Welcome to Wild Lotus Yoga. Serving yoga to New Orleans since 2002 and sharing the most extensive offering of yoga classes and workshops at one location in the Gulf South. Our intention is to turn ourselves and our community on to living an inspired, creative, and passionate life through yoga and related healing arts. We offer a wide variety of over 50 classes a week for all levels of experience. Classes are guided by a friendly staff of skilled teachers sharing inspiration through diverse styles of yoga. Offerings include gentle, medium, and vigorous yoga, 5 and 12 week courses, meditation, kids yoga, pre and postnatal yoga, private lessons, workshops & lectures with renowned visiting teachers, teacher training, concerts, films, community service, a selection of discounted and donation-based community classes, and more!

Mission

To turn ourselves and our community on to living an inspired, creative, and passionate life through yoga and related healing arts.

Yoga and New Orleans

We love New Orleans and the way that the spirit of yoga blends so sweetly with the soul of our beloved city. We love the festive nature and romance of New Orleans and experience yoga as one of many ways to celebrate life here.

History

Wild Lotus Yoga was born by serendipity in July 2002 when New Orleans native Sean Johnson joined three friends Beverly Morris, Kellie Panus, and Tricia Lea to teach together. The original location was in a historic former corner grocery in Mid-City. The classroom was a cozy space and Sean moved into the rear grocer's apartment. They offered seven classes a week. Though the location was tucked away in a residential neighborhood, word spread, and soon classes were packed.

A year later the studio renovated and moved to its current location on Perrier Street which in a past life was a neighborhood soul food stand. Wild Lotus was the first yoga studio in New Orleans to reopen after Katrina. Today the studio offers over fifty diverse classes a week and has a team of over twenty skilled teachers and four office staff. We still like to think of ourselves as a kind of grocery and neighborhood soul food stand, offering food for the spirit through yoga.

Approach To Yoga

Our goal is to make yoga as accessible as possible so we offer a wide variety of ongoing classes for beginners and beyond, and for the whole family.

We love the physicality of yoga and also celebrate the universal spirituality of yoga practice in an open, non-dogmatic, life-affirming way. Wild Lotus Yoga classes emphasize setting an intention for yoga practice: linking the practice to what is meaningful in your life. In each class, teachers share in their own creative way a monthly theme that connects the practice to our life away from the mat. The tools shared in class include some combination of asanas (yoga postures), meditation, music, mantras, breathing practices (pranayama), readings, poems, stories, creative movement, guided visualizations, self-inquiry practices, and more. We seek to offer creative instruction throughout the class that puts generous attention on physical, mental, emotional, spiritual, and breath awareness. There is also strong emphasis placed on the deeply rejuvenating period of rest at the end of each class called savasana.

Teachers

We are a family of teachers bonded by our love for yoga and for sharing the inspiration of the practice. We celebrate our kinship in the Wild Lotus community and are also grateful for the diversity of personalities and yoga training on our team. Some of the many forms of yoga that individual Wild Lotus teachers have trained in include: Anusara, Vinyasa, Iyengar, Kundalini, Phoenix Rising, Astanga, Kali Ray Tri-Yoga, Kripalu, White Lotus, Restorative, and Bhakti. In 2009 we graduated our first class of teachers in our in-house teacher training program called Soul School, an interdisciplinary yoga and spirituality teacher training program that focuses on bringing soul and imagination to the art of teaching yoga. See teacher bios for more details.

Facility

Over the years, we have performed multiple renovations on our uptown building to enhance the environment for yoga. Our building is surrounded by terra cotta pots with flowers pouring out and wind chimes singing in the breeze. Enter through our lobby/mini-boutique/reception area with access to our two spacious practice rooms- the Sun Room and the Moon Room. Each room has its own restroom you can use to change clothes. The rooms are painted in soothing earth tones and accented simply with tapestries, fairy lights, and draped fabric.

Wild Lotus Community Classes

We are committed to making yoga accessible to our community. In addition to offering a wide variety of classes, we also offer half-price community classes 6 days a week at our uptown studio and a free community class every Wednesday night. We also share by-donation community classes downtown 5 days a week at Holy Angels Chapel, where we will be holding classes till the official opening of our downtown studio inside The New Orleans Healing Center, projected for the Spring of 2011.

Sunday Morning Community Soul Time and Meditation

In addition to our discounted, by donation, and free community yoga classes we also have created a weekly space for spiritual community on Sunday mornings. Sunday Morning Community Soul Time and Meditation offers an intentional space to come and savor spiritual practice and meditation. Each week a different Wild Lotus teacher guides a 30 minute experience followed by a period of 20-30 minutes of quiet meditation. Practices include: visualization, readings, chanting, stories, dance, breathing, artwork, journaling, philosophy, and more. By donation. All donations given to a different charity each month.

Wild Lotus Yoga "Spirit Music" Concert Series

We offer year-round candlelight concerts and kirtans where musicians can share their expression of sacred music in the sanctuary of the studio. The audience relaxes comfortably on cushions, sits in chairs, or dances to the global grooves.

Wild Lotus Yoga Wisdom Series

Periodically we also offer an evening lecture series called "The Wild Lotus Yoga Wisdom Series" where we invite inspiring teachers to speak to the community about yoga practice, philosophy, and other aspects of the practice.