“Set an intention of shutting up.”
“Close your heart. Tighter. Tighter than that. Close your heart within you.”
“Send your breath into your lungs, which is the only place your breath can go.”
“Do nothing with your sitbones.”
“Ignore your comfort level. Your comfort level is holding you back. Leave it all on the mat.”
“Feel free to ignore the breath here.”
“Oh, how odd. There appears to be no divine light within you at all.”
“It’s pretty much the same as CrossFit, actually.”
“There’s nothing very special about the present moment. Feel free to think about the past or the future, whichever you prefer.”
“Fix your gaze on someone else taking this class who is more attractive than you. Do your best to live up to their example.”
“It’s embarrassing if you have to go back to Child Pose during this next movement.”
“Close your hips. You look ridiculous.”
“Worrying will help you solve problems.”
“I am going to chant now. I do not invite you to join me. I invite you to cultivate silence.”
“Remember that this is your practice, and it reflects poorly on you when you fall during Pigeon Pose.”
“If you’re not doing it perfectly, you might as well not do it at all.”
“Breathe in tension. Don’t breathe out. Hold onto the tension. It will help you focus. Relaxing is for winners.”
Tags: fitness, shut up, unlikely mantas, yoga
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Pretty much what I hear when I’m in yoga class.
I KNEW it wasn’t really OK to go into child’s pose 🙁
lol i’ve done yoga like twice i AM THE JERK
I try to go twice per week. You have laid my entire internal dialog bare for the world to see. Thanks.
This reminds me a lot of my friend who ends every class by saying: “Namaste, motherfucker.” His wife is a yoga teacher.
I would totally go to this yoga class. SO much better than being told to let my eyeballs melt into my spine as I reach for the beauty of the light within. If my eyeballs start melting into my spine, bet your ass I’ll be reaching for an antiviral to fight the Ebola within.
If it were possible to do a yoga class blindfolded, I would 100% do it, because “Fix your gaze on someone else taking this class who is more attractive than you.” is pretty much my mantra, and I feel like it’s bad for the chakras, or something.
Actually, it’s pretty much my mantra outside of a yoga class, too. Also bad for the chakras. And the self-esteem.
Not wearing my glasses helps a lot with this. I can’t see shit in yoga, other than vague human-like shapes.
When I don’t wear my glasses, I tend to let my eyes wander more because mentally I know I can’t see jack, but then I realize that to the other people in the class it seems like I’m staring like a creeper.
As I’ve always said: NAMASTE, BITCHES.
Pretty much sums up my thoughts in every yoga class, ever:
“Fix your gaze on someone else taking this class who is more attractive than you. Do your best to live up to their example.”
Dirtbag Pilates? PRETTY PLEASE?
now this pose is going to give you a lot of information
the information is that you suck.
oh what an interesting way to do the hundreds
Well, I did a reflexive shame-curl when I heard that. Well done. Well done.
how does one NOT fall during pigeon pose, tho, unless you’re a witch of some kind
Wait, how DO you fall during pigeon pose? Aren’t you pretty much sitting down? Or is there some advanced pigeon pose I don’t know about?
Well, I am not very good at pigeon pose so if I don’t have a block, I always have trouble keeping my balance. I usually tilt over to the side with my extended leg. If I have a block, it’s all good!
Also, holy shit, apparently there’s a thing called FLYING PIGEON POSE which looks impossible.
Hahahaha NO.
It is impossible. That is photoshopped. I refuse to believe that there is any other explanation.
lol i have no idea what pigeon pose is i just know it’s a pose
When you have to raise one hip you topple over diagonally.
There are actually two.
The one where you fall: http://www.yogajournal.com/poses/2493
The one I loved before I gave up yoga: http://www.yogajournal.com/poses/863
Oh, this makes so much more sense. Yes, I always fall in the first one, (I can’t reach my toes with my hands ever without props unless I am lying on my side) but that’s not what I think of when I think of pigeon.
Thank god, I am so terrible at pigeon pose and everyone else always seems to just GET IT. I feel like I can keep up with the rest of the class on everything except this (and yes, “keeping up with the class” is totally the point of yoga).
“No, farting isn’t natural. Please wait until after class to release your inadequacy.”
For me it was more like “Fix your gaze on the asshole who can actually DO a handstand. Allow the hatred to flow through you and will her to fall over.”
Sitbones, nooooooooo. Apparently something real adults – including, probably, people who are far more mature than I – say, but it always sounds like Anatomy 4 Toddlers to me.
