Feb 13, 2008 - BLOG - Stuff On my Mind    Comments Off on First Yoga Experience!

First Yoga Experience!

Yep, finally did it.  Donna and I went and tried Yoga last night!  We’ve been wanting to try it for years.  And about eight years ago, we even ‘rescued’ the owners of the Yoga Room Nashville from a badly flooded and pushy Harpeth River.  They even sent us a gift certificate as a thank you, and we never went.

Climb Nashville also has Yoga classes.  But my climbing / cycling buddy Jeff says their class is too fast and hard for beginners.  So, we went to the Yoga Room Nashville in Berry Hill. 

Nancy the owner? was very nice.  She knew how to be nice and accommodating to beginners.  Everything seemed very clean and fresh – I mean the equipment wasn’t skanky or worn.  The studio is actually a converted house in Berry Hill, with all the walls knocked out, a small office and bathroom on one side.

Yoga is kind of like 90 minutes of stretching.  It reminded me of when I was roller blading, Mom used to show me some pretty wild stretches for sore muscles that required strange positions to get stretched.  Mom has a lifetime of experience from at least 50 years of running a ballet school and founding and directing the Northwest Florida Ballet (which was originally the Fort Walton Beach Ballet Company.)

OK, back to Yoga.  Our class focused on ‘twisting’.  We used chairs.  We laid on the floor.  We put our feet against the wall, shoulders on the floor, and eventually our feet in the air.  The only names I remember are ‘downward dog’ and ‘child pose’.

Finally, at the end, we had to fold our blankets kind of in a cross.  One was folded very narrow and we laid our spine down against it, shoulders and hips kinda hung off.  The other went under our heads.  Then Nancy came around and laid a couple more blankets over us and dimmed the lights.  Yeah, kinda like nap time at the end.  Nancy went through all this relaxation meditation stuff.  If I had done this before getting my CPAP, I would have been asleep and snoring.  But, I thought it more humorous.  Donna even said she smiled thinking how I would be over there giggling to myself!  (which I was.)   Actually it was a nice way to finish all that stretching.  Nancy ended it with some kind of chanting, which made me giggle again.  Donna looked over and she was giggling too.  It’s hard to take chanting very seriously.

Afterwards we went to Rafferty’s and had dinner.  We told the waiter that we had just been to Yoga.  He said he was raised Pentacostal and he was taught that people that did Yoga were going to hell, which he now denounces as an idea.   I told him that Buddhists think playing volleyball sends you to hell, because of how Christians play volleyball behind their churches.  Of course I was full of shit as usual, he knew it and thought it was funny.

Long story short, we’re gonna buy a 10-pack, which will allow us 5 more visits as a couple so we can really decide if we like it.  It’s not very adventurous, but it sure is nice to spend that much time on stretching those tight muscles.  Can’t be a bad thing, unless we go to hell for it.  (-:

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