Thursday, September 2, 2010

Welcome to Type A Yoga!

You are probably wondering what the deal with "Type A Yoga" is. I am the owner of the business and founded it based on my personal experience and "type a" personality.

I began practicing yoga in 2003. I was in a career transition from being a self-taught network engineer in the dot com boom toward being a comparative literature student specializing in Roman influence on British literature. As one might guess, I am a very "in my head" sort of person, and I lean more towards analytic than artsy or athletic. I am skeptical and cynical, and my humor tends to be a bit dry. I came to yoga, this practice which has so drastically changed my life, because I needed a unit of PE and it sounded like an easy enough class.

I offer this not because this is all about me, but as an example of how transformative practicing yoga can be for ANYONE. I would try to get people to go to class with me and they'd say that yoga was for hippy-dippy types, or strict vegans who own bio-diesel VWs, or that they don't believe in crystals and astrology. Other people wouldn't go because they weren't "fit enough," or "flexible enough," or they were "too stressed out" to add another activity.

(By the way, saying you're too stressed out and not healthy enough for yoga is like saying you're too thirsty to pour yourself a glass of water.)

Yoga isn't really for enlightened, peaceful, flexible, healthy, skinny people. It just seems that way because some of the people who have been doing it for a long time have become that way, but they started out as people in pain or in need like the rest of us.

Yoga is for the people who are anxious, depressed, physically unfit, inflexible (mentally and physically), intellectual, sarcastic, bitter, angry, competitive, miserable people who walk around this earth every day. Most of them just don't know it yet.