the gaiam yoga club: week 1 standing poses

Missed the introduction to the Gaiam Yoga Club?  Read it here!

I’ve really enjoyed going “back to basics” in this first week of the Gaiam Yoga Club.  This week focussed on standing poses, working from the feet up and really working on the grounding nature of yoga, the feet, the toes, just standing in Tadasana.  Things that, after many years of yoga, I find myself only thinking about when I’m teaching beginners.  And it should be something I focus on all the time.

Each week starts with a video of all the postures that will be used during the next 5 classes.  Rodney Yee and Colleen Saidman have a practical approach to teaching the poses, filled with love, honestly, humility and (most importantly) humour.  They also teach three different modifications of each pose and really encourage the viewer to do the pose most appropriate to them.

The next four days are made up of four practice sequences, each 30 minutes long and each focussing particularly on 2 standing poses and finishing with Legs up the Wall and final relaxation.  I felt that I had completed a balanced practice each day.

The best part for me though is the sixth day, which comprises a breathing and meditation sequence.  So many yoga practices focus on asana alone and I think it’s fantastic that a day is set aside for something else.  The first week just concentrating on listening to the breath and again it felt good to get back to basics.

I do wonder how someone who is completely unfamiliar with yoga would get on with this, and it is hard to put myself in that position.  I wonder how well a complete beginner would get on with Half Moon Pose, for example  and I do think that everyone should try and get to a real teacher whenever they can (even if it’s only a few times a year) just to check your alignment.  That said, with the added option of a pdf printout of each day’s sequence the Gaiam Yoga Club does cater to all learning techniques.

It did strike me that online yoga courses would come in super useful for people who travel a lot and don’t get to go to regular classes that often.  Because you can listen to the class on your laptop and/or smartphone you really can take your practice anywhere with you.  Like I said before, this is the way of the future yogi(ni)s!

Looking forward to next week’s practice!

The Gaiam Yoga Club is currently running two memberships – US$25 per month or US$65 per quarter (which saves you US$10).  Both packages include a 10 day free trial period.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 31st, 2010 at 4:46 pm and is filed under gaiam yoga club. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.