Yoga is the true path to physical, mental and spiritual enlightenment. If you’re on another path, you’ll want to double-back until you get to the Pizza Hut and hang a left.
The practice is around 5000 years old, tracing its roots to ancient India. Various practitioners developed and refined their own philosophies and practices, branching out into many different schools of yoga. You had your classical yoga, your tantra yoga, your karma yoga, and many more.
My friend Darren took a class in kundalini yoga. Its goal is to wake up your kundalini (spiritual life force), which is coiled like a snake at the base of your spine, and encourage it to rise through your chakras (hubs of energy), until it reaches your crown (the seventh chakra), at which point you can free yourself from karma and realize your life purpose. Darren reported that his chakras had never been more energized. I had no reason to doubt him.
I dabble in a watered-down version of mindful yoga. It’s a great place to start if you’re as lazy as I am (8.3 on the Wilcox-Schlemper index). It combines the movements and poses of yoga with the philosophy of mindfulness, which focuses on being in the moment, detaching yourself from pining about the past and planning for the future. If you had to sum it up as a single phrase, that phrase would be, “Eh. What’re you gonna do?”
Which has become my mantra. It’s very liberating.
Yoga experienced a couple of “booms” in the west as it was introduced by eastern teachers, but it still failed to gain much mainstream traction. For the longest time, it was viewed as a pretty weird thing to do, practiced by a limited number of new-age weirdos.
But with the advent of modern yoga pants, it has experienced a surge in popularity. In 2001, there were 4 million Americans practicing some form of yoga. In 2011, that number had risen to 20 million.
With its rich history of reinvention, yoga was ripe for change in the modern era. The hyper-accelerated rate of that change means that, ironically, it has gained popularity while becoming exponentially weirder.
Pick Your Weird
1. Dog, Goat and/or Pig Yoga
These are all basically the same. Goats are dogs with hooves. Pigs are goats with bacon.
They will participate in your yoga session by licking you, and jumping on your back, and generally being loveable animals. Everything is better with loveable animals.
Horse yoga is also a thing, but I feel like its practitioners will be killed off fairly quickly.
2. Ganja Yoga
This style combines the ancient healing and relaxation qualities of yoga and marijuana. Everything is better with weed.
3. Beer Yoga
Popular in Germany and Australia, beer yoga combines the ancient healing and relaxation qualities of, as you might have guessed, yoga and beer. Everything is better with beer.
4. Harry Potter Yoga
You will practice magic spells in warrior pose. You will watch scenes from the Harry Potter movies as you perform the “Downward Dumbledore”.
5. Nude Yoga
Many of us are understandably wary of having our stuff hanging out. The bow pose is tough enough without grinding your junk directly into your mat.
Others are more adventurous. They are flocking to nude yoga classes offered in many major centres.
If modesty is all that’s stopping you, try nude yoga in private. There’s no shame in extending your own plank, if you get my drift.
6. Death Metal Yoga
This might seem counterintuitive, but blaring hard rock music and an instructor who yells in your face can actually be very soothing.
I’m kidding. This is a terrible idea, from a physical, mental and spiritual enlightenment standpoint. But if fighting to hold a yoga pose in a mosh pit is your idea of enlightenment, fill your boots. It will awaken the hell out of your kundalini, that’s for sure.
Just Do It, Because Your Physical and Mental Energies Aren’t Going to Harmonize Themselves
With all these options, there is surely a weird yoga for you, even if you had exactly zero interest in yoga up to now. If there isn’t, there soon will be.
Personally, I’m holding out for nude ganja beer ball-pit-full-of-puppies show tune yoga.