Offering teacher training to minority populations, Maya Breuer hopes to open yoga’s door to all

A decade after launching the Yoga Retreat for Women of Color, Maya Breuer will help roll out the first Yoga Retreat for Mandarin-Speaking Women this spring in New York. She has collaborated with the Boston Medical Center to help low-income people reduce back pain through yoga and worked with Brown University to introduce African American women to yoga. As an African American Jew, she has felt exclusion keenly, which inspired her “unity within diversity” view of yoga.

In the early 1980s at the Kripalu Center for Yoga & Health [where she is now on the board of directors]. It was a difficult time: I had three teenaged children, was beginning a recovery program for alcohol abuse, and healing from cancer surgery. In addition, I was caring for a brother battling AIDS. After years of practicing, my true life began to unfold. The practice of yoga did for me what no substance, doctor, support group, family member, friend, or lifestyle change could do. Yoga introduced me to my inner Self.

Why did you launch the Yoga Retreat for Women of Color?

I wanted to introduce minority women to the healing benefits of yoga practice, provide them with an outlet for their stress, and teach them ancient wisdom. Each retreat attracts women from all ethnicities. It’s my firm belief that the awareness and skills one derives through yoga practice will greatly benefit the black American community.

What type of students are you drawn to teach?

I’m drawn to those who need yoga to help them change their lives after loss, grief, stress, or challenge. In 2001 I founded the Santosha School of Yoga, in Warwick, Rhode Island. I run certification programs for the general population as well as for those seeking to work with victims of domestic violence, people in recovery, and women living in shelters. In the last couple of years, I’ve certified eight Spanish-speaking women who are now teaching in their native language. It’s my dream to have a yoga instructor in every community to help fight the lifestyle challenges that affect them.

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My days are filled with issues such as Climate Change, renewable energy, recycling, LEED buildings, CO2 sensors, de-lamping and composting. The reason for this is because when I’m not writing for EcoSalon, I’m the communications specialist for sustainability at Boston University.

On my way to work last week I was listening to the radio, surfing between Lady Gaga and NPR when I heard the uber-clever green moniker AstroTurfing. Astroturfing, taken from the root AstroTurf (the artificial grass laid down on sports playing fields) refers to events or missions planned by an organization, but masked to appear as grass-roots efforts, which are built on passionate people dedicated to helping a cause.

Here are eight other terms everyone should know that are sure to turn you into an eco-expert:

1. Greenhouse Gas

Chemical compounds that contribute to the greenhouse effect. When in the atmosphere, a greenhouse gas allows sunlight (solar radiation) to enter the atmosphere where it warms the Earth’s surface and is reradiated back into the atmosphere as longer-wave energy (heat). Greenhouse gases absorb this heat and “trap” it in the lower atmosphere.

2. Global Warming

The current concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere is said to be approximately 385 ppm (parts per million). Before industrialization it was about 280 ppm. As stated in the U.S. Climate Change Conference data, analyses of air contained in ice from the Antarctic ice cap shows that there is far more CO2 in the air today than at any time in the last 650,000 years. The consequence is that the greenhouse effect is becoming stronger, and the earth is becoming warmer.

3. Greenwashing

Using environmental claims, which fall short, to sell a product. Check out the Greenwashing Index for the worst offenders.

4. Sustainability

In 1987, the Brundtland Report, also known as Our Common Future, defined sustainability as “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”

5. Phantom Energy

Also called Vampire power, this energy is taken from the grid when an appliance is plugged in but not being used. Think printers, cell phone chargers, TVs and computers. One easy way to stop this is by using a Smart Power Strip, which cuts off energy with the flip of one switch.

6. Carbon Footprint

The amount of carbon produced by an individual, organization, or location at a given time. Carbon footprint describes the environmental impact of carbon emissions, measured in units of carbon dioxide.

7. COP15

The United Nations Climate Change Conference, which takes place from December 7-18^th in Copenhagen, Denmark, will bring together world leaders to discuss the Climate Change Crisis and the Kyoto Protocol, which sets binding targets for 37 industrialized countries and the European community for reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.

8. LEED

Developed by the U.S. Green Building Council, LEED is an internationally-recognized building system aimed at improving performance across all the metrics that matter most: energy savings, water efficiency, CO₂ emissions reduction, improved indoor environmental quality, and stewardship of resources and sensitivity to their impacts.

