by Julie Hall on October 2, 2011.

Cofounder, Administrator, and Board President of The Island Yoga Space, Sue Steindorf practically stretches herself into a downward-facing dog position to be sure to stand out of the spotlight and credit everyone involved in the organization. Although Steindorf is the Yoga Space’s manager and guiding force, she is committed to a wider vision for it as a community sacred space that embraces all comers, at just about any ability level and age.

Although yoga is what defines The Space, the people who use it interpret yoga in its broadest sense, as much about a spiritual and emotional pursuit as about a physical practice. Openness and growth, inclusion and respect are words that come up often when Steindorf talks about the place and the work people do there.

So what is The Island Yoga Space? Located next to Island Aikido down a little hill in the southeast corner of Coppertop Loop, The Space is a really rather simple room. Painted in warm orange and green tones, grounded with a light wood floor, and bespeckled with star lanterns, the room is large enough to pack in 80 or 90 people for musical performances but not so big that small classes don’t feel a cozy kind of connectedness.

Sue Steindorf

These days about twenty teachers offer a wide range of classes there each week. There are yoga classes for kids, tweens, teens, and adults. There are pilates classes and tantric meditation groups. There are dance, feldenkrais movement, and unconditional laughter classes. Kids with disabilities show up. People with cancer show up. Women, men, girls, and boys show up. There are book groups with first-class guest authors like Claire Dederer. There are movie groups, solstice gatherings, astrology classes, and Indian music performances. Steve Gold has played there.

There also are yoga retreats for instructors. One yoga teacher, who came from Kirkland, told Sue he had gone to yoga retreats all over the country for years and thought the one at The Island Yoga Space was the most worthwhile of any he had attended.

Steindorf wasn’t always a yoga teacher. She started her career as a physical therapist, working first at Children’s Hospital in Seattle and then for twenty years in the Bainbridge Public Schools. More and more she was seeing kids with special needs—kids with Down Syndrome, Cerebral Palsy, and spectrum issues like Autism and Asberger’s, as well as “quirky” kids who just didn’t fit well into the traditional classroom structure. She said she was watching them grow up into adults who were alienated from their bodies, often unfit and overweight.

The Island Yoga Space.

Looking for ways to help teach these kids lifelong healthy practices, Steindorf accidentally stumbled into yoga. She had tagged along with her husband to a few yoga classes but was by no means a convert. It took strenuous pressure from colleagues and friends to get her to attend a yoga retreat, Yogaville, in Virginia. She says when she came back she was a different person.

A friend asked her to offer a yoga group for teen girls in crisis, and the group was so helpful for the girls that people kept on asking Steindorf to offer more resources for the community.

In 2005 she and a loose group of practitioners rented the space in Sportsman Park on Coppertop Loop and started a co-op. But in time the landlord wanted steady rent, and the co-op organization wasn’t working, so in 2009 Steindorf fronted the money and leadership to turn it into a nonprofit organization with a board of directors. Calling it her “unplanned pregnancy,” Steindorf isn’t joking with the metaphor. She sees her role as “raising a baby for the community,” offering “whatever seems to show up.”

Board member and instructor at The Island Yoga Space, psychotherapist Elizabeth Turner says, “Sue creates a wonderful atmosphere—the opposite of a yoga mill type of experience.” Turner points out that new research shows that yoga “is a tremendous tool for healing.” A longtime practitioner of yoga and mindfulness, Turner was drawn to Steindorf’s philosophy of yoga, which isn’t body-centric but instead “with intention creates a healthy community spiritually, physically, and emotionally.”

As for the kids in Steindorf’s current fall Kids Yoga class, yoga is many things. Eight-year-old Rachel says it’s a chance to “stretch out into the room and move my body.” And she likes the star lights. For 4-year-old Tobin, who has Cardiomyopathy, a permanent heart condition that makes vigorous activity potentially fatal, the class is a chance to get to move and learn about his body without putting too much strain on his heart.

Steindorf says working with differently-abled kids is one of her favorite parts of her work. She believes they often have a closer connection with the sacred in and around themselves, to which many of us are too often blind. One of her most inspiring moments was working with a high-functioning autistic boy who got deep into the place of “satchidananda,” the union of “truth,” “knowledge,” and “joy.” It is the place she hopes everyone will find when they arrive at The Island Yoga Space.

For more information about The Island Yoga Space and its classes and events, visit their website.