Our Yogapalooza experience: Canada’s largest free yoga class

Yogapalooza’s goal is ambitious: teach yoga to 5000 people outdoors during a major city’s festival. Salimah Kassim-Lakha, the founder of yogavision.com, set out to achieve that goal and brought us along to help capture it.

The main challenge is to capture the scale of the event while at the same time isolate the intimacy and peacefulness that are central to Kundalini Yoga. Not only did the event feature yoga, it also featured belly dancers and drummers to welcome the participants to the event.

We were lucky to experience Kundalini Yoga class before hand and we also filmed a preview for the event at Lululemon in Toronto.

On the Friday before the event, Salimah appeared on CP24 to discuss Pride and Yogapalooza. Toronto’s Pride Festival weekend was blessed with extremely warm weather. Luckily, Yogapalooza took place at Queen’s Park which features a lot of trees and shade.

With all the sound checks and audio visual people running around, the day certainly felt like a concert. Regardless, Salimah still managed to coordinate the tens of volunteers and performers with the cool and calm manner that she’s well known for.

The actual yoga class featured hundreds of people. We did not expect to have the same quietness and peacefulness as you would have in a class of six. We were pleasantly surprised.

The event was successful and received a lot of positive feedback. I guess the only negative feedback we received while interviewing people afterwards was that they wanted to class to be longer.