Jayne Recalls The Invention Of Aerial Yoga And How It Came To Be:

Warming up for rehearsal one day with Frequent Flyers Productions, I looked over and saw company member, Glenn Davis, in a cross legged hip hang on the trapeze. Glenn and I were both yogis in the company and I was quietly impressed that he could do an inverted lotus pose and just be chilling upside down. Little did Glenn know that this would be the seed that was planted in my head for the invention of aerial yoga.  Fast forward a few years. Nancy called me in Baltimore to asked what I wanted to teach at the Aerial Dance Festival the following summer. The image of Glenn popped into my head and I told her I had the idea of creating an aerial yoga class.  I wasn’t sure if she’d be up for an experimental class and after I proposed the idea she said: “Go for it.”

 

That Spring and Summer I went into the studio almost every day to develop and invent postures that could be partially suspended or completely suspended in the air.  The marriage of aerial and yoga was quite effortless and I was thrilled at how little tweaking postures needed to work in the air. I discovered I could go much deeper in some stretching postures when partly on the ground and in the air. My stabilization was more challenged for certain postures and I put together several aerial yoga sequences that flowed from the ground upward into the air.

 

Some of these newly invented airborne postures needed names.  Some I’d put more thought behind, such as: floating buddha (it reminded me of a statue in my bedroom). Other times, names would just roll off my tongue while teaching as they'd needed a quick name so I’d call out:  eggasana, because we’d curl up in a ball egg shaped while in a knee hang. Or if we were turning 360 around by our hips, I'd jokingly call it rotisserie asana as it felt like a skewer through our hips at the rotation point.  The best thing was that these names stuck!  It’s hard to put into words the “WOW” feeling of surprise and delight when my students would practice these invented postures with their proclaimed (and sometimes silly) names.  

 

When I tried to copyright Aerial Yoga, I was denied because the name was too broad of a term. 

Since the inception of Aerial Yoga at the 2003 Aerial Dance Festival, it has spread around the world

and is practiced all over the globe.