Monday, March 8, 2010

Deep relaxation

I actually dropped this class weeks ago, and I meant to write about it but never got around to it. So I'll write about it now, even though the topic has, for all intents and purposes, expired. The class was called "Yoga: Gentle and Restorative".

It was not a class I needed for anything, but I figured it would be good to take a gym class, just for a way to force myself to go to the gym more often (because nothing forces me to do something like the threat of a pass/fail grade!), which turned out not to be necessary because I've actually been going to the gym three days a week consistently, yay me! Anyway. I thought it would be like regular yoga, with the breathing and the holding uncomfortable positions to build strength and flexibility, but it was not.

It turns out that the "gentle and restorative" part actually means "meditation bullshit" part. And I don't mean "bullshit" in the casual, hyperbolic way I usually use it.

The teacher constantly used the words "gentle" and "restorative" and "relaxing" and "deep relaxtion", which, yes, is actually two words. I realised, on the first day of class where he just showed us the "equipment" (I'll get to that in a minute), that this class was not going to be the yoga I thought it was. But that's okay, I thought, Why not take two hours out of my week to relax all my muscles and my brain and get all those great zen-ish benefits he's rambling on about?

I should've known better. Because part of our "equipment" was blankets.

The next week, when we actually started the "yoga", I quickly discovered what it really was: glorified nap time. We sat in "poses", sometimes for almost twenty minutes at a time, usually laying down on our backs, covered in blankets. And you know what I did in that first class? I FELL ASLEEP.

"Didn't that feel great?" the instructor (I refuse to call him a professor) asked.

"That felt like a nap," I whispered to the girl next to me.

1 comment:

  1. That sounds awful and hilarious.

    I took a yoga class once a week. But it's wasn't relaxing at all, just bunches of stretches I couldn't do. I had fun because my friend was there, but didn't feel too bad dropping it for mock trial.

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