"Indian Yoga?"

When describing the stereotypical Vancouverite, one might mention eating kale, enjoying slow drip coffee, running around the sea wall, and of course doing yoga.. I’m not sure when or how yoga became so trendy in Vancouver but the streets are full of cool yoga studios. I have dabbled in doing yoga classes over the years, usually periodically, and with some minor skepticism. Though I enjoy the practice itself, I find myself judging the crowd it attracts. A typical yoga-goer can be seen wearing lulu lemon and driving an expensive car to the door of the studio. When the instructor asks the class to chant “Om” I tend to feel a little uncomfortable knowing that everyone is happily chanting a very religious word with no concept of its meaning or context. I’ve long imagined that I wanted to try “real yoga” when I travelled to India.

Skip forward to a week after I arrived in Kolkata and had found a yoga studio nearby to where I am staying. It was clean, had a big window, and served yummy tea and chocolate cake in the café downstairs (I’m very thorough when checking out a new place, the chocolate cake must be tested).

When we arrived at the studio at 7:15am with our shiny new yoga mats, we were prepared for the ideal “Indian yoga experience.” Our biggest worry was not speaking Bengali (looking back that makes no sense considering the webpage, schedules, brochures, and the discussions I’d had with the person at the front desk were all in English).

We sit down in the class, ready for perhaps some breathing exercises and meditation. The young man who had been sitting on the counter playing a video game on his phone had marched in the room and barked for us to all stand up. What ensued was an hour of intense stretching to the consistent chanting of “1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8,  9, 10, again! 1, 2, 3,…”. It was rather aggressive actually – if you had the wrong foot forward, you got called out in front of everyone repeatedly until you corrected yourself to his satisfaction (this was particularly awkward when his English wording did not make sense and I didn’t understand what he was saying but he continued to repeat himself). At the end of class, he told us to all lie down in shavanasa corpse pose and close our eyes and then he left the room! It was only when I heard the shuffling of the other people in the room that I realized class was over.

To be honest, I was holding giggles in for the entire hour because I was so taken back by this experience. It wasn’t necessarily bad, but definitely not the relaxing morning I had expected! In fact, I have been quite sore for the last couple of days (stairs are difficult sometimes).

We are going to try again and hope for a different instructor so we can confirm that this experience is an anomaly. If this is “Indian yoga”, I think Vancouverite yogis would be shocked to discover they’ve been doing it very, very wrong!