Thanks to director Jonny Kest, this
year’s conference will feature some
of yoga’s most influential teachers.
Thanks to director Jonny Kest, this
year’s conference will feature some
of yoga’s most influential teachers.
My friend Mark, a former college basketball player turned salesperson, runs at least seven miles a day before work.
Lately, he has been using his sales skills to convince me to ditch my morning yoga practice and join him. No way! I told him. For me, yoga is a way of life. However, I agreed to run with him in the morning and shift my practice to the evening if he takes classes with me for a week.
He laughed at my suggestion. He does not see how doing asanas, or yoga postures, can strengthen his cardiovascular system, nor chisel his abs for a well-defined six-pack. He also does not understand how stretching your body this way and that can give you peace of mind.
I explained that there are several styles, each with its own emphasis. Some, like Hot or Ashtanga yoga, give you as rigorous a workout as you would get at a gym. Then there’s Kundalini yoga, which focuses on breath work and dynamic body movement, resulting in a body that’s limber and a mind that’s calmer.
After arguing about the benefits of yoga versus other types of exercise, in about the time it takes me to do 10 sun salutations, I decided to save my ujjayi breath and invite him to the 7th Annual Midwest Yoga Conference running from May 30 to June 4 at the Indian Lakes Resort and Spa in Bloomingdale, Ill.
Thanks to director Jonny Kest, 38, owner of the Center for Yoga in Birmingham and West Bloomfield, Mich., this year’s conference will feature some of yoga’s most influential teachers, including keynote speakers Seane Corn, Chris Kilham and David Life. Other instructors, including some from Chicago, who represent various styles will also be on hand.
The theme of the conference is Be Open, and Kest is expecting close to 1,000 people to attend. That’s an impressive number for a yoga conference in the Midwest, since this part of the country isn’t exactly known for being a bastion for yogis. But that’s changing, Kest said.
The Midwest conference promises to be one of the country’s largest yoga conferences with practitioners coming from as far as Portugal and India. The different styles that will be represented include traditional Hatha yoga to more avant-garde methods like Jivamukti, Anusara, and even Hip-Hop Power yoga.
“It’s a real powerful experience when you get that many people together and they’re all open,” Kest said. “There’s a lot of positive healing energy. And you can feel it without taking a yoga class. Just being in the exhibitor hall, you can feel the love.”
The workshop officially starts on Tuesday with a two-day teacher training for yoga instructors who can earn credits toward a Yoga Alliance Continuing Education certificate.
Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday are open to the public and include a daylong intensive on Thursday followed by various asana and holistic health workshops on Friday, Saturday and Sunday.
The Friday night concert from 8 to 10 p.m. features a duo called RASA which offers devotional love songs sung in the original languages of Bengali, Sanskrit and Hindi. Folks can buy tickets for the concert without participating in the conference.
Conference Beginnings
Kest first organized this event seven years ago because he wanted to meet famous yoga teachers.
“I had heard about Rodney Yee and Gary Kraftsow and other well-known teachers. I wanted to meet them and introduce them to my students,” said Kest, who offers yoga teacher training courses at his center.
He thought the best way to lure these luminaries to the Midwest was to organize a conference. What better way to get all the teachers you admire in the same room? he reasoned.
To his surprise, the teachers he always wanted to meet said yes and traveled to the University of Michigan to participate in the first Midwest conference along with 500 attendees. Five years ago, he decided to bring the conference closer to Chicago. And it keeps getting bigger each year.
Kest has been a student of Ashtanga yoga and meditation for more than 23 years. He became passionate about it when he was 12-years-old, before yoga was even popular. “Jane Fonda wasn’t doing it. Madonna wasn’t doing it.”
But Kest’s father, Rohm, who suffered with chronic back pain, was doing it, and would make his four sons attend yoga class with him every morning when they visited him in Hawaii. It was the only thing that relieved his dad, a physician, of back pain.
The boys enjoyed taking class with him because his dad practiced Ashtanga Vinyasa yoga, which is a more vigorous style.
“For a 12-year-old old kid, doing handstands and backbends was both challenging and fun,” Kest said. “The other reason we loved it was because of the yoga community itself. They were older than us, obviously, but they were beautiful people who loved me and my brothers.”
Kest started teaching yoga at age 15 after his father took him to India to study with yoga masters. When he returned to Michigan, his high school gym teacher asked if he would teach yoga to his class once a week. He agreed. “That’s how I got started teaching and sharing yoga,” he recalled.
Some 20 years later, that gym teacher is now one of his students.
Of the four boys, Kest and his brother Bryan, who lives in Los Angeles, are the only ones who decided to teach yoga for a living. His father still practices, and sometimes teaches at the Midwest Yoga Conference.
For information about the Midwest Yoga Conference, call 800-599-YOGA or visit midwestyoga.com.
Darlene Paris is a Chicago-area writer who is a regular practitioner of yoga.