10/30 Yoga Journal

     This past week I tried an online yoga class intended to help with spine health. I took the class over Youtube from a channel called Yoga with Adrienne and the class was about 45 minutes long. Due to taking most of my classes online, my back has been feeling affected by constantly sitting all day. While I wasn't feeling intense back pain I just felt like my posture wasn't as straight as it used to be and I didn't feel as open through my chest. 

    I really enjoyed this yoga practice and after the practice I felt so much straighter and refreshed. The class moved relatively slow but I enjoyed it because I could feel my body opening with every posture instead of barreling through the practice and then just feeling good afterwards. I also really liked how she linked every movement with the breath. It felt like with every breath my chest was opening and my spine was growing taller. It felt really good to take care of my back problems before the pain worsened and I felt so much better in my body afterwards. 

    Yoga has become more engrained in pop culture due to the way it's been marketed. Yoga, for the most part, is a nationwide concept that almost everyone has slight knowledge about and I think that's due to its appeal to consumerism. I also think one of the reason why its more mainstream is because there is an emphasis, especially in the West, about taking and selecting what you want your yoga journey to look like. If you only want it as an exercise you can leave out the spirituality aspect. Yoga has recently been marketed as a flexible practice that you can pick and choose how you practice it. The West has been effected by yoga in different ways. In some aspects I think yoga has become just another exercise regimen for some people but I also believe that it has had some spiritual effects on the West. While I don't think the spiritual aspect is as common in the West, I think yoga has introduced some spiritual ideologies that we wouldn't really know about if yoga wasn't brought here. 

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