This is not your grandma’s yoga class. </p><p>Or maybe it is. Yoga has evolved quickly in the past few decades from its historic ties to eastern religions to an exercise pursued by everyone from athletes in training to pregnant women. </p><p>Hundreds of classes and workshops are available in the Johnson County area — chair yoga, massage yoga, laughter yoga, aerial yoga, male nude yoga and yoga in the workplace.</p><p>Ashley Walburn, also known as “Mama Yoga,” teaches prenatal yoga classes at Darling Yoga in Overland Park. She did yoga during her own pregnancies but it didn’t feel quite right to her, and she tired of being the only pregnant one in the class. “Your body moves differently and you’ve got different aches and pains,” Walburn said. </p><p>Finding nothing in the Kansas City area, Walburn trained with a prenatal instructor out of Seattle and then started her own classes, going from two clients to around 60 per week in just four and a half years. “It really prepares your body for a healthier pregnancy,” she said. </p><p>Teenagers are doing yoga at Shawnee Mission Northwest High School, by popular demand from students in Janine Deines’ International Baccalaureate English class. Part of the curriculum is studying culture along with the literature, and the class was reading “Siddhartha.” </p><p>“So on a block day I had all my IB students dress in comfy clothes,” Deines said, “and we did yoga.” The kids liked it so much that they asked her to sponsor a club. “In addition,” she said, “throughout the year when things would get stressful for the IB students, we would do pranayama breathing techniques to help everyone relax.”</p><p>There wasn’t a yoga club when Allison Hunt attended Northwest. She tried several yoga classes in college, including “hot yoga,” named for the 100-plus degree rooms in which it’s practiced. The extreme heat loosens muscles, allowing for greater flexibility, and promotes profuse sweating, which is thought to be cleansing. </p><p>Hot yoga evolved from Bikram yoga, which utilizes the hot room along with a set series of 26 poses mandated by Bikram Choudhury. </p><p>Although Hunt found it monotonous at first, she has come to enjoy Bikram more than any other yoga style. She can more easily see her progress in strength and flexibility by repeating the same 26 poses each time. </p><p>“I feel like my body is a wet towel that someone has wrung out,” Hunt said. “It’s such a refreshing, rejuvenating, cleansing feeling that I’ve never found in any other kind of hot yoga.”</p><p>Tucker Weems utilized Bikram when, as a cross country runner at Oklahoma State University, he suffered injuries. “It was good to get my body back to being really flexible and to get over that injury,” Weems said. </p><p>Flexibility, relaxation techniques and strength are the reasons coach Van Rose recommends yoga for his cross-country runners at Shawnee Mission Northwest. He offers a half-hour yoga session once a week, and would increase it if he could. </p><p>“If I had a certified yoga person at school I’d probably have us doing it two to three times a week,” Rose said. “It’s just phenomenal stuff. I would knock out some of the running stuff and put this in place of it, I feel it’s so important.”</p><p>In conjunction with yoga month in June, Lifetime Fitness holds an annual Yoga Under the Stars event at its locations nationwide. Yoga coordinator Terri Bakalar said that 75 members and guests enjoyed the outdoor, evening session at the Lenexa facility this year.</p><p>Diane Doolin leads a weekly yoga class in a Shawnee park. “It’s part of embracing and enjoying God’s creation,” she said. </p><p>The word “yoga” means to yoke together the mind, body and spirit. Doolin noticed that many yoga classes either ignore the spiritual component and focus only on the strengthening and relaxation aspects, or they have traditional eastern religious or New Age influence. </p><p>Doolin respects those who teach their own classes in line with their own beliefs. She keeps the spiritual aspect neutral in the classes she teaches at the gym, but she incorporates her Christian faith in her own yoga practice, and when leading classes in a church. </p><p>“In some of the yoga classes, we look inside and we have a sense of gratitude to ourselves and it’s very internal,” she said, “but there’s more. We also need to give gratitude where it’s due, give gratitude to our creator God. </p><p>“We do need to look inside to find our peace, but it’s not all within me,” she said. “We also rely on and we surrender to God.” </p><p>Because she fields so many questions from Christians who feel conflicted about practicing yoga, Doolin gives quarterly workshops on Christian yoga. She presents a history of yoga and the many forms that have evolved from it, and points out subtle differences that are important. </p><p>“Where I want to calm the mind and quiet the busy-ness of the mind, maybe another teacher will tell them to empty their mind,” she said. “It’s the emptying the mind where, in Christian thought, you’re opening yourself up to a variety of influences.”</p><p>With so many thoughts on what yoga is and what it should be, instructors offer hundreds of classes and workshops in the Johnson County area. There’s chair yoga, massage yoga, laughter yoga, aerial yoga, male nude yoga and yoga in the workplace.</p><p>There are so many classes, don’t be surprised if Grandma’s at one of them.
Good call. I see them in the Bikram filling the hole. RT
hot yoga, marathons and other ridiculous shit..
Is bikram yoga the same as hot yoga? - [...] .
I had no idea Hot Yoga would almost KILL me! RT Headed to Bikram Yoga w/ . Excite… (cont) .
Beautiful Body Ideal Weight: "Bikram Yoga......Hot Yoga!" : .
Planning going to my 1st Bikram hot yoga class today. Class is at 5 if interested..
