Winter 2023
Dear Woodbury Meditation & Yoga Center Community,
Your gift, peace in action, keeps open the doors to our community of meditation and yoga classes. You sponsor the existence of a spiritual environment welcoming to all, offering stipends for those in need. Your donation touches someone's life.
We’re stifling inflation here by maintaining pre-pandemic pricing for yoga classes. We need your help to keep running—and offer More Yoga, despite steep increases in utilities, insurance and other basic expenses.
Click button, or feel free to mail a check to WMYC at 122 West Side Rd. Woodbury CT. 06798
Mission
We provide timeless quality instruction in traditional yoga and meditation with warmth and love, by dedicated and sincere teachers. Authentic guidance in the science and practice of yoga leads to more calm, healthy, joyful and loving lifestyles
Serving Our Communities
Since our federal recognition as a non-profit teaching center 39 years ago, your support has provided the means to teach more than 24,315 individuals of all ages and backgrounds, ancient, sacred methods for relaxation, healing, stress management, and spiritual evolution. People’s lives are changed.
Benefits
Medical research demonstrates that meditation reduces anxiety, normalizes blood pressure, increases self-esteem, enhances the prevention and healing of many illnesses, and provides focus and purpose in life. Yoga postures increase circulation, massage internal organs, augment functioning of the spinal nerves, and strengthen and tone muscles. Correct breathing instills calmness and balance in body, mind and life. Meditation accesses inner peace. Inner Peace is World Peace.
Celebrating You and Us with Gratitude
We do beautiful work together! On behalf of folks of all ages, we celebrate and thank you. Your participation in yoga and your donation today create greater peace, harmony and healing in your life, the lives of others, and in the world.
May you, your family, our planet and all her inhabitants remain healthy and joyful in yoga as One. —With great respect and appreciation,
Janaki Pierson, President
Jean Bielucyzk, Secretary
WYC is a tax-exempt not-for-profit educational institution under Federal Statute 501c (3).
Woodburyyogacenter.org 122 West Side Road, Woodbury, CT 06798 (203) 263-2254
Inner Peace is World Peace
Notes from our Woodbury Meditation and Yoga Center community :
"Thank you from the bottom of my heart for teaching me how to meditate years ago. It was tough for me to learn, but now it is my biggest tool, to Breath, and Meditate. It is a part of my life and I use it all the time. I am in Gratitude for your teaching.” Susan G.D. Westchester NY, 2021
“Woodbury Yoga Center (WYC) provides tangible health benefits in terms of intellectual, emotional, and physical endurance and growth for all individuals, in particular members of the senior population. WYC provides an extensive and remarkably affordable selection of meditation, yoga, and related programs, all designed to promote and ensure the betterment of peoples’ cognitive and physiological wellness.
“Now a retired professional, WYC continues to be an integral part of my personal wellness plan. My journey with WYC began nearly 20 years ago with Meditation. Continuing with a daily practice since then, I find that my cognition, intellectual, emotional, and physical health / stamina are the same if not superior to how they presented many decades ago. I consider WYC and what I have learned and now practice via meditation to be a key differentiator in maintaining my ‘real age’ well younger than my chronological age. Additionally, I am more centered, less bothered by the daily trials and tribulations of life that seem to adversely affect my contemporaries and in general I am significantly more optimistic than most. I regularly attend the Deepening Meditation class.
WYC is a key enabler to leading a healthier, more fulfilled, longer and overall better quality of life.” Tom, Wolcott CT, 2022
“You have been such a huge inspiration to me. You are a thoughtful, wise, and compassionate teacher. I am grateful to have found you and look forward to 'deepening' with you.” Karen B Sandy Hook, CT 2022
“I know of no other place locally where yoga is taught as a spiritual practice. In other yoga studios or gyms it is “just
exercise.” At WYC, my yoga practice flows more smoothly, my meditations are deeper and my smile is brighter – it is hard
not to smile in such a beautiful setting. It's also comforting to know I am part of a local community of people spreading
peace, love, and joy throughout the world.” J O, Oxford, 2012
Dear Janaki,
When I was diagnosed with cancer in 2007, it was a challenging time for me both physically and emotionally, and remained
so for years afterwards. It was a difficult journey and you and other Woodbury Yoga Center staff were there for me every
step of the way.
I was also dealing with many health-related expenses and had been laid off from my job. Your generous offer for me to
participate in classes with a scholarship was truly a lifesaver. There is no doubt that my healing process progressed because
you encouraged me to participate in free meditation and yoga classes.
Gratefully, I have been cancer free for (more than) 8 years and my financial situation is stable; I would like to "pay it
forward" and contribute $150 to a Woodbury Yoga Center scholarship so you can continue to provide healing programs to
other cancer patients.
Thank you for the ongoing contribution you and the yoga center are making to the health and wellbeing of people dealing
with cancer. The education and care you provide is very important to the healing process.
With warm regards and deep appreciation,
Kathy O. 2015
“I am writing to let you know that taking yoga at your center has changed my life!
I started yoga 15 years ago at WYC by recommendation of my chiropractor for my bad back. From the first class, no
exaggeration, I realized I was "home" and even was moved to tears in your class.
Each time I returned to WYC I felt so at home and at peace. I always left feeling like I returned to my "true self.” My
husband would tell me when I was going through a sad/tough time: go to Woodbury Yoga, since he knew how nurturing it
was to me. Besides retreats, I have never gone to any other studios because I know that your space is so special, nestled
within nature and it has a wonderful spiritual energy feeling, like I am practicing among the trees outside the window and
feeling a strong sense of spirit with me.” - A. Wissell, Southbury Spring 2017
“Both in the hospital and at home, the nurses that have helped with therapy have all been amazed at how mobile I am so
soon after surgery – and I don't hesitate to ascribe that to the yoga training that you've given me. I really appreciate that, and
I wanted you to realize how grateful I am. “ - Mary Jane Strong, Woodbury, less than a week after knee surgery, August 2017
"I had been searching for a place where I would be able to do Yoga, and I wanted an environment that would inspire my
mind, my body, and my soul. Living with a chronic illness I knew I needed a place where I could be myself, feel
comfortable, and help to maintain that delicate balance. The minute I met Janaki and visited the Woodbury Yoga and
Meditation Center, I knew I was home." - Kathy, Southbury Fall 2017
"The value and benefits of yoga and meditation are vast and real. I’ve been doing yoga with WMYC for 30 years, and I took
your meditation course many years ago and use it to this day. Initially I started both to improve my golf game! I can tell
you it works, yoga and meditation are great for one’s golf game! And of course both help me physically and spiritually, in
countless ways, every single day, on and off the golf course." - Mark B., Woodbury Fall 2017