Prompt: My Yoga Experience (12/14-online) Summarize your practice experience over the semester. Your final journaling should reflect the knowledge you have gained over the course of the semester, using your experience to make sense of the history and philosophy of practice.
Response: I went into this class seeing yoga as a form of exercise and as a type of spiritual practice, although I wasn’t sure of the specifics of that spirituality. I saw many skinny, vegan, barefoot influencers on Instagram becoming yoga teachers or going on yoga retreats in foreign countries and I very much bought into the image of western yoga as a healthy lifestyle one should seek to attain. I went to many heated power yoga classes and dabbled in a few yin practices and believed I knew the general way a yoga class could go. It appears, however, that I really knew nothing at all.
This class really opened my eyes on the origins of yoga, the different schools and adaptations the practice has gone through to fit into western society. I went into the first couple in class practices surprised at how different they were from what I was used to, and I came to appreciate the unique opportunity to experience each different form of physical practice yoga that this class offered me. Practicing yoga each week while also learning about yoga’s history, philosophy, and transformation as it made its way into western culture made the class especially in-depth and effective for me.
It surprised me that yoga as a physical practice was a very new phenomenon, and that yoga originated as a way to get out of one’s physical body and connect with a higher reality. It was extremely interesting to watch the film “naked in ashes” about the nomadic yogis in India who preform austerities such as giving up eating or sitting down, keeping one’s arm raised above the head until it dies, meditating surrounded by burning cow dung, and contorting their bodies in extremely uncomfortable positions as a way to get out of their physical bodies and connect to a higher power. They cover themselves with ashes to symbolize that their bodies are already dead, and to them what they are doing is yoga. I would have never expected that the origins of our sex culture driven industrialized form of yoga came from these practices.
The history of yoga from this eastern spiritual practice of disconnecting with the physical body into a western practice of perfecting and beautifying the body was a tumultuous one. Because the United States is defined by such a generally unhealthy and stressed out way of life, it makes sense that we were able to have yoga sold to us by way of orientalism. When the physical culture movement came about and yogis such as Iyengar began to sell yoga as a form of fitness to achieve the perfect body, its popularity in western society skyrocketed. Since then, yoga has been turned into a money making empire, with many people flocking to stores such as Lululemon for the perfect yoga pants that will make them have a sexy yoga butt, ogling lithe and fit Instagram yogis as they pose in perfect handstands with some picturesque backdrop, and packing into yoga studios or searching for videos online in hopes of achieving beautiful bodies, pain relief, stress relief, better sleep, better sex lives, and even more financial success. Yoga has been commercialized as a quick and easy cure all that people in America are naturally enamored by, and it sells.
I also bought into the image that yoga sells to westerners prior to this class, and I was very surprised to learn that yoga actually slows the heart rate and is not an effective way to burn fat due to the connection of slow and steady breathing with the physical movement. Much of yoga is and has historically been about gaining control of the breath, which is something I have struggled with for years and that I like to believe I have improved upon thanks to constant practice this semester.
I really enjoyed getting to take many different yoga classes that were offered during class time. I doubt that I would have ever even heard about half of these practices, far less actually practiced them, had it not been for me taking this class, and it also helped bring the lessons on these different schools of yoga and their contribution to the yoga we experience today up close and personal. It’s one thing to learn about a yoga practice in lecture, and a very different (and in my opinion, better) thing to physically do that practice as taught by a skilled instructor who specializes in it. I thought that that was very unique and it was probably my favorite element of the whole class.
I learned a lot about yoga from this class and it has really changed my perspective on yoga as a whole. I wanted to take this class since my freshman year at Stockton simply because I thought it would be fun to do and learn about yoga all semester, but I never anticipated to have all I thought I knew about yoga completely turned on its head. I have finally gotten better at breath control and meditation, which I never thought I would do, but I have also learned so much about where yoga came from, I have had so many myths that I fully believed about yoga busted, and I also snapped out of the consumeristic appeal western yoga has on young and often insecure women. Yoga was never anticipated to be a practice to attain a beautiful body and a beautiful lifestyle, and the knowledge of yoga’s origins can attest to that. Yoga is so much more than the physical practice many in the west are accustomed to. It is meditation, extreme focus, and transcendence from the physical body. While I may never practice yoga in a more traditional sense, I can go into my heated power yoga classes and notice which poses were taken from ashtanga, I can recognize when a yoga teacher quotes from the hatha yoga pradipika and know which parts are being left out, and I can separate yoga as a practice from the sex appeal material culture based form it takes on in popular culture today.
