Let me tell you about yoga! I love yoga! It's all I want to do, and I keep reading the blogs of other yogis to see what they are doing and how they are practicing, because it's so interesting!
I started doing yoga about 18 months ago, when I was taking a chemistry class and I made friends with another woman in the class who said she was going to get back to doing yoga to help herself relax and be less stressed. She asked if I wanted to do it with her, and because she was fun and I wanted to do something with her, I said I would go, too.
I told my friend Shelley about it and she wanted to sign up, too, so we all started taking yoga class at the Y on Monday and Thursdays, and it was great! I thought it was all going to be stretching and listening to sitar music, but it turns out that yoga is a lot of hard, sweaty work! Who knew?
So Laura,Shelley and I kept going and gradually got to know other people in the classes and invited a couple more of our friends to go with us, and here we are, a year and a half later, still going, and we love it.
The Thursday class started out being the easy class, with a teacher whose style focused more on breathing and just easier postures, and then when that teacher moved on, there was another teacher, and still, Thursday was the easy class, but then on the next session, we got a new teacher who was very different!
Chris was teaching the class to fulfill the requirements to finish her 200 hour teaching certification, and she brought a whole new outlook and a different style to our yoga classes! Rachel called it Boot Camp Yoga, because it was hard work!
The Thursday class had always been the less attended class, with a smaller enrollment and like any class, as the session went on, people would drop out, but with Chris, it really started to weed out the class, and I mean really fast! We'd get 12 or 15 people the first week of the session, but they would drop like flies and after a couple of weeks, it was just down to the six or seven dedicated followers again. It was hard but we loved it!
Then, toward the end of the last session, Chris was suddenly gone. The last two classes of the session were cancelled, and we were told there would be no Thursday class for the new session! We were all shocked, and we don't know what happened there, except maybe a couple of health issues that she had mentioned, her own, and her mom's.
So, there we were, wishing that we could get three classes a week, and suddenly we are down to one! I tried a class at another gym, but that place was kind of ghetto and the teacher was, well, she was no Chris!
The Monday teacher had tried using a borrowed space downtown to start a class that met Tuesday and Thursday, which was great - for one week. Then the space was rented to a martial arts group, so that was no good.
I suggested to Shelley that we could meet on Tuesdays and Thursdays at the church and use a DVD to follow for classes, and she thought it was a good plan, so we invited our core group from the Thursday class, and that's what we've been doing for a month.
It's been really good for me because I ended up doing yoga daily as I previewed DVDs for us to see if they were appropriate for our interests and skill levels. There are a lot of different styles of yoga, and we aren't interested in some of them.
So that's what's been going on, but last night I found out that our Monday teacher will probably be teaching the Thursday class too, starting with the next session, and that's fine. We'll stop doing the Tuesday and Thursday class at the church, and just go to the Y for the two weekly classes and practice at home on our own if we want more.
I learned from this that it's doable to have a home practice, and I made space in the den for a 'yoga room' by giving away our old couch, so I have a space to practice in.
The best thing is that I found a website called Yogaglo.com that has classes in all different kinds of yoga styles,where you can pay a small monthly fee and then you can take as many classes as you want. I love it!
