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Yoga

has anyone ever done lsd while doing yoga?

i just started doing yoga and even after one class of it, i know i'm going to love it. i felt so relaxed afterwards.....my anxieties went down (i have somewhat of an anxiety problem) and i felt a warm tingly feeling all throughout my body that was amazing.


I'm extremely interested in adding LSD to the yoga experience....anyone have any info on that?

i tried to search it on erowid but nothing showed up
 
I don't really like LSD that much, but I love doing yoga on psychedelics. Yoga on DOI was quite a challenge. Yoga on PCP rules.
 
Yoga - Advice Needed

Hey All-

I am interested in partaking in yoga a few times a week...I have tried it in the past and do enjoy it. At this point, I am a beginner, and was wondering if any fellow Yoga enthusiasts could stir me in the right direction. I am looking for a type of yoga that builds muscle and is intensive. Would Bikram Yoga be doable for a beginner? I am not familiar with all of the terms. Suggestions are welcome. Thanks, guys

Cheers

Tomer
 
Where I'm from, the YMCA yoga classes are less than great. Ditto most gyms. Many cities will have arrangements where a bunch of studios will get together and offer a sampler pass where you pay some chunk of money and get a session at a bunch of different studios. Try them out, try out a few different classes and styles within each studio, and you'll find what works well for you.

IMO (and I may well get some flames for this) avoid hot yoga/Bikram. It's pretty intense, and my only impression of it was that it was quite competitive, which flies in the face of everything that yoga stands for.
 
Dave,

Thanks for the response. I live in NYC, so space is of the premium here. There is a well known instructor right near me that teaches traditional Yoga. You may be right about the Hot Yoga (from the reviews I have been reading). I may check him out.

Tomer
 
Pretty much any form of Hatha Yoga is going to be physically intensive. The tricky part is finding an instructor that is good. If your instructor tries to force you into a position find another one.
 
Dave is right. Bikram (hot) yoga classes can tend to be too competitive.

I have been practicing on and off, but mostly on, for the last 15 years. When yoga kinda went "big" with all the Bikram noise in the early 00's, I noticed a lot of teachers coming on the scene who weren't really grounded in the practice.

I'm not criticizing them… a powerful, aggressive yoga session (hot or cold) can be great, but it can also injure you, or worse, fail to give you a real idea of how yoga "works" in body and mind and soul. I was lucky enough in my first years to have a teacher who encouraged us to understand our limits and bodies. She was really gentle, but very intense too.

I think checking out several studios/classes/teachers will help you find someone who can give you the fundamentals of the practice and keep you working within a safe space with your body and mind.

I've done lots of yoga with different teachers but my favorites so far are a Hatha institute that incorporates chanting and mindfulness and meditation.

And a kind of rock-star class that is really intense but very solid in its philosophical roots. The teacher of those classes thoroughly understands yoga and listening to the body and respecting its limits. But he can also take you to amazing levels of intensity with good corrections and just a word or two.

Kinda long, like all my posts, but I wanted to express it because I fell that yoga has been the most beneficial practice I've ever adopted.
 
yougene-- Good call. About 90% of my practise is hatha or a hatha-hybrid (usually vini-hatha or iyengar-hatha), and I can't say enough good things about it. Ashtanga is okay if you're really confident in your postures and are very mindful of your limits, but I still find it really jarring. Great workout though!

artaxerxes-- Nailed it on the head. The key is to find the practise that works for you. Personally, I'm not crazy about chanting, although I do enjoy opening and closing practise with an Om, and bumblebee breath is pretty cool. Adding to your final statement: I've been working out in some form or another for the past decade or so, but I haven't seen anywhere near the mental or physical results in all that time as compared to the last couple of years that I've been going to yoga, and especially in the last year that I've begun really doing a regular practise. While it isn't necessarily for everyone, I'd suggest that any and everyone give it a try.
 
I like hot yoga but it is very intense. You have to be extremely careful. Many teachers encourage participants to push themselves which imo is a bad idea. One of my favorite yogis has numerous stories of people coming to her to help rehab injuries they got doing Birkram.