Image: Vincent Boiteau

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This article was also featured on The Huffington Post website

Sure, the iPhone can store information like credit card data and bank account information (Spb Software, Inc.), and give users the ability to watch TV (SlingPlayer Mobile), play air hockey (Touch Hockey FS5) and jam on a set of drums (Drum FX Pro). But the iPhone can also help you live more sustainably. We’ve trolled the web to unearth the best iPhone apps to make your time on this planet more fulfilling, and a slightly darker shade of green.

Piqqo Projects
Free
I found Piqqo Projects, a new online service for presenting carbon reduction projects around the world, to be one of the most inspiring – and free – apps. The online showcase ranges from a biogas renewable energy project in Hungary that turns waste into green energy while saving jobs, to indigenous Mexican groups that are protecting their land, and a solar powered Kindergarten, also in Hungary. Piqqo shows YouTube videos of the projects and explain carbon savings.

3rd Whale Mobile
$1.99
If you’re committed to living a sustainable life, then 3rdWhale Mobile could be the best $1.99 you’ve spent in a while. This location-based iPhone app connects you to green businesses in your area, offering 6 categories to choose from, such as food, retail and services. Enter whether you’re traveling by car, foot, or bicycle, and get directions, then rate the review. One of the most simple ways to learn what’s around you, and great for anyone that’s on the move. Now, with the addition of  “Creative Citizen Solutions,” users of this app can also make better purchasing and lifestyle decisions, such a using power strips to reduce energy waste from Vampire Appliances.

Go Green
Free
I look at Go Green as a terrific intro to the environment, or an app for the apathetic. For example, if you’re trying to get a friend or relative to be more eco-friendly and you know the only possible chance of success is through baby steps. Each time the application is opened, another bit-sized Green Tip is displayed, then saved to a list, such as:
•    Wrap your water heater in an insulated blanket, and you’ll eliminate 1,000 lbs. of CO2 a year. Eliminate another 550 lbs. by lowering the water heater thermostat to 120 degrees F. (These metrics have not been verified by EcoSalon).
•    Buy shade-grown coffee. It’s grown naturally, under the rainforest canopy, preserving forests from clear-cutting and leaving more trees to absorb CO2.

Get Green
.99
Get Green sends a helpful season-based daily tip to your iPhone, ranging from green workplaces, to throwing a green Halloween party and even greening your wedding. One recent tip: Instead of tossing used coffee grounds, add them to your garden soil. The grounds will provide nutrients that will help your plants flourish. Who knew?

iLocavore
Free
A locavore is someone who strives to eat food grown and produced locally. In fact, the movement is gaining such momentum that iLocavore touts the new Oxford American Dictionary chose locavore as its 2007 word of the year.

There are many reasons why people choose to live a locavore or Locallectual lifestyle: concerns about food miles traveled and the associated increase in carbon footprint, freshness of locally sourced food and the choice to support family farms, craftsmen, independent retailers and eateries to stimulate the local and regional economy.

The iLocavore application supplies this information from the Locallectual.com database to find area producers, independent retailers featuring local and domestic goods, and restaurants featuring local foods based on your current location.

GoodGuide
Free
This iPhone app helps you find safe green products while shopping in the store by providing – what they claim to be – the world’s largest and most reliable sources of information on the health, environmental and social impacts of products and companies. Find over 70,000 product ratings in food, personal care, household cleaners, and toys. View product ratings on the health, environmental, and social performance of your favorite brands, and create personalized shopping lists to search for, and avoid.
“We make it fast and easy to get the information you need to help make better decisions on everyday purchases based on what’s important to you,” say the folks at GoodGuide.

greenMeter
$5.99
Here’s an app to track your car’s fuel and power usage characteristics and offer tips on how to save your wallet and the environment. Based on the gMeter vehicle performance app, greenMeter uses the device’s internal accelerometer to measure forward acceleration, compute engine power, fuel economy, fuel cost, carbon footprint and oil (barrels) consumption.

For those of you who love a good interactive metric, you can learn from greenMeter by tipping the device forward and backward to simulate acceleration, and see the effects of both acceleration, aerodynamic drag and rolling resistance, across the speed range. Once inside your vehicle, choose an efficient cruising speed and use the built-in g meter to limit acceleration while you drive.

iNewz Green
$2.99
iNewz Green acts as a portal for eco-friendly, environment-aware news. Select the category of green news you’re interested in, and a list of the latest articles will be displayed. Tap the headline and an integrated browser page will take you straight to the selected article on the source’s website. If you like the story, email it to your friends, save it to your Del.icio.us bookmark,  or publish it to your Twitter stream. News is culled from such sources as Planet Green, The Daily Green, TreeHugger, Popular Science, Good Guide and the iNewz Vertography Blog.

