Yoga East Meets West Spring 2018

Iyengar yoga is a form of hatha yoga that has an emphasis on detail, precision and alignment in the performance of posture and your breath control.  What I first noticed was that there were a lot of props needed for this certain type of practice.  In other classes, teachers encourage using blocks if you cannot get into a pose or need help touching the ground.  In this class, Annie was telling us to use the block more often than other classes.  I liked this because I did not feel like the outcast using a block, it made more poses that I did not think i could get into more possible and we focused a lot more on the posture and where our arms and fingers were and where we were looking and where our gaze was during each pose.  At the end we used bands to do a stretch which I think would have been impossible for me to do without the band helping me. 

This week, I went to a hot yoga class at my gym.  The teacher who normally teaches was not there so there was a substitute in for her.  Just after walking in, I could tell that this teacher was going to be harder than the one who is normally there, the teacher was very nice and friendly while everyone was making their way into the room but there was something about her made me feel that this class was going to be harder.  I wasn't intimidated, I was actually excited because that morning I woke up, did not feel groggy and wanted a challenge in class.  We started off with sun salutations, the teacher told us we had to awaken our body and our mind and this was the perfect way to do it.  I noticed that my body was starting to warm up and the heat in the room was becoming more noticeable and my body was moving more freely as it was warming up.  This class was not as fast paced as other hot yoga classes that I have been to in the past but I still enjoyed it because we were still doing a

The practice we participated on March 8th in class was called Sivananda Yoga.  The instructor who taught our class was very patient with us, this practice was one I was not familiar with but I enjoyed the practice a lot. Sivananda yoga is a non-proprietary form of hatha yoga in which the training focuses on preserving the health and wellness of the practitioner which is why we took breaks, I liked the breaks we got to take during the practice because it gave everyone a chance to breathe and reconnect with themselves before moving on to the next pose or poses we did.  At the end of practice i felt very relaxed, I liked the way the teacher taught this type of yoga and explained to us before starting the history of Swami Sivananda and why he began to do this practice and when.  I wasn't used to setting our mats up the way we did and doing the practice while being directly in front of someone with them looking in my direction the entire time, it was a little strange at first but I rea