You know, the contemporary global orientation in "yoga" is a fairly rambunctious workout mentality. if you are going to pay regular, you tend to want to have a workout, in trade for choosing to do yoga instead of treadmill or boot camp or something rather physical and "work-outy." If you have a yoga studio and you don't offer a workout in your prime pre- and post-work hours--rather intense and up through practices like power and hot yoga--you're likely to go under as a business. My favorite teacher said you can't run a yoga business for long if it's not a workout. Oh, you might try beer yoga or goat yoga or laugh yoga or nude yoga, but they will come and go as fads, and you kinda know it.
What saw through my years is people coming to yoga primarily for flexibility, and getting stabilization instead. And it was hard and painful to do vinyasa as it was done, almost in a hurry. And the message was essentially, keep doing it until it is not uncomfortable. So for some many, one class and done, and all these beautiful souls lost from yoga, and thinking that they had tried yoga, when then a=had not. But the teachers were very righteous and felt this was the way--some level 2 and even 3.
So if your yoga is a workout after your work or before work to get it in to your busy day, you are right in the popular flow of yoga. But until about 1900, for thousands of years, yoga had little to do with sequences of poses, vinyasa flow or workout.
There is something there in the heart of yoga that can flip your nervous system, that is graced, that you might be tossing away, especially in an era when the Earth is being decimated while we frantically work and then workout to calm. Really? What's wrong with this picture, and we reward the folks doing it. Look at Jois and astanga yoga as al most the pinnacle of what higher yoga is. Folks had to wait to get into his Indian sangha each day due to the crowds. [See recent NY Times article to take a look a astanga, which is really at the heart of this workout intensity, and some solid Jois-ian sex abuse. But sex abuse or no sex abuse (and there are criminal, exploitive others that are or have ben wildly popular), is this your yoga?
If you can't do a headstand or handstand are you any good? Or is this your goal? I see it a lot, of handstand time and headstand time especially in classes with 600 hour teachers, by body-types that are not gymnastic. I would ask are you doing yoga at all. But yoga is a term that contains nearly anything. Hopefully you won't be the one who attains headstands or handstands without support and gets a stroke from a neck pinch in your 20's. You know, in a headstand/handstand (which is worse and not yet measured), your intraocular press might be 60 instead of a normal 11--eating away perhaps at those optical nerve cells and birthing glaucoma either now or later. Didn't you teacher mentions this? Handstand kinda might = stupid. But if you can't do it for Jois, you won't make his big astanga elite team, and you will have to do a lot more, and if cute enough a little sex on the side.
So maybe, in a few words, relax and calm and follow body, and outdo the so-called masters.
