Local yoga studio taps into community’s “consonance and camaraderie”

Farrell’s journey to Gratitude Yoga began after graduation from Dartmouth College in 1986. She spent time abroad in China, earned a degree from Columbia University and worked in finance, marketing, advertising and publishing at big-name corporations such as Goldman Sachs and McGraw-Hill before she decided to share her passion for yoga.

Farrell’s interest in yoga extended from her experiences meditating at Dartmouth. She traveled for the first time as a Dartmouth undergraduate to China to conduct research for her senior thesis.

“I remember that just being so all-consuming,” Farrell, who majored in political science and Asian studies, said of her own thesis. Meditation allowed her to “explore the mind in a different way” than did her studies, and yoga became an extension of that exploration.

After her time in China, Farrell attended the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia. She thought she would work in international business or international relations, but she wanted to learn something different.

“I was really steeped in academia, and I felt like I needed to be in the world for a bit,” Farrell said. “I had this knowledge gap in my education.”

Farrell hoped to fill this “gap” by working at Goldman Sachs, which she believed would give her the tools to enter the business world.

“It was like baptism by fire,” Farrell said of her time at Goldman. “But you really learned. You had to learn or else you couldn’t last.”

Yet Farrell knew from the beginning that she did not want a career in finance. Therefore, she moved from investment banking to marketing, advertising and finally to publishing. She worked at McGraw-Hill before moving to Princeton with her husband about 16 years ago, when they started a family. Farrell homeschooled her five children, taught art and painted on the side while continuing to practice yoga by herself.

Two years ago, Farrell decided to become a certified instructor through the Yoga Alliance, a national yoga education institution. The alliance requires a minimum of 200 hours of teacher training, which Farrell took in four-hour increments one weekend a month over the course of a year.

She began teaching at Holsome Yoga on Witherspoon Street in February 2011. After a few months, Farrell said she “wanted to bring more teachers in, teach more classes and create a community.” She rented space behind Holsome and opened Gratitude Yoga the following January.

Because her experience practicing yoga had been primarily private and personal, Farrell never expected she would teach. Yet teaching, she has found, is a practice in itself.

“You’re watching other people and trying to connect with their experience,” Farrell said. Rather than take away from the privacy of her yoga, teaching has changed Farrell’s own practice. Now, when she practices, she said she “thinks about how this might feel to a different person,” Farrell explained, and how she might share her own experience with others in class.

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Farrell teaches three to five classes a day, while the studio offers over three dozen sessions a week taught by 14 other instructors. Like many other yoga studios, Gratitude’s classes are funded by donations.

“It’s an ancient practice in yoga,” Farrell explained. “The idea is that you’re transmitting these teachings that are eternal and valuable and not receiving any monetary compensation.”

Any donations and fees from private and semi-private classes go toward paying the rent. Retail space in Princeton, according to Farrell, is not cheap; she does not expect Gratitude to be a profitable business, just a sustainable one.

Farrell said the Princeton community is particularly well-suited to the character of her yoga studio. Unlike in Manhattan, Farrell said, Princeton has a sense of “consonance and camaraderie.” Part of the energy, Farrell said, is due to the influx of “young people who are just open-minded, receptive, positive and at [an] exciting time in their lives.”

Farrell’s classes are well attended by students, including a number of varsity athletes — namely members of the track, tennis and football teams.

“They’ve said it’s really changed their game,” Farrell said of the football players. “They’re so strong, but flexibility is a different thing.”

Clare Gallagher ’14, who began attending yoga classes this year with her track teammates, likened Farrell to a fairy godmother.

“She is the upmost inviting, kind and contagiously happy person to all people she meets,” Gallagher said.

Gallagher explained that women’s track head coach Peter Farrell — who is not related to Gemma Farrell — began the bi-weekly yoga sessions due to popular demand by some of the older distance runners on the team who had been taking classes from Gemma Farrell for years.

“She is very thoughtful to our training, as she knows we are doing her classes in addition to our normal practices,” Gallagher said. While she estimated that three-quarters of her teammates had never done yoga before, she said the individualized aspect of the activity made it easy to begin.

“No one is timing how long you hold your Soldier One pose or how deep your breath is,” Gallagher explained.

Moreover, Gallagher said the class has allowed for team bonding in a sport that is usually split into event groups for normal practices. “Everyone can do yoga, and it is great for our flexibility and core.”

While Farrell has shared yoga with her students and her family — her eldest daughter, a dancer, and her husband often attend classes — she still retains her own private practice schedule every day.

“When I’m teaching, I don’t practice,” Farrell explained. Instead, she walks around the room adjusting students’ poses and only occasionally performs them herself to demonstrate. She leaves her true yoga for mornings at home.

“I think no matter what I’m doing in terms of my workday and where I am in the world, [yoga and meditation] are always part of my essence,” Farrell said. “I can take it with me everywhere.”