I went to Megan’s—she is the other instructor at the Community Center—class last Saturday.  Good class, focused mainly on postures and vinyasa.  She also kept the room dark and used background music, two things I’ve never experienced during a class.  While in savasana she offered to place a scented, dry wash cloth over our eyes; as I was there for the full experience of her class, I went for it and that made three completely new experiences for me.  I had difficulty in all the usual places, I love my hips! (and knees and hams and … well … all of me!)  The main thing I came away with was that, as a student, I wanted more.  I wanted to understand what the postures were doing and why this posture followed the first one.  With that in mind, I reworked my own teaching direction.  We’ll move through a core set of poses and then focus on related poses for the balance of the time.  At least, that was my goal going into tonight’s class.

Tonight’s class had seven students.  Three were new to Yoga or relatively new.  The other four were clearly long time yogi.  After talking for a moment or two after class with one of them, I am having to rethink my rethinking.  I will definitely still keep a staid pace in the Monday class but perhaps Wednesday should be less instruction and more practice?  You long time readers already know that I must be facing a great struggle within me over this.  I am quite opposed to gym yoga which is basically aerobics disguised as Yoga.  There is so much more to Yoga than simply the postures and so little time to even touch on it in an hour class!  Worse, the Asana should be meditation in motion and bouncing from posture to posture is anything but meditative.  I can tell though, that many of the students are looking for a yoga workout rather than Yoga and my brief conversation this evening comfirmed that.

It appears that I will have to meditate on this tonight and tomorrow.

Quick note about the class links on the left, I just discovered tonight that the link was broken from the blog but not from the home page.  Take a quick guess where I checked the link?  Anyway, the link is fixed but as I’m reworking my notes and materials, it leads nowhere.  I will have my basic notes and instructions on standing postures available sometime tomorrow.  I will make a note here when I post them.

Namasté