Yoga at Home

Since Craig had a hockey game tonight, I decided to dust off one of my yoga videos. I haven't been able to do yoga at home for a while. Between the early mornings with the boys and the trucks strewn across the floor, I've been having a hard time finding the zen space. But tonight, the boys went to bed without a fuss and I had some time all to myself. Yoga would be the best use of my time, I thought. Stay away from Facebook, don't check email, just go start the DVD.

I'm glad I did, since it was kind of a learning experience. Since I haven't done this DVD in a long time, it was virtually new to me (one from Gaiam if you're curious). It was certainly well done, and very serene, but I found myself wondering, "How do people do this if they've never done yoga before?" To increase the connection with your energy (or something like that) there was no instruction throughout the practice. Only the voice telling you, albeit in a soothing tone, which pose to move in and out of next. At one point there was even a sequence with six poses in a row, but hard poses!

The yoga teacher training has changed my perspective on such matters. Now instead of thinking, "This is hard!" I think, "Wow, you could really hurt yourself if you didn't know what you're supposed to do in each pose!" This DVD in particular was rather rapid fire from pose to pose, and that's certainly not the type of yoga that we're learning. I like ours better; there's more flow and build up to each pose so you feel like you're ready for it.

Anyway, just a realization that I feel like I am learning quite a lot in this training program. It's great, although the side effect is that I tend to critique the classes (or DVDs) that I take for better or worse.