THE SOUL KITCHEN

Motivation

The Journey

We believe not only in individual life, but also collective community experience. We like it so much to feel like a community, while everyone having their own life at the same time. Being a community while everyone on their own is a pattern we see both in nature of Yoga practice and Amsterdam’s life culture. For the former, yoga definitely serves to an individual satisfaction and well-being. Despite this fact, most of the time, we want to do yoga in a community setting. For the latter, in modern daily lifestyle of Amsterdam, everyone has her own life, own buble and own circle. Still, we often come together to feel the community experience. For example, going to a cafe to work, while working from home, or simply coming together for Sinterklaas events.

However recent developments in the yoga market is slowly making yoga a highly business-oriented individual service, unfortunately. People go to a yoga class just before the class starts and leave immediately after. Most of the time, there is no interaction, mingling, or any kind of sharing other than the passive one between the participant and the instructor. This makes yoga a plain individual well-being service, harming social aspect of yoga lifestyle and Amsterdam’s community experience. However we believe that Amsterdam’s ‘’yoga people’’* have a lot in common to share in various aspects of life, on a personal and also communal level. To that end, we want to start a yoga community center (named The Soul Kitchen), which will provide yoga people the space and time to become a community, making Amsterdam more fit and healthy and expanding further. It is a place to nourish our body and soul. This will go well with the yoga way of life and Amsterdam’s culture, providing both individual and communal satisfaction and well-being.