A Real Tree
.99
A Real Tree plants trees in 12 countries to fight deforestation. They work with organizations that provide education to local communities to plant trees in an ecologically-beneficial manner, such as avoiding toxic pesticides, herbicides and fertilizers. The trees then produce nutritious fruits and crops that are eaten and also sold. By partnering with award-winning tree-planting organizations such as Sustainable Harvest International (SHI), and having endorsements from the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), A Real Tree is gaining momentum.  The app also has a few Easter eggs: It includes mini-games to teach a bird to fly and get flowers to drift in a breeze.

Carbon Tracker
Free
This GPS-enabled carbon footprint application allows users to calculate their carbon footprint from daily commuting, business trips or vacations. Users can also create goals for maximum emissions in a month, then monitors progress. Great for individuals, universities and large companies looking to lighten their carbon footprint.

Do you have a favorite green iPhone app? We’d love to learn about it.

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After sifting through the Executive Summary, we’ve chosen a few key points to share:

- Six out of ten people (61.7%) in the United States population live in counties that have unhealthy levels of either ozone or particle pollution.

- Approximately 4 million children and 10.9 million adults with asthma live in parts of the United States with very high levels of ozone, and over 5.7 million adults and 2.1 million children with asthma live in areas with high levels of short-term particle pollution.

The nations needs to:

Clean up dirty power plants

Coal-fired power plants are among the largest contributors to particulate pollution, ozone, mercury and global warming. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) should immediately take action to reduce emissions and expand clean-up requirements for power plants nationwide. The American Lung Association has taken legal action repeatedly to fight to require power plants to clean up.

Clean up the existing fleet of dirty diesel

The good news is that affordable technology exists to virtually eliminate this problem and the economic recovery legislation is investing $300 million at the EPA for the voluntary diesel retrofit program.

Clean up ocean-going vessels

Ocean-going vessels, like cruise ships, container ships and tankers, deliver staggering amounts of smog-forming oxides of nitrogen, particle pollution, sulfur dioxide and heat-trapping carbon dioxide. By 2030, these vessels will produce approximately 45 per cent of the national inventory of mobile source particle pollution emissions, harming health, worsening global warming and creating acid rain. New evidence shows that pollution from these vessels reaches parts of the country far inland from the 40 port cities that have recognized air pollution problems.

What can you do?

Drive less

Combine trips, walk, bike, carpool or vanpool, and use buses, subways or other alternatives to driving. Vehicle emissions are a major source of air pollution. Support community plans that provide ways to get around that don’t require a car, such as more sidewalks, bike trails and transit systems.

Don’t burn wood or trash

Check school busses

Make sure your local school system requires clean school buses, which includes replacing or retrofitting old school buses with filters and other equipment to reduce emissions.

Use less electricity

Turn out the lights and use energy-efficient appliances. Generating electricity is one of the biggest sources of pollution, particularly in the eastern United States.

Send a message to decision makers

Send an email or fax to urge Congress to oppose measures that weaken the Clean Air Act.

Take pride if you’ve been listed as one of the cleanest cities:

Fargo-Wahpeton, ND-MN emerged as the cleanest city in the U.S., the only city to appear on all three lists of cleanest cities. 17 cities appeared on two of the three lists of cleanest cities: Billings, MT; Bismarck, ND; Cheyenne, WY; Colorado Springs, CO; Farmington, NM; Ft. Collins, CO; Honolulu, HI; Lincoln, NE; Midland-Odessa, TX; Port St. Lucie, FL; Pueblo, CO; Redding, CA; Salinas, CA; San Luis Obispo, CA; Santa Fe-Espanola, NM; Sioux Falls, ND; and Tucson, AZ.

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A recent issue of  Women’s Health Issues, a Canadian-based medical journal, took a closer look at what the media is sharing with their readers. The study, entitled: “Representations of Cosmetic Surgery and Emotional Health in Women’s Magazines in Canada”, examines how popular women’s magazines portray cosmetic surgery and associated emotional health.

Five English-language women‘s magazines were selected on the basis of their 2005 Canadian circulation rates: Chatelaine, Cosmopolitan, Flare, O: The Oprah Magazine, and Prevention.

While the content analysis showed that the articles did in fact tend to present readers with detailed physical health risk information, only 48 percent of the articles discussed the impact that cosmetic surgery has on emotional health. Most often the stories linked cosmetic surgery with enhanced emotional well-being regardless of the patient’s pre-existing mental state. Articles also tended to use male accounts to provide defining standards of female attractiveness.

