OC Yoginis
Program Director: Marie Friedlander
The OC Yoginis is a team of high school girls from South Orange County. The Yoginis are from a diverse range of ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds. The team is set up as a club format and meets weekly to practice asana (postures) and discuss lifestyle and fitness issues. Every season, the team identifies a community need and works together to implement a service program. With yoga practice as the foundation, the OC Yoginis helps teens cultivate important life skills such as stress management, healthy body image, hygiene, nutrition, self discipline, leadership and cooperation. Yoga is a highly effective way to challenge teens both psychologically and physically, while providing a safe environment for learning to explore and work through their difficulties. Through this process, teens develop the necessary tools to be calm and creative when dealing with the challenges of daily life.
Thank you to the City of Mission Viejo for the use of the beautiful Montanoso Recreation Center aerobics/yoga room in 2007.
Marie's Bio
Marie's purpose in life is to help people take yoga off the mat and into their lives. Her goal is to learn how to live within yoga's essence and transformative power. Marie is a certified Baptiste Power Vinyasa Yoga teacher. She has been a student of Baron Baptiste since 1999, is registered with Yoga Alliance, and has been teaching yoga since 2001. Marie graduated from the University of Minnesota with a BS in Psychology. She worked as a counselor at a Crisis Center with Suicide Prevention and at a Shelter for Runaway Teens as they first came off the streets. Marie says: "Teens are my greatest inspiration. They are our reflection and our future. It is critical that we teach them the values to be all they can be in life and that they matter and are important. They carry our light and love for living." Marie's goal in life has always been to give back to others and share all that she has learned. "My greatest teachers in life are my students. It is a continuous circle, as they learn they grow, and take me to a new edge in my teaching."
For Marie, "Yoga is a gift in my life. I can not imagine my life without it. It is who I am and how I live". Marie is married to her best friend, and they share an amazing journey together. They have an awesome son who carries a light from which they grow daily. She enjoys her life with many animal friends and loves her world by the ocean. Living each day as her new beginning.
