Homecoming: Down Under’s Return to Central Square
There are moments in a life, and in the life of a school, that pulsate with a quiet inevitability—when what once was dreamt on bare floorboards and whispered among friends becomes once again tangible, real, embodied.
This fall, Down Under opens its seventh home in Central Square - the very place where it all began.
It was here, on Friday nights long ago, that Nadja, Carin, and I met as young teachers-in-the-making, drawn not by nightlife or distraction, but by a different kind of revelry: two luminous hours of asana, philosophy, and inquiry under the watchful and generous eye of Patricia Walden. While the world outside was rushing on, we laid down mats and unrolled wellworn blankets in a church basement and gathered around ancient texts. The teachings were rigorous, tender, uncompromising. The space, humble. The atmosphere, charged with authenticity.
We’d walk through Graffiti Alley, past walls lit with color and protest and play. We shared food at tiny tables from every corner of the globe, bumped elbows with physicists, poets, and curious minds from MIT and beyond. We were young, and the world felt vast and intimate all at once. We did not yet know what we were building—only that it mattered.
Nadja is no longer with us in form, but her spirit breathes through these walls. Patricia, still teaching, remains the luminous heart of a lineage that continues to unfold. And what began as three teachers has become one hundred—a collective of teachers bound by a deep reverence for the craft, the scholarship, and the sheer devotional fire of practice.
This return to Central Square is more than a new chapter—it is a homecoming. It is the full circle. The echo of a vow once made in the quiet after class, now fulfilled.
Down Under was never just a studio. It was, and remains, a school: a community shaped not by trend but by tradition, not by performance but by practice. Twenty years on, we return to where the spark was first lit—with our feet on the same ground, our hearts a little fuller, and our purpose unwavering.
Life, lived in full color.
Practice, held in the quiet constancy of intention.
A community, no longer becoming—but fully, unmistakably arrived.
With love, always—
Justine
