The other evening, a blog about the current protests happening in Istanbul caught my eye and my heart. The very next morning, as if by magic, my Facebook feed announced that the amazing and musical Chris Chavez was leading a practice in Gezi Park. And he’s been doing it every day for the past several. I wrote to ask Chris if he would share his experience with us and he said yes. This is what he shared with me (and ps: he is the sweetest, nicest person one could meet over the internet). ~ Bryonie

Hey love,

Just reading your questions and thinking about the answers brought tears to my eyes. It is such a powerful time here right now, a time of transformation! To see every part of society taking part in that is unbelievable.

BW: There is a blog making it’s way around FB that details the violence being used against the peaceful protests.

CC: Yes, she is one of our teachers and she is an amazing spirit! I saw the picture of the friend she mentions in the blog, who had been hit in the head with a tear-gas canister and I couldn’t sleep for two days. It was unbelievable.

BW: Can you put me in the middle and connect me to the heart of what is happening?

CC: The protests in some form or another have been going on for awhile now. I am one of the owners of Cihangir Yoga here in Istanbul, and some of our teachers have been camping out and doing yoga gatherings at Gezi park for weeks now.

To be honest, I travel so much that I didn’t really know what was going on there until last Friday (like most of the city and the country).

A brief background to this is that the “ruling” party had decided to demolish Gezi Park, which is the last green space in Taksim, in order to build a replica Ottoman military barracks that would also have a shopping mall in it. People were outraged, but only 2,000 people went out and did anything about it.

Early Friday morning, while the protestors were sleeping, the police entered the park and burned their tents, beat them with clubs, and violently pepper sprayed those who were standing around. When I say violently pepper sprayed people, the police were running through the crowd chasing people, spraying them and then kicking them. It was very disturbing to watch.

Within minutes, this abuse was up on Facebook and Tweets were going out all over the world; within hours, thousands had gathered in Taksim Square to voice their outrage about the abuse.

As people turned on their television to see what was going on, there was not a single channel covering it; CNN Turkey was doing a documentary on penguins, for example.

Now, the penguin has become the movement’s mascot—hilarious!

Soon after it started, one of the least viewed stations started covering it and I am sure it instantly became “the people’s channel.”

We got on Facebook to see what was going on and it was unreal. Taksim Square and Gezi Park looked like a war zone—I didn’t recognize it! One of our studios is only 200 meters from where all of this was happening—the situation immediately felt so close, so real, and so unbelievably impossible—all in one moment.