The University of Guelph has finally entered the exam season, a time when the campus becomes as tightly wound as your grandfather’s pocket watch; a magical time of year. With all of the extra time that students now have, students may want to try yoga to help them unwind. Inexperienced in the world of yoga, or any form of fitness that doesn’t include grunting and needlessly lifting heavy things, this young reporter decided to delay studying for his exams in favour of studying up on the wide world of yoga.
Yoga, a term which can probably be used to describe any stretch where you strike a cool pose every now and then, originated in India and was quickly brought over to the Western world as multitudes of men and women realized they looked good in athletic wear, and that traditional sports weren’t really “their thing.” The uniforms are definitely the most important step in being yoga ready. I made sure to slip into a fresh pair of yoga pants, my Habs jersey (I was getting active after all) and my LuLu Lemon headband, before heading over to my local yoga studio to find my inner Zen or Chi, or whatever.
After quickly pulling my hamstring, left glute, and my groin in one spectacular motion, I decided the physical aspects of yoga weren’t for me. I’ll stick to ridiculous amounts of crunches for my stretching, thank you very much. Not to be defeated by an activity that my 53-year old mother can do, I decided to pursue the spiritual aspects of yoga to see whether I would have any luck experiencing the relaxing benefits of an activity that, so far, has just left me limping. Now the idea of an activity involving both physical fitness and my mental faculties is like apple pie with cheese on it—completely natural to some, totally incomprehensible to me. So, for this stage of my yoga journey, I decided to consult the yoga gurus at my local Starbucks to find out how to meet Nirvana.
After chatting up a local book club while they drank their non-fat mocha soy lattes, I found out that the spiritual side of yoga was all about looking inward and finding out about your true self, and had nothing to do with Kurt Cobain’s band. I was told that you should feel a sense of complete calm and centeredness; the feeling that you were connected to the greater whole of existence. What Marion and the rest of the ladies didn’t tell me, in between a lively discussion of The Goldfinch, was that some inner beings are better left dormant.
When yoga aficionados talk about being connected to the inner self, they imagine their inner being as a calm serene spirit. Now, I’m not sure whether I rocked Trappers one too many times during my undergrad, but I did not like what I found lurking inside. As more and more people are introduced to yoga, either through their love of chai tea or foam mats, the frequency in which people peer into the abyss grows greater and greater. The feeling of looking into the all-encompassing dark void of my inner essence is totally not an experience I’ll soon forget. For now, I’ll stick to the bench-press; no one has ever realized dark truths on the bench-press.