Forrest Yoga

[libitina]

So I tried yoga a few times and always walked away until this delightful yoga studio opened up near me, and I walked in only a couple months after they opened - and still practice yoga there three years later.

While there are many styles of yoga taught there, the core of the place and the style practiced by the founders is Forrest Yoga. This is totally a case of a Westerner "making up shit, slapping a brand name on it, and calling it a new type of yoga." And even though I've only met her a couple times, and only professionally, that the founder of the style - Ana Forrest - is batshit insane seems batshit insane to me. That said, I love this yoga.

It's a lot like Hatha yoga and is strongly informed by Iyengar yoga. While there is an A series and a B series, most of the order and selection on poses is individual to each class - there might be one more emphasizing hip openers or a day emphasizing shoulders. Poses are held, but not usually for more than a minute or two. Props are often used, but for about 20% of the class.

The main ( differences between Forrest Yoga and most other yoga styles )

Other than that, it's just yoga. But let me also take a moment to talk about how delightful my yoga studio is. ( Read more... )

Shadow yoga: the weird shit

[rydra_wong]

"What is shadow yoga, anyway?" said one of the women at the reception desk when I went to get my ticket for the class today, because apparently the universe wanted me to have a convenient hook for this post.

"It's the weird stuff," I said, managing to censor myself at the last moment and not say "weird shit."

Then I recited the potted history of how a strange Hungarian-Australian yoga practitioner, Zhander Remete, did some intensive study of the hatha yoga texts from the medieval period, back when hatha yoga was an esoteric and somewhat disreputable practice which might enable you to project yourself astrally or attain immortality. Based on his reading -- and his studies of martial arts and Ayurvedic medicine -- he decided that modern people, Westerners in particular, were often not fully prepared for asana practice.

And he invented these practice forms, the three "Preludes", which are designed to prepare the body for asana practice, both on a physical level and on an energetic one, working on the joints and muscles and on energy blockages at the same time (the "shadow" in the name refers to the koshas, the five "sheaths" of the self in Vedantic philosophy).

The result is something that looks like a peculiar (but rather beautiful) mixture of yoga, tai chi, and martial arts. Here are some samples from the Preludes for you:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LTWUq4GB0Gw
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4RBrNhfocHs
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gGW13qHrT9E
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sjUBwr8DiwM
http://vimeo.com/28173594 (the loooong warm-up that starts all the sessions)

Here's a longer video of a demonstration at a yoga conference, which gives some idea of how the forms progress from simple warm-up movements through to the complex and scary:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VhFOiBA3ajY (NSFW for shirtless yoga dude)

Here is where I need to say that I'm still not sure what I'm doing in a shadow yoga class.

( Cut for length )

ETA: Mods, please can we have a "shadow yoga" tag?