Like others said, try out a few different classes and see what fits. Once you learn a routine you can practice at home and save the skrill. Also this allows you to move at your own pace.

Currently I've been practicing ashtanga which is absolutely kick ass. Like hot yoga, I think it would be easy to injure yourself if not you're not careful. Kind of like lifting heavy weights.

Yoga is an endless journey with infinite possibilities. One book I've followed says that there are over 880,000 different postures.

being in New York, I'll bet meetup.com has some cool yoga stuff going on.

Good Luck!!!
 
I enjoy doing yoga and I would be interested in sharing stories with any other BLers that do yoga.

In my younger years I did a lot of cross training, mountain bike riding, aerobics, etc. If you are young and active, congratulations and enjoy your body. You can benefit from yoga, too.

My story might be different than yours but yoga can address a plethora of mental and physical concerns for people of all age groups.

I'm in my 50s now and I do not want any more injuries. I changed to a physical activity that would allow me to focus more on keeping myself healthy, not thin. I know I can still do most of what I have always done. However, I get tired sooner, I get sore quicker and stay sore longer. That isn't typical of everyone in their 50s. I am just giving you my reasons for liking yoga as much as I do.

As an older woman dealing with aging issues such as menopause, bone density screening, incontinence, vision problems, skin and other cancers, dental health, senior moments....

what was I talking about?

Yoga. DO YOU YOGA? What kind of practice do you prefer? Do you have favorite poses you use when you are having strong emotions, either positive or negative?

What do you know about yoga? Tell me, because I am always learning.
What do you want to know about yoga? Ask me, because I know nothing.
I am not who you see when you look at me, I am how you feel when you're around me
OM~shanti shanti shanti
Namaste.
 
Fantastic thread, Ugly! You sound like you get so mch from your yoga practice.

I have been struggling through 'Zen' classes (a mixture of yoga, tai-chi and meditation). I have really limited balance and I have a hard time slowing down a lot of the time. This discipline is definitely teaching me patience and how to just be. :)
 
CHiLD-0F-THE-BEAT said:
Fantastic thread, Ugly! You sound like you get so mch from your yoga practice.

I have been struggling through 'Zen' classes (a mixture of yoga, tai-chi and meditation). I have really limited balance and I have a hard time slowing down a lot of the time. This discipline is definitely teaching me patience and how to just be. :)
Click to expand...

My balance is not what it used to be, and I can't do the tree pose right because I have to hold on. It's a great position though and hopefully if I focus, my balance will return. If it doesn't, oh well.

I'm not a pretzel person and even downward facing dog, probably the first pose I learned, is still hard for me. My leg muscles are too tight. I failed P.E. every year because I couldn't keep my legs straight and touch my toes. I once had a P.E. teacher lean on my back as I bent at the waist, reaching for my toes. My legs are long, or my arms are short? I don't know. Anyway, she failed me but it's a wonder she didn't kill me. It hurt like a bitch.

I work on my flexibility every day. Some people see a picture of a master yogi with his body in a sensational pose and think that yoga is the ability to put your own head up your ass. If it were, I'd have a degree in it by now...:\

Flexibility is important to me because the older I get, the harder it is for me to stretch without pain. I don't push myself to touch my muvrfkkn toes though.:p I sit down and use a yoga band to help me make progress. If I miss a day, it's ok. If I miss a week, it's almost like starting over!

Your zen class sounds really fantastic. Yoga classes have elements of zen also. I spent one year trying to learn the "dance" (if you will) of tai chi. I lost patience with the instructor, who lost patience with me about the same time. I didn't have the coordination NOR the balance. Oh well. I needed humility more than tai chi anyway.

I do not attend very many classes for yoga anymore. I practice in my room on my yoga mat, with incense burning, sometimes a blunt burning too, and watch my poses in the closet door mirrors. Only I can really see little improvements in my balance and flexibility. A teacher with a room full of butts in the air couldn't help me as much as I can help myself.
Alone, I can focus better, relax more, bend well, and not feel the pressure of being next to a person who has been doing gymnastics since he or she was 2. Those situations used to make me feel worthless and hopeless.

