Yoga Festival Toronto is a non-profit organization formed to produce a yearly festival of the Yoga Tradition inspired by content, vision, and community.

The Festival aims to unite, inspire and support local practitioners, teachers, studios, and lineages with a broad range of presentation topics, practical classes, and round-table discussion and debate. 

Our goal is to help develop a mature, community-based, content-inspired, de-commercialized, and innovative Yoga culture in Toronto and beyond.  Our keynote event is the Festival itself, scheduled for the third weekend in August every year, but we also host community-building events, and publish a bimonthly newsletter featuring news and reviews by YFT faculty and staff -- all with a strong educational and dialectic focus.

We believe that as a nascent global movement growing with fierce momentum, the Yoga tradition is ready for periodic "time-outs", in which mentors, students, and scholars can shape and share the many answers to questions that define a culture yearning for integrity:

• What do we believe?

• How do the various branches of Yogic theory tie together in theory, practice, and everyday life?

• What unity underlies the modern explosion of lineages and styles?

• Is there a "heart" of Yoga that we are changing or losing, or forming anew?

• How is the body and its posture relevant to freedom?

• How might Yogic worldview be applied to our understanding of and behaviour within the realms of ecology, economy, politics, and social justice?

• How does the Yoga path unfold over one's lifetime?

Such questions often go unanswered in a marketplace of brands, styles, and products. They go unanswered by an excessive focus on the 'new'. They go unanswered by the perception that Yoga is an activity to be repeated rather than a life-path that unfolds. YFT aims to provide a public, yet sattvic, atmosphere in which the tradition may begin to quietly answer such questions, and thus recalibrate itself for continual inner growth.

For centuries following the Buddha's passing, generations of monastics and householders retreated to forest ashrams during the rainy season to study, memorize, debate, and contemplate Dharma. While this was a time of deep personal growth for these practitioners, it also allowed the Dharma itself to expand  in its own development, refinement, and means of dissemination.

In the same way, Yoga Festival Toronto aims to serve Yoga itself, through retreat, study, discussion, and community.

 

Yoga Festival Toronto aims to be an example for conscious business modeling within the context of community development. Everyone involved with YFT abides by a few key ethical guidelines:

 

• To foster a spirit of cooperation between yogis, lineages, and studios at all times.

• To endeavour to make the Festival and its gifts accessible to everyone.

• To remember that we are serving the community and tradition  first, and the marketplace second (if at all).

• To downplay the illusion of competition with other events.

• To maintain cheerfulness and generosity whilst dealing with all manner of difficulty.

• To take responsibility for the social, political, and spiritual implications of our actions.

• To derive more prana, tejas, and ojas from this process than we put into it.