Written by Leslie Smith
“Building a community of active change makers” is Megan Campbell’s goal. A yoga teacher for seven years, the Ottawa woman is a self-described philanthropist and conscious activist who doesn’t sit back and wait for change to come to her. She started Journey of the Yogini, or simply JOY, (which she describes as a “Yoga-lanthropy community and website) to “ignite awareness of women’s issues at home and abroad,” and in a short time, she has done powerfully well.
Through JOY’s yoga workshops, retreats, and events (all of which donate a minimum of 10% to local and national charities and often much more) she has raised $12,800 in five months. Events include the city’s first annual Yogini Yogathon in which more than 60 women participated, raising more than $8,600 for Care Canada; the second annual event will be held May 27, 2012 at the Glebe Community Centre. Other events have raised funds for non-profit organizations such as Plan Canada’s Because I am A Girl initiative, Harmony House, Developing World Connections, and Interval House, a first-stage shelter for abused women and children.
Campbell, empowered by more than five years of leadership and Yoga training with Seane Corn, a high-profile California Vinyasa yoga teacher who visited Ottawa in October, is slowly building what she calls “a community of active change makers”. This straightforward but consensual approach to fundraising, leadership and empowerment is also a touchstone of Corn’s Off The Mat, Into the World program (an offshoot of The Engage Network), which she started in 2007 with movement and Yoga instructor Hala Khouri and vocalist-composer Suzanne Sterling.
Campbell is the Ottawa regional leader of Off the Mat (OTM) which is committed to “use the power of yoga to inspire consciousness, sustainable activism.” Campbell, like Corn, is a caring yet no-nonsense sort of person, who, you have the feeling, would rather shoulder the entire burden of a project rather than let it fail. Not for nothing was she voted Ottawa’s favourite yoga instructor of 2011 by Faces Magazine.
Megan seems to find time to be involved in so many causes as well as teaching and attending workshops that one just has to wonder if she has more hours in her day than the rest of us. Of course, she doesn’t, but her business underlines her commitment to her ideals and to yoga. Typically, she does not preach or dictate that others show a similar commitment, only that they maintain open minds and open hearts. She has created new, innovative ways for people to fundraise and raise awareness for women’s issues globally, such as Be the Change: 30 Day Body, Mind, and Soul Challenge for Because I am a Girl.
“Especially with yogis and yoginis there is this idea that it is all meant to be light and love… and we want to live from these places but if we try to repress the Shadow and pretend it doesn’t exist, it will rear its ugly head in the most unexpected times and places.” Even doing yoga, she says, can trigger thoughts about past events or traumas that may have been repressed, ignored, or avoided. (Remember this next time you are in a yin class, on the fifth minute of Dragon pose. )
“Shadow” is a term often used by Seane Corn and others to describe the dark side of our personalities: the mocking voice that tells us we can’t do something, the behaviour that sabotages our good intentions, the outburst (or e-mail) we later regret, the terrors of the past–everything that is bad about us. The trick is not to subsume this side of ourselves, but to recognize that it will always be with us and to deal with it, by recognizing there are events or situations, or even physical postures that can encourage this side of ourselves to leap to the forefront and take control. Using the tools she acquired through her Yoga in Action leadership training, as well as journaling, she discovered that because of her own experience being raised by a single mother, she wanted to “empower underprivileged women so that they can enjoy the basic rights and dignities that so many of us are privileged to have.”
She realized that coming from a single parent family here in Canada has its own set of challenges, but could not imagine how women in developing countries could do it without the basics, we so often take for granted – education, equal opportunity employment, and, or civil rights. And so became the intention behind JOY, awareness, education, and fundraising initiatives to help others less fortunate than ourselves. “It is impossible to work effectively with people unless you understand yourself. Only then can you understand others. “
“We often come to the mat to reduce stress and increase physicality,” she tells her students, “but we really need to move away from thinking that it is about fixing, being better or perfect. There is no such thing. The shadow lurks all the time. We need the ability to be aware and recognize it when it comes up, and this is what the Yoga practice teaches us: to be aware, understanding, loving, and open in body and mind. And it is not just an individual thing. We have personal, community, and national shadows that are all interconnected.”
With a background in event planning and marketing, setting up yoga events was second nature for Megan. “That has now snowballed into many different initiatives to raise money and awareness. I just held a sold out retreat, and from that JOY donates 10 percent of the proceeds ($300) to Ottawa’s Interval House.
“I really feel like there is a growing collective consciousness here in Ottawa. There is a very strong yoga community. Ottawa may have the most yoga studios per capita of anywhere in North America–as well as yoga teachers!”
But all of this is only part of Campbell’s training. She has completed two separate 200-hour teacher trainings, one in Ottawa and the other in India. She has also completed an 800-hourYoga Philosophy course through correspondence with Georg Feuerstein, and is beginning her 500-hour teacher training under the guidance of Shiva Rea.
See what else Megan is up at www.journeyoftheyogini.com. Read more about Off the Mat at www.offthematintotheworld.org. Recommended reading? The Shadow Effect by Deepak Chopra, Debbie Ford and Marianne Williamson.