I relate to this whole thing so much, and I didn’t even know I was a jerk 😮
YES. Sitbones is the very worst yoga phrase ever and I hate it I hate it I hate it. I am overcome with loathing.
SITZ BONES. That is their name.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuberosity_of_the_is…
My dad had me memorize all of my bones when I was a child, and when we were waiting, naming my bones was an entertainment activity – right before calculating volumes and finding primes. So first, people complaining irritates me because it reminds me that my childhood was weird, and second, it shows the creeping pervasiveness of Latinate words as better words, when the very fine Germanic words are right there. RIGHT THERE.
Muttermuttermutter”rock back onto the tuberosity of the ischium”muttermuttermutter
I had no idea! But the yoga instructors I’ve heard are definitely saying sit bones, not sitz bones.
Rest assured that I also yell at them.
I am great fun at parties.
I’ll go ahead and add this to my jerk dossier. Sorry 🙁
My friend who is a nurse just sent around a video of her two-year-old showing where his umbilicus, patella, etc. are. It’s adorable. But I’m not sure where that falls on the spectrum of “teaching small children practical things, why not?” vs. “perpetuating unnecessary Latinate hegemony.” Little of both, I guess.
I HAVE TOO MANY FEELINGS.
Latinate hegemony, though. It’s the worst.
For me it was fun learning a different language where they calque the Latin instead of borrowing. Like, “The thyroid is just called the shield-shaped gland?!? Oh wait… that’s what it’s called in English, too, I just didn’t know it.”
The only way I passed my German exams in grad school (classics program) was by taking apart compound words and translating the individual components into Latin or Greek.
Oh gods, I’m one of those people!
Dude that’s because German felt that it was too good to use all of the perfectly normal Latin and Greek (and Latin-Greek) compounds that all the other modern European languages use. I’m pretty sure they back-formed them all into Germanic roots to begin with. I mean, “Fernsehen” REALLY? OH I’M SURE YOU CAME UP WITH THAT ONE INDEPENDENTLY.
(I also barely managed to pass my German reading exam.)
GERMAN EXAM FISTBUMP
In retrospect, I might have made it bigger in the papyrology world with a little more, um, actual competency, but what the heck.
One of the many reasons I worship The Toast is because there is nowhere else on the interwebs where a comment like “Latinate hegemony, though. It’s the worst.” could possibly appear.
I HAVE FOUND MY FOLK.
Have you read that “quantum physics in entirely non-Latinate English” thing, where it’s all motes and light-bits and stuff?
Uncleftish beholding! It’s great!
It makes me so happy.
My yoga instructor (whom I adore) says “sitting bones”, which is at least grammatical English.
“Send your breath into your lungs, which is the only place your breath can go.”
yes.
don’t even get me started on chakras.
This is why I love doing yoga in LA, everyone is just unapologetically there to show off their new outfit and work out their core. Then again, there are about 50 studios in a three-mile radius of my apartment, so YMMV.
While I was looking for sleep shorts on amazon, I came across a pair of “low-cut stretch yoga shorts.” They were, in fact, boy-cut panties pretending to be exercise wear.
“Send your breath into your lungs, which is the only place your breath can go.” You mean, all those hours I’ve spent breathing into my extremities have been a lie?
I am a weightlifter and boxer and all around jock of the sort who unwinds by beating or squatting the crap out of something and having a beer and a steak, but once I have taken a yoga class, because it was free and I am game for trying any fitness thing once (pilates wasn’t half bad!). And a few minutes in the instructor is trying to walk us thru some sort of dealy where we were supposed to go from a very relaxed pose to a very muscle-intensive one, which she describes as “changing between your passive, feminine energy and strong, masculine energy.”
I stood up and looked at her and said, “Are you fucking kidding me?!”. Which, as it turns out, is how you get kicked out of a yoga class.
I adore this post, but I need to make the shameful confession that I absolutely LOVE hippie-dippie yoga stuff. Go nuts on me. I want to hear about what this pose is doing to my chakras. Talk to me about connecting to the earth. I will eat it up.
Well, that’s a new way to look at yoga i feel. No wonder why its called yoga for jerks.
I got no problem with the idea of chakras since they roughly correspond with areas of major nervous system activity or large clumps of blood vessels or major glands or some combination thereof. I figure that at worst the chakras were ancient India's symbolic way of talking about extra-active areas of the body. But when someone starts talking about sending totems into chakras (see other comments here) I'm gonna think about getting violent.
Females do not survive well by being passive. Ask any mother bear.