Response: I went into this class seeing yoga as a form of exercise and as a type of spiritual practice, although I wasn’t sure of the specifics of that spirituality. I saw many skinny, vegan, barefoot influencers on Instagram becoming yoga teachers or going on yoga retreats in foreign countries and I very much bought into the image of western yoga as a healthy lifestyle one should seek to attain. I went to many heated power yoga classes and dabbled in a few yin practices and believed I knew the general way a yoga class could go. It appears, however, that I really knew nothing at all.
This class really opened my eyes on the origins of yoga, the different schools and adaptations the practice has gone through to fit into western society. I went into the first couple in class practices surprised at how different they were from what I was used to, and I came to appreciate the unique opportunity to experience each different form of physical practice yoga that this class offered me. Practicing yoga each week while also learning about yoga’s history, philosophy, and transformation as it made its way into western culture made the class especially in-depth and effective for me.
It surprised me that yoga as a physical practice was a very new phenomenon, and that yoga originated as a way to get out of one’s physical body and connect with a higher reality. It was extremely interesting to watch the film “naked in ashes” about the nomadic yogis in India who preform austerities such as giving up eating or sitting down, keeping one’s arm raised above the head until it dies, meditating surrounded by burning cow dung, and contorting their bodies in extremely uncomfortable positions as a way to get out of their physical bodies and connect to a higher power. They cover themselves with ashes to symbolize that their bodies are already dead, and to them what they are doing is yoga. I would have never expected that the origins of our sex culture driven industrialized form of yoga came from these practices.
The history of yoga from this eastern spiritual practice of disconnecting with the physical body into a western practice of perfecting and beautifying the body was a tumultuous one. Because the United States is defined by such a generally unhealthy and stressed out way of life, it makes sense that we were able to have yoga sold to us by way of orientalism. When the physical culture movement came about and yogis such as Iyengar began to sell yoga as a form of fitness to achieve the perfect body, its popularity in western society skyrocketed. Since then, yoga has been turned into a money making empire, with many people flocking to stores such as Lululemon for the perfect yoga pants that will make them have a sexy yoga butt, ogling lithe and fit Instagram yogis as they pose in perfect handstands with some picturesque backdrop, and packing into yoga studios or searching for videos online in hopes of achieving beautiful bodies, pain relief, stress relief, better sleep, better sex lives, and even more financial success. Yoga has been commercialized as a quick and easy cure all that people in America are naturally enamored by, and it sells.
I also bought into the image that yoga sells to westerners prior to this class, and I was very surprised to learn that yoga actually slows the heart rate and is not an effective way to burn fat due to the connection of slow and steady breathing with the physical movement. Much of yoga is and has historically been about gaining control of the breath, which is something I have struggled with for years and that I like to believe I have improved upon thanks to constant practice this semester.
I really enjoyed getting to take many different yoga classes that were offered during class time. I doubt that I would have ever even heard about half of these practices, far less actually practiced them, had it not been for me taking this class, and it also helped bring the lessons on these different schools of yoga and their contribution to the yoga we experience today up close and personal. It’s one thing to learn about a yoga practice in lecture, and a very different (and in my opinion, better) thing to physically do that practice as taught by a skilled instructor who specializes in it. I thought that that was very unique and it was probably my favorite element of the whole class.
I learned a lot about yoga from this class and it has really changed my perspective on yoga as a whole. I wanted to take this class since my freshman year at Stockton simply because I thought it would be fun to do and learn about yoga all semester, but I never anticipated to have all I thought I knew about yoga completely turned on its head. I have finally gotten better at breath control and meditation, which I never thought I would do, but I have also learned so much about where yoga came from, I have had so many myths that I fully believed about yoga busted, and I also snapped out of the consumeristic appeal western yoga has on young and often insecure women. Yoga was never anticipated to be a practice to attain a beautiful body and a beautiful lifestyle, and the knowledge of yoga’s origins can attest to that. Yoga is so much more than the physical practice many in the west are accustomed to. It is meditation, extreme focus, and transcendence from the physical body. While I may never practice yoga in a more traditional sense, I can go into my heated power yoga classes and notice which poses were taken from ashtanga, I can recognize when a yoga teacher quotes from the hatha yoga pradipika and know which parts are being left out, and I can separate yoga as a practice from the sex appeal material culture based form it takes on in popular culture today.
Comments
Post a Comment