New York Magazine

Best Cheap Yoga of 2011

In a city where Vinyasa-induced calm is often offset by $20-a-class rates, instructors Lily Cushman and Jeremy Frindel felt moved to do something different. The pair turned a former hair salon into a candlelit yoga haven with stained-glass bay windows, just five instructors (Cushman herself teaches fifteen sessions a week), and—most impressively—a true pay-as-you-wish policy. There’s no check-in desk or awkward badgering; rather, participants drop anywhere from $5 to $20 into the small metal box near the doorway, unprompted. As Cushman put it, “You’re not just coming to tone a six-pack or get your money’s worth out of an overpriced unlimited card.” Classes max out at 25 attendees and most last 90 minutes, and the population is as democratic as the pay system, from toned twentysomethings to graying kombucha swillers. To read the full article, click here.

Park Slope Reader

Leisurely Exercise with the Right Rewards

Great! As soon as I announce my retirement from yoga, a new place opens. I bet it’s got a weird shtick or makes you do an obscure yoga style like only doing poses inspired by artichokes. What? No? It focuses on classical styles for any level of student? The classes focus on different levels and cores such as postures, meditation, relaxation, chanting and philosophy? Well, I bet it’s one of those giant gyms with a million people in every class. No? It’s in a beautiful, sun-drenched space on the second floor of a building built in the 1850’s? The classes are small, casual and allow for a lot of attention from the instructors? It must be expensive, right? It’s donation based? Really? Just when you think you’re out, they pull you back in! Check out Brooklyn Yoga School, the yoga studio with the most natural light at 82 6th Ave at Bergen.

Gothamist

Best Inexpensive Yoga in NYC

Many studios offer donation-based classes, but some studios are completely donation-based, and that'€™s awesome. Sure, it gets a bit crowded with ”everyone who can'€™t afford (or refuses) to throw down $20 on a yoga class at some foo-foo studio instead opts to cram into the Brooklyn Yoga School's tiny yet beautiful space on 6th Avenue between St. Mark'€™s and Prospect Place. Every time we've taken a class there, it's been mat-to-mat and therefore slightly perilous. There is a real sense of gratitude and camaraderie amongst us working folks who don't have the time or the dough to traipse into Manhattan, decked out in Lululemon, to twist and bend alongside the upper echelons of well-manicured yogis and yoginis. BYS also offers daily meditation classes and hosts weekly kirtan gatherings. Founders Lily Cushman and Jeremy Frindel will offer the School's first 5-day immersion in October 2011, and it looks to be one of the most realistically priced intensives in the city. To read the full article, click here.

Park Slope Reader

Bending Toward Brooklyn

So I venture into Brooklyn, where leaves are crispy, and townhouse-lined streets appear countrified compared to the chain stores, souvlaki vendors, and NYU hipsters that pepper Union Square.  One real looker of a brownstone catches my eye: on the corner of Saint Marks, with a wall of curvy stained glass windows.  But I don’t have time to waste on pretty.  So I dash past.  Then slow in my tracks, realizing, said building in question is my first stop: The Brooklyn Yoga School. Lily Cushman, the studio’s co-founder greets me inside.  Cushman is a slender young woman with a patient manner.  Her and her husband Jeremy are the school’s founders, and teach the majority of classes, in the Dharma Mittra tradition, along with a handful of teachers.  Cushman tells me, “We opened BYS a few years ago for students interested in the wider practice of yoga.  Classes include a vinyasa series, standing postures, breathing exercises, meditation, relaxation, a little chanting and Yogic Philosophy.” Read the full article here.