According to the Canadian Society for Aesthetic (Cosmetic) Plastic Surgery (2007), the term “cosmetic surgery“ refers to invasive surgical procedures such as breast implants, liposuction, or facelifts. Distinct from reconstructive surgery, which aims to fix body disfigurement, cosmetic surgery is used to alter “normal” and physically healthy bodies.

A 2007 Canadian consumer survey revealed that 20.35% of respondents had undergone cosmetic surgery and 46% would consider surgery to change some aspect of their appearance.

The findings were consistent with arguments in research literature that women‘s magazines contribute to the medicalization of the female body; that cosmetic surgery is generally portrayed as a risky but worthwhile option for women to enhance both their physical appearance and emotional health.

According to the study, some research has found positive correlations between cosmetic surgery and emotional well-being, suggesting that cosmetic procedures increase body image satisfaction and produce psychological benefits that improve one’s overall quality of life. However other studies have shown that emotional health problems, such as anxiety and depression, may arise or become amplified in some patients as a consequence of cosmetic surgery; that body image dissatisfaction may increase after surgery, and that breast implant recipients are at increased risk for psychiatric admission and suicide.

Implications for future research and public education strategies were discussed.

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On a recent afternoon A Besere Velt (A Better World) was rehearsing for a concert that will take place Thursday at Somerville Theatre with the Klezmatics, a world-renowned New York klezmer band. Lisa Gallatin led the chorus like a Broadway director, flailing her hands and flitting across the room between the altos and sopranos.

“Sit on the edge of your seat, feet flat on the floor, back straight!” commanded Gallatin, of Arlington, who was recruited to lead the group 11 years ago while working as a union organizer and directing a picket-line singing group. She pulled out a pitch pipe, gave an assured blow, then taught the group new stanzas to “Bread and Roses” and ironed out a few wrinkles in “Der Yid Der Shmid.”

Many of the songs mirror traditional Eastern European melodies, with lyrics about the labor movement, daily life, social justice, and hope. The song “Vacht Oyf” (Wake Up), for example, written by Jewish factory worker David Edelstat, calls for workers to rise up against poor working conditions.

“The music describes the hardships and dreams of an immigrant generation,” said Gallatin, “from mournful lullabies to rousing workers’ anthems to songs of unity that make you feel like clapping along.”

The chorus began singing in 1997 under the auspices of the Boston Workmen’s Circle, a branch of the Workmen’s Circle/Arbeter Ring, which was started in 1892 by a handful of Jewish sweatshop workers in lower Manhattan. Today the choir includes members from kids to university faculty.

Daniel Albert-Rozenberg, an 11-year-old sixth-grader at the International School of Boston, learned about the chorus at Sunday school. “Yiddish is the language of my grandparents and singing Yiddish songs is the way I express myself as a Jew,” he said. “It’s the language of the lullaby that my parents used to sing me to sleep with.”

Thursday’s concert will honor three people who represent key elements of the Workmen’s Circle: Mark Erlich of Jamaica Plain (representing the labor movement), the executive secretary-treasurer of the New England Regional Council of Carpenters whose grandfather led an organization of Jewish workers in Eastern Europe and Russia; Sylvia Rothchild of Chestnut Hill (Jewish identity), a choir member and writer who was among the first to edit oral histories of Holocaust survivors; and Nora Guthrie (arts and culture), folk singer Woody Guthrie’s daughter.

A few years ago, Nora Guthrie, a singer-songwriter who lives in New York, discovered song lyrics of her father’s that were never put to music. She approached the Klezmatics, who produced two recordings and were subsequently awarded the 2006 Grammy for best contemporary world music album.

“Mostly it was my grandmother’s voice that really introduced us to Yiddish songs,” said Guthrie. “She would often put us to sleep at night – first telling us the stories behind the songs, then singing them in Yiddish. I had no idea at the time that many of these songs were her own.”

Choir member Norman Berman, 60, a Boston lawyer whose parents were Holocaust survivors, grew up speaking Yiddish with his mother. One of his favorite songs is “Vilne,” about the town in Lithuania where his mother lived. She was one of its few survivors.

“When we sing it,” said Berman, “I think about my mother being there as a teenager, imagining the promise of the future.”

Susan Chaityn Lebovits can be reached at Lebovits@globe.com.

© Copyright 2008 Globe Newspaper Company.

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