Underneath a canopy of leaves, accompanied by a chorus of insects, Beth Kaplan’s gentle voice casts a spell over Twin Oak Meadow, as she teaches an outdoor yoga class one Sunday morning in Tregaron Conservancy in Northwest D.C.
“You can bend your knees, it might feel better on the lower back … Just look at the color of the leaves. Feel the wind on your skin,” Kaplan said, as she slowly guided her class through a few stretches.
Her classes can vary from more than 10 people to only three dedicated yogis on a particularly warm morning in the woodland gardens near the Woodley Park neighborhood. What never changes is how Kaplan first starts her class — by having people introduce themselves and say why they are here today or what they want to work on.
This thoughtful, short discussion sets up the overall message of Kaplan’s classes: yoga looks different for each person, and anyone can use the practice to improve health.
There are older women with shoulder pain, men who want to stretch between morning runs, new moms who have never tried yoga before and dedicated yogis who will outline exactly what they are looking for.
“The studios where I was teaching, I felt like there was a lot of talk about yoga is for everyone and for every body … and everyone is welcome,” Kaplan told WTOP. “But when it came down to it, it didn’t really feel like that.”
She is training to become a yoga therapist after the pandemic changed her perspective on the kind of yoga she wants to teach.
“I just started to think more and more about how much yoga had benefited me in terms of my life,” Kaplan said. “In terms of my health, and I started to think about how yoga could really help a lot of people who were really needing the community meeting, who were feeling isolated.”
So she took more trainings and started teaching classes online, including classes specifically for older adults through Senior Villages in D.C. Kaplan found that teaching this more accessible yoga — not “the really kind of athletic kind of yoga that you picture, or that you see when you look at Instagram” — was making a positive impact on her students’ health.
“I also started to become really interested in the phenomenon of pain, and why pain is so hard to deal with. And why so many of the kind of traditional, go-to … health care things don’t work for lots of people. And so the idea of yoga as being able to support health care just became really fascinating to me,” she said.
Kaplan started taking yoga classes in her 40s to help relieve her back pain. Her own personal emotional and physical pain also inspired her to quit her job as an academic librarian in 2018 to teach yoga.
“I was at sort of a low point. My parents had both died after long, difficult illnesses. And I had fallen, I broke my wrist, my left wrist and my right elbow,” Kaplan said. “So I was kind of incapacitated by grief and pain, and I mean, I literally could not do anything. And it just made me just stop and be quiet.”
After realizing that “life is short,” she took a teacher training course at a local studio and began teaching classes around D.C.
Before the pandemic, Kaplan taught at a few yoga studios and held lunchtime sessions at locations such as the National Gallery of Art. She currently hosts online Zoom classes and does in-person yoga in Tregaron Conservancy from May through October.
Susan Lynner, Kaplan’s longtime student and the chair of the Tregaron Conservancy’s board of directors, said she “started taking yoga very skeptically” to help with her longtime back pain.
“I thought, ‘This is never going to work for me,'” Lynner said. “But what I discovered was you can’t just go to yoga just for one session; you have to believe that it’s worth it to just keep showing up because the benefit is over the long term.”
Lynner emphasized that “there’s nothing magic about the poses,” but Kaplan has taught her that it’s about how you approach each movement and listen to your body.
Kaplan agreed that it’s less about the exercise or poses, and more about “growing your ability to be aware, and to be in the present moment, and to release expectations” during the practice.
“And to kind of stop the chatter, which is a problem for so many of us,” said Kaplan. “And then once you get better at that, you can make better choices, and you can kind of help the nervous system to regulate in such a way that you’re better able to handle whatever comes down the pike. And that’s really the true benefit of yoga.”
Kaplan first became involved in Tregaron and met Lynner as a volunteer gardener when the wooded, preserved grounds became “a godsend” for her during the pandemic.
“And then the executive director asked if I would be interested in teaching a yoga class here. And that was 2021. So I was thrilled,” Kaplan said. “And that was the first in-person class I had done since the pandemic.”
For three years now, Kaplan has been teaching the yoga class on Sunday mornings and trying to spread the word about the affordable, inclusive classes. She used to hold classes every weekend but now she’s taking a week or two off each month, depending on her schedule and whether there are other events scheduled at Tregaron. Her next class is on July 23, and she recently uploaded her two dates in August.
When WTOP asked Kaplan what she’d say to people new to yoga and anxious about getting started, she said that after taking that first class “you will feel really good.”
She acknowledged that it “takes some guts” to sign up for a yoga class where “you don’t know the space, you don’t know the people,” and you are trying a new form of movement. But she said the commitment to your health is well worth the time and energy.
“The minute you sign up, you will feel like, ‘I just committed to trying something new, doing something for myself, for my health,'” Kaplan said.
As for practicing outside at Tregaron, it can be “a little bit messy, a little bit dirty, little sweaty,” but you’ll be joining “a very welcoming group” and taking the first step in improving your overall health, she added.
