BREATHING INTO BEING: LOVING, LEARNING, and LIVING LUMIN
by Ryan Allen
WE’RE ALL STRESSED OUT
In the United States, systems and structures we have long relied on for our health and well-being are failing us. We are sick and stressed out. We lack resiliency and are rapidly falling behind other developed nations in how we prepare our young people for their personal and professional lives. We’re at a tipping point. The average family pays more than 20% of its monthly income for a healthcare system of headaches, frustration, and confusion. We’re spending more and more and getting less and less. And in terms of education, although “No Child Left Behind” certainly accelerated the decline of our young people’s academic growth, the core issues run much deeper and go back in time much, much further. Put simply, we’ve been trying to teach students like we once made cars. These realities touch all of us. Massive, tectonic changes that once took generations to unfold are now unraveling exponentially. The Internet, social media, 24-hour cable television, and the like are forcing us to rewrite the script moment to moment. To meet this reality, we need a populace that can be flexible, mobile, and able to share space and relate to diverse people in healthy, meaningful, collaborative cooperation.
Lumin exists to address these inadequacies, the gaps in coverage and care that our public schools and private insurance companies create in their service to our most vulnerable, at-risk people. We’re here to bring some revolution to the evolution of healthcare and education by finding a place and creating a space where you can young and old can learn and heal and practice and play utilizing evidence-based, research-driven approaches to helping people where they need help the most: reclaiming control, experiencing inter-being, and building resiliency.
LUMIN’S STORY
Our journey began in 2015, shortly after the birth of our 3rd child, Sawyer. When we learned that she had Down syndrome (Trisomy 21) the stars immediately began aligning. We were given a book by Sonia Sumar called, Yoga for the Special Child, and from that moment until now we have been trying to find meaningful ways to bring the practice of yoga and mindfulness to a whole variety of people with special needs and abilities. In the short time since that initial moment, we’ve received trainings and certifications in yoga, yoga for special needs, mindful resilience for trauma recovery, chair yoga, gentle & restorative yoga, kids yoga, and medical therapeutic yoga. We’ve been applying this expertise over the years through partnerships with multiple yoga studios, schools, Siouxland non-profit organizations, and various businesses. We lead teacher trainings, professional development sessions, and continuing education programs, we teach classes in yoga studios and at non-profit organizations, and we work with businesses to ensure the health and sustainability of their employees.
We created Lumin to empower individuals and families to live beyond boundaries by providing direct care of the mind, body, and spirit rooted in the practices of yoga and mindfulness. We are driven by the desire to be the change we want to see in the world, to model for our kids how to mindfully live with and for others, and by the need to support underrepresented, underserved, at-risk individuals and families and the organizations who serve them.
CROSSING THRESHOLDS
The hero’s journey is not a straight line, but a maze. It usually gets harder before it gets easier. We offer something that requires deep, personal buy-in to be successful. We’re not selling magic pills or elixirs that soothe all the rough edges of life away. Transformation is hard. Healing takes time. There’s a great line from a Leonard Cohen song, that the cracks “are how the light gets in.” Not everyone is ready to make this leap, to explore the edges, to cross the threshold. Our role is to help guide a journey that only you can navigate yourself.
More concretely, a great challenge is our collective, cultural willingness to accept less than we deserve when it comes to our personal health and wellness. We wish everyone (including ourselves) would take more time for self-care. We should all be listening more closely to the flight attendant safety call to put your own oxygen mask on first before trying to help others. In other words, we need to give ourselves more permission to watch out for #1 so we can avoid stepping in #2.
GETTING CONNECTED
We’re reaching out to you now because at some point in our journeys, we’ve connected. We’ve worked and served alongside you or your kids in your homes, your schools, your teams, and in your businesses and organizations. We’ve taught your kids at the Boys and Girls Club of Siouxland or Beyond the Bell, inside a Sioux City School District classroom, or interacted with you in a yoga class or a teacher training program at a studio. We’ve led workshops and trainings for Northwest AEA, the Learning Disabilities Association, Please Pass the Love, and the National Kids Yoga Conference, amongst others, and for a variety of non-profit organizations like the Camp High Hopes, Hospice, Community Action Agency, Sanford Center, Pier Center for Autism, Gigi’s Playhouse.
Making yoga practices accessible and inclusive is at the heart of our efforts with community partners like Heartland Counseling, Opportunities Unlimited, Goodwill of the Great Plains, and Crossroads of Western Iowa—we honor diversity, we promote equity, and we practice inclusion.
Lumin’s goal has always been to serve our community, especially our most vulnerable—the young, the old, individuals with disabilities, veterans and first responders, victims of trauma. We want to help the voiceless find their voices, the sedentary to discover motion, those in pain to feel the sweet benefits of release, and those battling to look next to them and to see a brother or sister standing in solidarity, holding space.
We’re connecting now because we need each other now more than ever. That’s the great realization we’ve already known, but the lesson we need to relearn over and over.
Thank you for helping us be the change we want to see in the world.
Join us.
Spread the word. Share the love.
RYAN & MEGHAN