Morning yoga

Happy Saturday, everyone!  This morning I managed to get motivated and gave a new YouTube yoga video a try.  It was led by the same teacher as the other one I’ve been using.  This one was a “heart expanding” practice.  I’m not really sure what that means, but it had lots of backbends and other interesting things.  (I’m very inflexible in the morning!  Grabbing my feet for bow pose nearly didn’t happen at all.)  I liked it pretty well, and it’s true that yoga is fantastic for clearing one’s mind in the morning.

Last night I had tried another video with a different teacher– she talked about a new line of yoga clothing, and yammered on about some Hindu deities, and then she did a lying twist that smashed my boobs into the floor painfully.  I am sad to say that I ragequit that video, and will be avoiding that teacher from now on.

Tangentially, this leads to one thing I don’t really like about yoga– all the woo attached to it.  For me, yoga is a physical practice– I’m agnostic at best, and don’t believe in any great spiritual universal forces.  (Do the laws of physics count?)  If people want to envision their bodies filling with spiritual energy and light, that’s fine; I’m just not really inclined to care about that stuff.  Yoga was born as a spiritual practice, and I want to honor it as such, but I’m okay with it being physical for myself.  It makes me feel good, warms up my body, loosens my joints, builds strength and flexibility.  That’s enough.