Yoga class for visually-impaired offers community, fun

http://www.kvue.com/story/news/state/2014/12/21/yoga-class-for-visually-impaired-offers-community-fun/20743971/

Inside a small room at the Reading & Radio Resource building in uptown Dallas, Susan Austin holds a yoga class for an unusual clintele. Austin works with the visually-impaired, including Ann Philips, Amy Suniga, and Carol White, who all wanted to take yoga classes for years, but most places weren’t ready to work with them.

DALLAS – Inside a small room at the Reading & Radio Resource building in uptown Dallas, three women are showing each other something other people don’t always see in them.

All three women working on poses in the Reading & Radio Resource building – Ann Philips, Amy Suniga, and Carol White – are visually impaired in some way. They all wanted to take yoga classes for years, but most places weren’t ready to work with them.

“I specifically wanted to do a class with nothing but visually-impaired people in it, so that everyone is in the exact same place,” Austin said. “Everyone is in the exact same boat.”

“It’s a lot easier to tell people to do a pose when you can just show them,” she said. “So the hardest thing was to put words to the very basic movements.”

Austin had to learn use words to illustrate what she can’t demonstrate with her body. And when her own words failed her, she had to learn to let the women help each other.

“Sometimes what I would do is go to one of the students and just put them in a pose, and then say ‘How do you describe this?'” she said.

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