Taryn Toomey | Photo by Lianna Tarantin
Our new healthy obsession? The S-Mag by the Sakara Life, a “place of nourishment, discovery, sound investigative science, and discussion with a little bit of XXX thrown in here and there.” We love this interview with founder of “the class” Taryn Toomey. Dive in and see the original version by Gaby Lester-Coll on mag.sakaralife.com.
Whether you actively acknowledge it or not, you are on a spiritual journey. You are. You are by waking up everyday and seeking interactions, experiences, and feelings that have answers to the questions you can’t yet articulate. You are by making the decision to nourish your body with whole, energetically-rich foods, coming to the S-Life Mag, and trying to figure out how to digest and assimilate it all.
The Sakara community is built of a sexy entourage of seekers. We’re looking to feel good in our bodies, we’re looking to connect deeper internally and higher externally, we’re looking for more. And a lot of times, as much as this requires an internal exploration of quiet, notice, reflect, it also requires a whole lot of release, which is something we don’t easily have the opportunity to do. We can find a meditative yoga class on every other corner of the city, but how easy is it to find a safe, open space to scream, shake, and throw your body in all sorts of directions?
There is no one who knows this delicate dance between seeking, noticing, and releasing better than Taryn Toomey, creator of The Class, mother, lightmaker, dear, dear friend, and seeker herself.
On Seeking
“I’ve always been a little bit of seeker in ways of ‘what is this thing, what is this thing’ and I think we’ve all experienced that, ‘why do i feel this way. I don’t know what its name is and I don’t know where it came from, but I’m exhausted by it and it’s not working for me. I need to figure out a way to do whatever.’ “
She gets it, and although she can’t put her finger on it yet, she can put it into words and into practice. Her hungry pursuit to find these questions, let alone answers, led her to Peru where she studied with several shamans, did sacred ceremonial work, and learned different plant medicines. This deep, raw, nowhere-to-hide experience was the first time she ever felt the real purging of emotional baggage – emotional baggage she didn’t even know she had – and the closest she had ever felt to coming face-to-face with her answers.
When she came back to NYC, she started teaching Yoga, playing with her voice as a form of movement for the first time. But the questions were still bubbling under the surface, nudging her gently, reminding her they were there. There was still a need to purge. There was more.
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Taryn Toomey | Photo by Lianna Tarantin
“After teaching [Yoga] for a while, I realized that all this slow drawing in and drawing in… I wanna fucking SCREAM! I want to draw it in and draw it in, but then I want to move it out, because what I was doing is I was drawing in and I was softening and I was noticing, but I was just reliving. I want to notice, feel it, and then I want to eject it.”
So slowly, over time, The Class began to take form, taking aspects of Yoga, meditation, and ancient practices, and marrying them with this animalistic, somewhat visceral, and definitely therapeutic purge the body needs.