Yoga gets dunked on a lot. Even more when you are a guy doing yoga. It is seen as a feminine and hippie kind of thing.
But that’s a dumb way of thinking, of course.
Yoga is good for flexibility, training your balance, focussing on your breath and staying calm and it even trains strength. A daily yoga session of ten minutes can keep you stretched, flexible, and calm.
As I said, yoga for women is already pretty popular. I know multiple women who do yoga on a regular basis. Men, not so much. But I want to change that, and inspire men to step out of their comfort zone, break the patriarchic view of yoga and keep them fitter.
Who in here has experience with yoga already? Please share your tips and visions!
I like “Yoga with Adrienne”. She makes 30 day series and they get increasingly difficult with each day.
Ive yet to complete one through, but the furthest I’ve gotten is like day 22 I wanna say. Yoga’s great tbh and I should do more of it. For me, it helps provide awareness of my physical state which makes assessing my mental state a lot easier. An ex of mine had told me they did some pose before and it caused her to see colors somehow…weird, I’ve never had that happen.
Sounds a bit woosah to me, but even just the physical effects of yoga alone are amazing.
I’ve been fairly successful doing it on my own from yoga videos (Sarah Beth Yoga on YouTube seems to be where I often end up) and did pay for a subscription to a channel for a while. I can confirm the many health benefits, and it is probably something I need to pick up again.
I’ve not had any ridicule for being a man who does yoga, but I was definitely not very welcome in any of the (almost exclusively female) yoga classes I attended. It sucks, but equally I can see the reasoning, some of the poses are kind of um, open? And people get embarrassed. Less so around people who they generally assume won’t subject them to a sexualised gaze, I suppose.
Still, it is great. My first crow pose was epic, and I felt amazing. Anyone who needs a goal to work towards to get motivated should definitely go for that.
A crow pose is definitely something I aspire to reach. Since I’m fairly tall and don’t have a history of being flexible, it takes some time to advance lol. But it’s fun to do and feels great, especially since I work in an office all day.
Yoga is great. My only gripe with it is that yoga and meditation are frequently associated with the divine in India because of which the “yoga industry” is full of charlatan hacks who try to amass a following kinda like how Gandhi did. If you look at this list of modern yoga gurus on Wikipedia, many of the recent ones are hacks as well. I can only speak of the ones that are alive because I don’t know about the older ones. Yoga (and ayurveda) is also the pride of Hindu fascists who like to bask in the false glory of a mythologised past where yoga (and ayurveda) was a cure to a multitude of ailments, an art which now has supposedly been forgotten about due to the rampaging colonisation by Western ideas. They take the popularity of yoga in the West as affirmation of the idea that India of the past was the most advanced civilisation and other idealist notions like that.
Mostly though if you go to a normal gym which has yoga classes, it is usually fine and normal. But there are a ton of “foundation” run by aforementioned hacks. My neighbours tried to indoctrinate me into one when my parents told them I was depressed. It was extremely stupid.
Yes yoga has as a whole has some disturbing sides to it. As a form of exercise it is good though.
Yeah it is very helpful. I hurt my disc while deadlifting which caused a muscle spasm. Yoga stretches were helping me out a ton with it until I spiraled and broke the habit. Have to get back into it again.
The disturbing sides of yoga don’t stem from yoga itself, but the people using it. Nationalists will always seek to misappropriate cultural artifacts of “their people’s history”. This is why Indian nationalists use yoga to justify supremacist actions, why Nazis use Viking imagery, Buddhism misappropriated by Tibet, etc etc.
So we shouldn’t shun or dismiss a practice just because nationalists use it for evil. If we do that, then that becomes a victory for the rightists as they can further point to it being “exclusively theirs”. Culture is meant to be shared and enjoyed by all, including guests, so long as everyone is respectful.
When rightists use culture artifacts to justify the suppression of others, they do not respect even their own culture any longer.
When studying the history of yoga, you won’t find original yogis, or even the disciples/students suggesting the elimination of other cultures. What you’ll find is people suggesting that by exercising control and discipline over your mind and body, you will come closer to and possibly achieve enlightenment and experience divinity.
Yes, of course. I didn’t meant to discredit yoga and its spiritual sides but I can see how my wording is a bit wrong.
Capitalists culturally appropriated a traditional religious practice into the fitness industry
Therefore Indians are culturally backward
Wut
What do you mean?
I think they’re just pointing out the absurdity and orientalism of suggesting that as yoga has been distorted and popularized in the West, Indians must be backward and not doing enough yoga, or at least not correctly (correct being the coopted version).
deleted by creator
Western people see it mostly as a form of exercise and maybe, for people more involved, as a breathing method to keep composure and stay calm. The goal of yoga itsel is much broader though, as it aims to help you reach Self Realisation. Now, that’s where the interpretation of the practice comes in place.
I used to do yoga with a group of people as an extracurricular activity during my teenage years. With that, I mean that I did it for three weeks by insistence of one of my parents during a time where I did zero exercise. I absolutely loathed it, to the point that the experience still has me disregarding yoga as something to practice to this day.
It was years later however when I began to understand what was it that made me dislike it the most, and truth be told, it was nothing regarding yoga in itself, but the whole culture surrounding it: the talks about auras and chakras, about mantras and vibrations and all those concepts painted in an exotically orientalist light that so strongly attracts new-age “spiritual” westerners and, probably, gives it that “feminine and hippie” image that you speak of too.
If there is a chance in the future that I may be practicing yoga with a group of people again, that will be only if I ever find a place where it is practiced with a secular tone, with the same approach to the sport that you would see in someone practicing tennis, weighlifting or almost any other sport. And it is too my opinion as that yoga would get many more practicioners if it began adopting that image to the general public as well.
I really only do yoga as a form of exercise and a breathing method, and it has some nice effects for me.
I already supposed you did, judging from your post. The problem is that, at least where I live, you are forced to practice alone if you want to do yoga only as a form of exercise, because any place where you search for group practice you will inevitably what I describe, perhaps with one exception or two at most if you are lucky and living in a major city.
deleted by creator
