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SUMMER 2008
NAMASTE,
After we finally renegotiated our Bethesda lease late last year, we undertook a number of renovations to spruce up our studios, offices, dressing rooms, and reception area. We’re pleased with the results and hope you are, too. We now plan to renovate the Arlington studio with new paint and carpet this summer.
As another part of our new look, we will debut our redesigned logo this fall. No big changes here; just new color and font and a slight revamping of the familiar circles and triangle. Health, serenity, and awareness through yoga will still be the focus, as it has been since I introduced the logo at Unity Woods’ conception almost thirty years ago.
We thought about creating some sort of eye-catching symbol that would become instantly recognizable as the Unity Woods brand, in much the same way that a red bulls-eye immediately makes you think of Target. (Ah, marketing.) But we realized that our logo, while perhaps not particularly trendy or eye-catching, is familiar to yoga aficionados around the world and, more important, conveys what we really want to say: that through the practice of yoga, you can improve health, find serenity, and develop awareness. So while I’m talking about the logo, I thought I’d take the opportunity to tell you a little about it came about in the first place.
My intention was to try to come up with a design that would be fairly simple and straightforward and simultaneously say something about my understanding and experience of yoga to anyone seeing it. I began with the triangle.
Three is a significant number in yoga, as it is in many other spiritual traditions. In yoga there are: the three aspects of the Divine (Brahma, the Creator; Shiva, the Destroyer; Vishnu, the Preserver); the three syllables of Aum; the three gunas or qualities of the universe (sattva, purity and equilibrium; rajas, activity and dynamism; tamas, stability and inertia); and many more examples of the importance of three. In the logo, the three tips of the triangle point to the three primary levels yoga has touched my life and the lives of so many others: body, mind, and spirit. The words health, serenity, and awareness indicate the fruits of practice on each of those levels respectively. Of course, many other terms are possible, but I chose health, serenity, and awareness because, for me, each holds broad and powerful significance. Indeed, these three words are so meaningful and so relevant to the practice of yoga, that I intend to devote the next three newsletters to examining each more deeply in terms of their qualities and their relationship to yoga.
The outer circle came next. The word yoga is derived from the Sankrit word, yuj, and means to unite or join together. Underlying the philosophy and practice of yoga is the experience of the union, the interconnectedness of all things. Yoga ultimately reveals that everything is an integral strand in the limitless web of Being. Everything is included; nothing is excluded. The logo’s outer circle represents the all-inclusive quality of yoga; the space within the circle of yoga holds the universe.
Furthermore, circles are composed of an unbroken line - without beginning, without end, infinite. Infinity is intellectually comprehensible on a certain level. You point your finger in a particular direction and that direction goes on forever. (Physicists, cut me some slack here, please.) But to experience infinity as a reality is very different from just thinking about it. The yogi touches infinity by becoming quiet and awake enough to be wholly in the present moment. In fact, while on one level yoga is a practice, on a much deeper level, yoga is a state of existing in the present moment fully. The present moment is without beginning, without end, without future, without past. The present moment is infinite, like the line of the circle.
The circle within the outer circle and the triangle came last. I realized upon looking at just the outer circle and the triangle, that there was no clear indication that all this was about yoga. Of course, yoga is the reason for the existence of Unity Woods, so I placed a circle with the word yoga in the center to illustrate that yoga lies at the heart of Unity Woods and everything we do.
We have made some minor changes in the logo from the original as well. The new logo will have a line connecting health, serenity, and awareness to further emphasize the connection of body, mind, and spirit. We think the line also gives the logo a more cohesive look.
We have changed the font from a combination of script that imitates devanagri, the alphabet of classical Indian scriptures, and the delicate, almost Persian look of the words heath, serenity, and awareness, to a bolder, more fluid font. India being the birthplace of yoga, I originally thought that the devanagri-like script would connote India and, by association, yoga to the viewer. Perhaps it did, but it was also hard to read, and because the name of the center, Unity Woods Yoga Center, was written in this script, I felt that it was being lost. With the new font, who we are and what we are all about is much clearer and easier to see.
The last change is to employ color in the logo. We’ve chosen purple, first and foremost, because purple is my favorite color. Hey, why not? Beyond that, however, purple is a combination of hot red and cool blue and thus represents the conjoining and transcendence of opposites about which the yoga sutras speak. Throughout the ages, purple has been associated with nobility and spirituality. We consider our mission of introducing and spreading the spiritual wisdom and life-enhancing benefits of yoga to be a noble endeavor, so on a lot of levels, purple seems quite appropriate.
Beginning this fall, then, you’ll see the new logo on everything associated with Unity Woods: the newsletter, stationary, business cards, clothing, and advertising. We hope that when you see it, you will see not only a symbol that represents Unity Woods Yoga Center, but will be reminded of the pursuit of health, serenity, and awareness through yoga that Unity Woods is all about.
P.S. This summer I am abbreviating my Unity Woods teaching schedule to give myself a little rest and an opportunity to tackle some long delayed projects. I will continue to teach my Tuesday night Level III class. Suzanne will teach the Wednesday night Level I and II classes, and Lori will teach the Thursday night Pranayama IV and Level II/III asana classes. I intend to resume my full teaching schedule in the fall.
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