been by the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization, and by the movie “COWSPIRACY” (available on DVD) that taken together, all the greenhouse gas emissions associated with animal agriculture are the greatest source of those emissions that man has created, exceeding fossil fuels alone, even as animal agriculture uses them.
Lara’s personal solution to our meat-heavy diet has been to turn to a vegan diet, giving up not only meat but dairy products. And she is a walking advertisement for the health and energy that such a diet provides.
For those open to this change, she is happy to explain its benefits, personal and environmental. In addition, she has been passionately promoting “COWSPIRACY” (including arranging screenings) with its message that many of our habits of consumption, production, and life styles need to be re-evaluated and changed.
Aware of the benefits that her approach to yoga can provide, in terms of health and awareness, individual and societal, she is now looking for ways to spread the ideas of YogaStream through our region and even globally — not to make money, through franchising, but to spread its approach to health, awareness, and engagement. If this seems a lot to devote meaningful attention to, Lara is a living example that it can be done gracefully and with great kindness, energy and awareness.
And finally she still likes to travel, having just returned from a three-week yoga seminar in Costa Rica for 24 students, and before that, a hike across England from the Irish Sea to the North Sea with her family.
When we feel good and strong in our bodies, she reminds her students, and pay attention to the details on the mat, we carry that practice into our life so that we will make better choices in the way that we communicate, how we treat others and extrapolating from that, how we treat the greater environment at large.
A Princeton author, Huck Fairman focuses SOLUTIONS on environmental issues.
