In this week’s newsletter, we report on the ribbon-cutting ceremony for renaming a City College facility after former supervisor Harry Britt and more.
Everyday People features the people who make the greater Ingleside neighborhood a special part of San Francisco.
Wellness group TendWell Collective co-founder Andrea Stern teaches guided meditation classes at the Ingleside Library during the first and third week of the month with a focus on the Savasana style, discovered her love for yoga while working in human resources. Realizing that she needed a break from her workday, Stern would use her lunch break to attend classes at a nearby studio. She made the switch from corporate 9-to-5 to operating her own studio in 2004. During the pandemic, she went online and created the wellness collective.
“I wouldn't tell anyone where I was going and I would go to a yoga studio down the street,” Stern said. “I would just breathe and move and inevitably by the end of class I just felt like a thousand times better.”
When she’s not teaching yoga, Stern works for Mercy Housing and is currently focused on the Hub Community Center in Sunnydale.
For her classes, Stern sets out to create a space that’s suitable for all ages and experience levels. Classes at the Ingleside Library, specifically, also tend to fill up quickly and participants must sign up ahead of time by calling at the first of the month to reserve their spot. She hopes with additional funding that TendWell Collective can offer more programs across all branch locations.
“It is gentle and it is accessible,” Stern said. “The [attendees] don't have to worry about not being able to do it. This is really just an opportunity for people to check in with themselves.”
The Ingleside Light caught up with Stern to discuss her classes.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
How did you start doing yoga at the Ingleside Library?
We did something called Summer Stride with the San Francisco Public Library and so we did yoga at lots of different libraries all over town. This is one of the few yoga classes that really stuck. People were just really responsive and they said [they] want to keep this and we have taught lots of other places but the turnout here has always just been really steady.
What’s it like to teach yoga at this location?
We have a lot of regulars in this class so a lot of the people I know and I have known and they've been practicing with me forever. Ironically, I owned a studio for all those years but I never really taught so this is one of my first classes where I just felt like “OK, this is my class.” I could fully embody being a yoga teacher so it's been so great. I think that the beauty of doing yoga in a space that's like a community space is that people have very little expectation so they come and they're open to receive as opposed to if you're paying $25 or $35 for a class you come and you're just like “listen you better give me the experience of my life for what I just paid for this class.” It's been really really sweet to be in situations where people are just like “What is this?” and “What do I do?” and “I feel so good afterward.” and that kind of stuff so that's been really beautiful.
What is the importance of wellness courses like this one and offering the public these sorts of resources?
I think one of the sad parts about the world that we live in is that everybody doesn't have access to be able to do the things that they need to do to just take care of themselves. I think that one of the nice parts about the yoga practice is that it doesn't really require any equipment. It's accessible for all bodies: big bodies, small bodies, able bodies, disabled bodies. It's really about bringing your awareness inside, using the breath as a tool to keep yourself calm, keep yourself mindful, keep yourself alert to what is in the present moment. It's easy for us to get really caught up in what could happen down there or get stuck in what happened back then but when we really focus on the breath and tune in to what's happening in the body then we have this ability to just to really get through anything. We put the body, for yoga, we put your body in stressful positions and then we ask you to breathe through them.
So often, like when we're out and somebody cuts us off or we feel like we've been slighted by someone, if we can bring our attention first into the body like “OK. Alright. I'm feeling that. It feels like something” and then really look at the emotional body like “OK. How is this landing in my heart? I've got feelings about it too. I can feel it in my body. I've got sensations. I've got feelings about it.” And then the mind is then creating a story about what it means and if we can stop the mind from going straight to the story because the story is that “Oh, that person's a bad person or that person's a jerk or that person did something to hurt me.” And we actually check
in with ourselves first. I think it's a better way to move through the world because it allows you to not internalize things that shouldn't be internalized, and not take things so personally. Hopefully, if we get to a place where we can trust ourselves a little bit better, we can also learn to trust our neighbors and trust the people that we see on the streets who are ultimately just trying to survive.
Anne Marie Kristoff (she/her) is a recent graduate from San Francisco State University's journalism program. She enjoys writing about the arts, entertainment and nature.
