Love, Yoga-Style: Saskia Layden

I can't think of a better way to celebrate fall and the spark that teachers bring through love than to feature my beautiful yogi friend, Saskia Layden.

I remember the first time I met Saskia Layden, at an afterschool program for Hispanic immigrant children in Bushwick called Still Waters in a Storm. I had volunteered to write about the storefront program, and Saskia was the yoga teacher. I was immediately smitten. With her confident gait and her huge smile, she made quite an impression.

Weeks later Saskia came to PS81 at lunch to teach an InspireCorps yoga workshop. She was unabashed about working with a group of young kids she’d never met, a group of spirited third-grade boys whose defenses were usually high. I watched as she formed them into a circle and spoke to them softly. Their eyes were wide and interested. She asked them to write in journals, and she walked around slowly, mindfully, and applied lavender to their temples. A few minutes later they were all lying in repose, and I don’t think I’d ever seen anything quite so beautiful.

“I have themes,” she told me recently, “like ‘Belonging,’ and ‘Anger,’ or ‘Listening is an Act of Love.’ Sometimes we talk about ‘Stress,’ or the ‘Seasons.’ They have to journal about a question, like, ‘what makes you angry?’ ‘how do you express your anger?’ ‘what do you do when you feel stressed?’ or ‘where do you feel like you belong?’ I ask questions at the beginning or the end, they can share or not. They can write letters to someone they’re angry at. I have them lay on the floor with their yoga mat and blanket and chill and be comfortable.”

She is only 29, but Saskia seems to understand and impart a deep wisdom to kids and adults alike about a highly ethereal yogic concept called ‘love.’

She ran a workshop at my benefit in 2015 where she showed donors firsthand the kinds of work she did with the kids in the many under-privileged schools where she taught. “First there was ‘sensory counting,’ where they had to think of three things they could see, three things they could hear, and three things they could feel. Then they had to say ‘I love you’ to themselves, and then they had to turn to their neighbor and say ‘I love you’ to them.’” She laughs, remembering. “Adults get really uncomfortable with that.”

There is a powerful strength to Saskia’s teaching. Her beauty captures, certainly, but it is her resolve that really convinces. There is an assuredness in her guidance that makes it clear how, with focus and intention, we can come to peace in our bodies and in our minds.

Her confidence comes in part from her world travels. She left home in Lake George senior in high school to do an exchange program abroad in Brazil. “I became fluent in another language, and learned that life could look different than I was used to.”

Her comfort with foreign places and forging a new identity was a harbinger of things to come. In the years to follow, she went to Syracuse to major in Spanish Language and Literature and speech pathology, taking a semester abroad to learn Spanish in Spain. She moved to Boulder, Colorado, then went back to Brazil, then lived in New York City, moved upstate to work at her grandparents’ hotel, moved to New Zealand with her sister, then became a nanny-a Portuguese-speaking nanny in Amsterdam and an English-speaking nanny in Siena, Italy. It was fitting, then, that she went back to school, at NYU, for her Masters in International Education. Along with her degree, she also got a yoga certification at Loom Yoga Studio in Bushwick, Brooklyn.

“I wanted to be a teacher because I loved being a student of yoga. I felt stronger, more comfortable with myself, more peaceful and secure in who I was as a person. I loved the idea of standing in front of everybody and using my knowledge to help them, and to keep learning,” Saskia said. “Yoga gave me a tool, something very concrete that I could teach.

Yoga has been the link in her endeavors since then. Her work with kids in New York City started first at Still Waters, where I met her, and then she went on to create The Human Plant Project, an organization to "nurture humans through mindful movement, writing, and dialogue," which she brought to many underprivileged elementary and middle schools around the city. She taught adults too, during lunch at her job with the exchange program at Queens College, and used yoga to help cure groups of students she led to Japan of their jetlag. She went to Peru to teach yoga with the Advice Project, an international education program.

Two years ago, Saskia went looking for yet another new identity. She sold everything, quit her various jobs, got rid of her apartment and walked the El Camino de Santiago with her father.

“It was his idea, he said, ‘Want to walk 900 kilometers across Spain with me?’ and I said, ‘Sure, why not?”

The 35-day trek was yet another life changer. “I loved the simplicity: just walking, eating, sleeping,” she said. It allowed you to get down to the basics of life.”

She traveled from there to another trip in Japan, then to teach kids in Brazil, then Denmark and then Turkey. Phew. “I started teaching yoga at the beach at a little bungalow,” she said. The hustle of New York City seemed highly unappealing, not just because she fell in love with a man in Turkey but because there, the little Southern Mediterranean town of Fethiye, “I remembered that I wanted to teach yoga not because I had to pay rent but because I enjoyed it,” she said. “Turkey hooked me in.”

Now, Saskia is busy learning Turkish--her fourth language—and teaching yoga. There is an independence and sense of entrepreneurialism in the country that inspires her to try new things, she said,like teaching yoga on a cruise. Her partner, Resit Kaya (Reggie) owns the Aliturka Yachting and Travel company, a travel agency that operates cruises on traditional Turkish Gulet boats through the Mediterranean coast and Greek Islands. Next summer, Saskia will lead cruises where yoga on the deck is interlaced with eating fresh Turkish food, paragliding, swimming and scuba diving around the Turquoise Coast. Go! Send an email to saskia@alaturkaturkey.com or check out the cruise info here.

I hope to join her on a cruise. Being in Saskia's company, watching her put her whole self into the betterment of others, watching her show love through yoga, is a joy.

Thanks for the inspiration Saskia!!!

Shalom. Inshallah. Peace be with You.