Our Story
The poster began as a personal project to consolidate much of the reading, learning, thinking and asking that we’ve done over the last decade as both teachers and students of yoga. With so many aspects to the practice, we found it challenging to remember, let alone explain, how everything fit together without having to dig through books and notepads. What we wanted was a diagram we could hang on the wall that captured, concisely, all the major aspects of yoga and did so in a way that was pleasing to look at.
So, we designed a 24” x 36” (standard size) poster printed on thick, archival quality paper that is made of 100% post-consumer waste, recycled materials and:
- expresses the main philosophical concepts behind yoga,
- differentiates and covers the major paths, traditions and styles,
- explains the relevance of major historical periods and texts,
- describes the particular actions you do and the relevant terminology you hear and
- places everything within a cohesive, easy to follow metaphor centered on a stylized banyan tree (a tropical fig tree sacred in yoga literature).
It’s perfect for:
- Yogis looking to bring more meaning into their practice
- Teachers who want a better grounding in the wide spectrum of yoga
- Teacher-training programs
- Anyone who wants to know how yoga “works”
- Modern decor for a yoga studio, holistic health center or your home!
- You!
In April 2012, we finished a successful funding campaign on Kickstarter to gather community support for printing costs and we were blown away by all the positive feedback and support we received. A year later we launched a small line of Art Cards and Prints that explored elements from the poster in new ways we hadn’t first imagined. Right now we’re seeing where this all goes. If you have any thoughts, we’d sure love to hear from you!
Who are we?
We are Karoline and Frank Neville-Hamilton — we’ve been students of yoga for about 20 years each and Karoline has been a registered teacher at several studios in Chicago, San Francisco and Washington, DC. We also do a lot of “sense making” in our day jobs at havahula.org, where we help (mostly) non-profits leverage technology to explain complex ideas (and why they matter) in a visual way with limited time and space. We get excited about great ideas — especially ideas that enrich and empower the human experience — and we’ve arranged the poster so that you can jump in, get an overall sense how yoga as a system is meant to work and explore from there.