Personally, I can't keep up with a class. I get distracted by boobs, butts, balls, farts, words, you name it. I can't focus on yoga in a yoga class anymore. I will request a private session with a good instructor when I have tried everything and still can't find my way into a pose. Sometimes that helps. Not always.

You mentioned you have trouble slowing down. Instead of slowing down, stop.
THAT is yoga.

Please understand that being or staying healthy does not limit me from my favorite highs.%)
 
It takes a LONG time to lengthen the leg muscles, and downward dog is, perhaps surprisingly, one of the more technical 'common' poses. My practise has fallen off a bit lately, but even at my best my heels never came within 4 cm of the ground. Any dandasana-based poses are death for me.

I've only been practising for about three years now, but last year I went through a teacher training through YogaWorks. I found it excellent, as they focus very heavily on correct anatomical positioning, kinesthetics and the like, with a minor emphasis on they 'shiny yoga' philosophy. Not that there's a problem with the latter, but I find that teachers who have gone through other trainings will often focus more on that than on proper alignment, leading to injuries.

My own practise has been sporadic of late, as I've had huge difficulty in getting a home practise going. I've set my home up as a place to relax, and as a result I have far better success in going to classes than practising at home. I generally aim for mid-level hatha or hatha flow classes if I'm feeling a bit more energetic, occasionally an anusara class will get thrown in there for convenience. I like the idea of ashtanga, especially as a daily home practise, but I find the pace of called classes to be way too fast for me, and the Mysore classes tend to be at inconvenient times for me. My ideal class would be a two-hour hatha with full warmup, lots of standing postures, peaking with either headstand or forearm-stand (or conversely, ustrasana), a full cool-down and a nice, long savasana. Mmmmmm.

Ugly-- while mirrors can be handy, it's better to feel the alignment in your body rather than trying to look for external cues. As long as you know where you're trying to go with your poses, and how to get there safely, you shouldn't need to see what you're doing.
 
I really wish I had NEVER looked, to tell you the truth, Dave. I had NO idea how badly I was out of alignment. I just didn't feel it. My balance probably has something to do with it, but even chanting in a half lotus, I sit utterly crooked because I hurt my knee somehow. Until we bought this house, I never had a wall full of mirrors. I assumed when I gave a salute to the sun, it looked like the pictures and I was all posture and poise. #not
 
That's the value of classes. Have an instructor critique your poses and offer safe adjustments. Some people work for decades at it and still don't look a thing like the diagrams. There are some anatomical quirks that people can have that make that sort of shape impossible. For example: even half-lotus shouldn't be attempted until the hips are very open, and unless you have incredibly well-stretched hip flexors (which approximately no Westerners do, since we tend to sit in chairs) should probably not be attempting it cold. You'll wind up twisting your knee, especially if you're trying to force the alignment.

It can take literally decades to work out tiny asymmetries and other in-born kinks, to say nothing of the little injuries and quirks that we've picked up over a lifetime of unmindful activity. Don't force it, just work to your edge and it'll slowly start moving forward. You can very easily injure yourself doing yoga, especially on your own (another reason why I haven't started a home practise yet), and it can take ages to recover from that.
 
thanks so much, dave, and i am serious about not getting an injury. Of course, bolsters and mats and straps provide me with a lot of support. A good session can teach me how to make progress slowly and steadily for the whole rest of the year! I've hurt myself before in different activities and I want to use all those painful lessons to tutor my new postures. <3
 
Soon going to be starting a yoga regimen soon so i can finally feel free again. I have a few videos online that i'm looking forward to watching but must maintain a healthy living and diet first. Any advice on how to start out a really good workout? I have been post poning for some time now and really need the extra help. PM back. thanks.
 
I'd recommend classes at a studio. Videos are good to familiarize yourself with the poses, but having someone there to correct your posture and offer tips on how to aproach poses that you're not yet ready for is invaluable. Plus you also get the benefit of good sequencing (depending on the style being taught) and a bit of a social aspect too.
 
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