Ashtanga yoga practice: Ashtanga yoga has been my favorite style of yoga we have practiced in class. I was familiar with many of the poses, as well as the sun salutations, and I liked feeling like I was challenging myself. It felt like as much of an exercise class designed to get one physically fit as it did a spiritual practice. It reminded me of the many Sundays I have spent doing sun salutations and inversions in a heated studio near my home town, and it made me feel sincerely good to do this practice. I enjoyed how Lauren guided the class as well, as her teaching methods and attitude were very familiar.
Iyengar yoga practice: My experience with Iyengar was definitely surprising. I am used to vinyasa yoga, where the class has a certain amount of flows and series of positions throughout parts of the class. Iyengar is more about doing lots of the same type of poses for a given series and holding them for extended periods of time. I had never been made to hold a certain pose for 30 seconds, nor was I ever given a wall to aid my practice. Iyengar is also very focused on alignment, and our instructor was constantly re positioning and adjusting us so that our pose was perfect. I also was surprised by the difficulty of the poses that the instructor expected us to do. I had experience with crow, sideways crow, and headstand poses, but many people in class did not and we were all expected to do the poses. This struck me as odd and slightly dangerous, but I was impressed with myself for still sort of being able to do some of the difficult poses after not practicing them for a while. The class le...
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