JOIN USWhile health magazines and You Tube videos might tell you about postures, they will never be good enough to replace the experience of a yoga class, says Pragya Bhatt.
Yoga, contrary to popular perception, cannot be self-taught. More importantly, yoga must always be performed under supervision.
Here go five good reasons why you need to attend that yoga class:
-Yoga postures are not about how they look. It’s easy to get carried away by a beautiful picture and try to replicate the pose. However, all poses go beyond the physical look, into the internal stretching and aligning of bones and muscles, which cannot be explained in a photograph.
An experienced yoga teacher will look at your pose from all angles to ensure that you are doing it correctly. No article or book can do this for you.
- Only a trained instructor can tell you the safest way to get your foot behind your ear. Every yoga pose is a sequence. The sequence is designed to be safe and natural for the body. If you try to take shortcuts to a pose, you may end up causing long-term damage to your bones and tissues.
- An instructor brings years of experience and wisdom to the classroom. That’s much more than what you’ll get out of a book, an article or a 10-minute video on You Tube. Yoga teachers gain a lot of insight into your mind by watching how you practise. Because of this, they are able to guide you in many ways.
- Practising in your home, in a closed room with little or no interaction with others, leaves you with little or no other perspective. A yoga class is effectively a community of health-conscious people. So, whether it’s the young cyclist who can tell you where to pick up a great bike suited for your needs or a software engineer who can tell you about the best yoga apps to download, you will build a warm and caring community of like-minded people.
-An instructor will keep you motivated. Unless you’re one of those people who are great at putting in an hour’s workout without fail every day, it’s a good idea to ask for an instructor’s help. At least, you’ll know that you are accountable to someone other than yourself - someone who is interested in your yoga practice.
(The author is a Bengaluru-based yoga instructor)