YogaEMW2020

  My Yoga Experience Coming into this class, I didn’t really have any expectations for it. I’d heard of yoga but I’d never really practiced it seriously, so I knew very little about the experience. However now that it’s over, my opinion of yoga has changed drastically from the ignorance I had towards it before. After having practiced every week and gone through so many different practices, along with the information from class, yoga has become something lack-luster for me. I do like the practices, I like to exercise and stretch for sure, but learning how commodified yoga in the west has become has taken away from the experience as a whole. It feels like I’ve been lied to, because yoga portrayed itself as something spiritual, as something healing, and as someone who suffers from mental illness and has many friends that love yoga, I was interested. Specifically the Iyengar Yoga practice that we did, I really enjoyed. However, learning later that Iyengar was one of the proponents to the s

 week 11/24 This week I again used a youtube video on Iyengar yoga. However, as much as I like the actual exercise of going through the motions of Iyengar, I feel like I can’t get deeper now knowing how commodified it has become. It’s really lost is luster for me, it just seems so inauthentic that all of the spiritual bullshit they speak of feels so forced.  I guess you could say that yoga is similar to meditation. You need the dual focus of movement of the body and the breathing. So in that sense it’s comparable to meditation. However I feel as if meditation and yoga are two different things. Maybe it’s because I’m a novice, but when I’m sitting down and meditating it feels much different then doing yoga postures. I also feel as if the purpose of meditation is to be still, and to focus on creating oneness of mind rather than going through yoga postures. Yoga is also a group activity, and I feel like meditation at least for me is something that requires solitude. On top that, maybe my

 Journal for week 11/19 This week I once again meditated for 45 minutes. It’s been an extremely stressful week and I’m bone tired. My mind is full of anxiety about school, family, and friends, and I just didn’t have it in me to practice a yoga poses this week. However I don’t think that mediation should be counted out of yoga, because the sitting poses are more traditional than the standing poses. Personally I used to associate yoga with purely postural yoga, but now honestly my favorite kind of yoga is just meditation. The practice itself really relaxed me, as I focused on simply meditating, it was really freeing to just have my mind cleared of all thoughts. Despite this, it took me about 15 minutes to really get into the meditation because so much has been going on.  The practice space didn’t really matter to me too much honestly, I feel like practicing at home has taken so much out of the class for me. It simply is not the same as it would have been if we’d been able to make real li