An Appreciable Affinity: Exploring Yoga Programming in Public, School, and Academic Library Settings

Media images associated with mindfulness and self-care often stress the need for quiet, space and time for contemplation, and a liminal setting apart from the daily routines of work and homelife. These place-based attributes associated with settings promoting mindfulness parallel many characteristics of spaces in libraries, particularly those in school, public, and university settings. After a brief foray into building more collaborative and constructivist spaces, in the past two years, libraries of all varieties have harkened back to earlier models to dedicate space – both physical and intellectual -- for students and faculty who found new challenges to working from home. Over the past two years, libraries have found that quiet floors, reserves carrels, and allocated study rooms a practicality for enforcing social distancing, became an unanticipated luxury for library-goers negotiating a pandemicera collision of home and study. These suggest more opportunities for sharing impactful self-care practices like yoga through library instruction and programming.