I have a cousin who is always trying to get our family to discover new ground, connect with our natural selves and with our ancestry. Nicole is not quite a prolific e-mailer, but she’s almost there, so it’s really pure luck or perhaps Divine intervention, that I opened her flyer on kemetic yoga.I think the ‘yoga’ caught my attention, as did the ‘kemetic’. “What the heck is kemetic?” I thought.The flyer said the classes, “for the entire family”, would help me discover how to have “better focus in a world that tries to keep you distracted from making dramatic changes; more creativity to solve problems by thinking outside the box and; inner peace the foundation of health, power and enlightenment”.Pleased as punch that I could gain this without taking a pill or any other type of drug I e-mailed for an interview with the practitioners. I wanted to put the information in Body & Soul. I got no response so I called after 5pm and spoke very briefly with Latoya Bridgewater of the Bermuda African Dance Company. Speaking too quickly for me to take notes, she invited me to the class being held that evening. I called my husband and asked if he could shoot, then rushed out for the class.Henry, my husband, promptly met me at the Bermuda African Dance Company’s studio in the old Berkeley Institute. His shooting allowed me to concentrate solely on the class.I’ve had a lot of introductory and beginner yoga classes most all in hatha yoga. I expected this class to be very similar to them, with slow deliberate movements where you don’t push yourself to go further than your body feels able; where your movements are made in time with your breath and where you control your breath.All of this did happen in the class, but the beginning was a more active awakening of the body than I had experienced in any previous yoga class.Led by kemetic yoga master Basu Asr Aunkh Aakhu from Miami, Florida, the class unanimously breathed in while lifting our arms overhead, and exhaled as we brought our arms down. We also had to massage our palms with our thumbs, tap our hands, arms, legs and feet, massage our necks and slap our lower backs.The warm-up was designed to wake up the cells and free the muscles of the lactic acid that causes them to tighten. I found it actually conditioned my mind into believing the yoga was releasing stress and making me healthier.As he guided us through the postures, kemetic yoga master Aunkh introduced us to meditation and positive affirmations.While some of the poses were new to me, I don’t believe any were essentially different from those used in hatha yoga. What was strikingly different to me was that we did not chant ‘Om’, the primordial sound (according to hatha yoga). At the end of the series I really felt like that was going to happen, but it didn’t. We held our hands in prayer mode and said “hotep, hotep, hotep” which I’ve learned is Kemet for “peace, peace peace”. It did leave me with a very settled, happy, slightly invigorated feeling for the rest of the day.