yoga

Yoga - that faintly ridiculous-sounding activity - will definitely change you. A mate's girlfriend bullied me into it :) Reluctantly I caved in and gave it a shot. So recently I took up yoga, a flavour of yoga called basic Hatha. I am inflexible and have no plans of getting into anything fancy, like Raja or Laya yoga, whatever they are. I am absolutely not into the bullshit about raising a force called the kundalini through the chakras. That is superstitious bollocks in my opinion. But the efforts taken to achieve such illusory goals are extremely good for you. Which is the whole point.

Gravity alone doesn't age you and cause your body to sag: recipes encoded in your genes drive your pre-programmed destruction. But your genes are not the only influence either. Notice how most old – and many young - guys are stooped and stiffened and bent over like a storm-swept willow. One effect of yoga is that it will help prevent that, along with the aches and the pains. There is a cost. Some yoga exercises are uncomfortable. A few even hurt a bit sometimes even if you do them right – stretching muscles, tendons and joints can twinge. Usually pain educates you not to do stupid things like slam your digits in the car door or sever your chopper by zipping your trousers. Pain caused by doing yoga is not excruciating however, and you can always ease off anytime, just as with any other workout. When the exercises are performed correctly, the discomfort is a sign that you are undoing the sinister decay of everyday inactivity and neglect. You are paying a small price to improve that rusty body you have neglected. You will feel much better in the long run.

Yoga has also improved my life in little ways: I can pull my socks on standing up, but not both socks at the same time though. I've not mastered levitation yet :)

I am informed that there is a link between yoga and sex, the latter of which is central to the Chinese "life force", chi. So there you have it, just ask your partner for some chi. Convince that you need more spiritual enlightenment. Explain that you possess mystic powers and gain strength from your karmic energy centres. This trick will work best on women. She'll be under your spell in no time, assuming she is not much smarter than you. Tip: try not to confuse chi with cha or you will get nothing but a cup of tea.

On the topic of spiritual horseshit, there are a lot of new age types who think that the reason they are self-aware is so they may figure out their place within the Cosmos. They see the idea of the mind being small and the Universe being large as a meaningful duality. They think that we exist only so that we may learn, or "grow".
The biggest question to ask people with such fluffy beliefs is WHY? Why should the universe be designed around teaching us, feeble life forms that we are, how we fit in? Surely that is so egotistical we must doubt it immediately on those grounds alone, it is a surviving form of the man is centre of the Universe myth.

The other fallacy is to think that because we are good at learning then our chief purpose on this planet is to learn. On the contrary, learning is merely an emergent property of evolution: learning improves our chances of finding food, avoiding predators and winning mates. Evolution will often favour creatures that can learn. Our ability to learn is no more a magical key to our existence than our ability to grow hair or pick our nose.

The other day our instructor got us to run our hands over a partner then shake them (our hands, not our partner that is). The idea was that we were cleansing them of bad energy. This sort of thing is guaranteed to make most logically thinking people (men hahaha) would run a mile in embarrassment, horror and shame at this loony activity. I gritted my teeth and endured it. Such utter drivel is very minimal in the classes I attend, I don't know about other classes.

Yoga postures are supposed to enable you to control your mind and body. One of the goals of Yoga is to enable you to sit properly. Learning to sit sounds a bit bizarre, something you never think about, yet it is not as easy as it sounds. All this is necessary to be healthy, and it also aids meditation, which should be done in a sitting pose with minimal distractions.

Yoga can be surreal at times. In one of the yoga sessions the instructor got us to try a chant. Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa-uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu-mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm! This is the famous OM mantra. Some people did not take part. I opened my mind a bit and it was rather curious and fun, once you got over the feelings of awkwardness and self-consciousness. It is odd what experiences are out there you never think about.

Yoga puts much emphasis on breathing exercises, which can be slightly dull, but most of us do not know how to breathe properly, we are lousy at something we do all the time! Recent lab experiments showed that following breathing techniques of yoga reduces the heart rate, blood pressure and stress chemicals more quickly than "normal" breathing. It has been demonstrated that if you do not breathe heavily you gradually lose lung matter over time. Even non-smoking old people who have led slothful lives have permanently lost a third of their lungs. Time to go for a run or have some Chi :)

Dabbling with yoga has made me realise that stretching muscles and flexing joints complements strenuous exercises. It also dawned on me just how few postures we adopt in everyday life. Most of us sit a lot; walk or run a bit; lie down. That's about it! It is like having the ability to see all colours but only ever seeing shades of yellow. We have the muscles to adopt all these postures but we do not use them and many of these muscles deteriorate. Circuit training and working out in the gym are good but they miss the lazy, idle, neglected muscles and joints that a bit of yoga tortures back into life.



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From:	Da_Dood	Subject:	enjoyed the article	2004-02-24 19:33:24
From:	M	Subject:	Yoga	2004-03-10 05:48:48
From:	L K Tucker	Subject:	Kundalini Yoga Psychotic Episodes	2004-09-20 20:15:17
From:	nicole	Subject:	website	2004-09-21 15:09:40
From:	Awuu	Subject:	about yoga	2004-12-15 05:00:00
From:	Stu	Subject:	Yoga bollocks	2005-03-03 00:33:54
From:	Mark	Subject:	Yup.	2006-03-11 19:40:36

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