In Search of Flexibility and Focus

It is 11:30 a.m. and I’m ready to go to sleep. It is the end of morning yoga class at the Wellness Center in Naples, and we are meditating to soothing ambient sounds coming from the boom box. After stretching muscles I forgot I had for the last hour, I’ve managed to relax and slowly get up to leave class. I start my workday light and limber.

“If your life nerve is tight, something ain’t right.” Chrisse, a yoga instructor at the Wellness Center said during the morning class.

Well something must have been wrong with me, because my spine from top to bottom was full of knots and cricks that needed to be worked out. I decided to revisit my brief stint with yoga from three years ago for a few reasons. I dislocated my left shoulder two years back and it still pops all of the time. Also, I like to surf and figured anything that would help me with balance would be good. Recently I have been playing basketball a lot, and my back was starting to feel like a conglomeration of rusty cogs that weren’t moving quite right – yoga would be my WD-40.

I was a little reticent from first experience with yoga when I lived in Mexico. I spent so much time trying to understand instructions that I loss motivation. The class was all women except for me, which made me feel a little awkward.

The morning gentle yoga class at the Wellness Center was a perfect way to start the day. It was pretty basic stuff, some of the stretches I remembered from high school swimming and soccer warm ups. At one point we did go into a move called the “screaming pigeon,” which definitely had me a little twisted at first but wasn’t anything to tough. One of the best parts of yoga is while you stretch and focus on muscles you are encouraged to truly concentrate and forget outside distractions – a welcome idea in my world of work, family, friends and relationships.

In order to get a broader taste of yoga offerings in the area I also brought my orange yoga mat to Studio 41 in north Naples to give the Level 2 Hatha Flow class a go.

As opposed to the gentle yoga class, these students seemed more serious. There was a variety of male and female, old and young.

The structure of class was pretty much the same, with more relaxed postures and meditation in the beginning and end and the more challenging stuff in the middle. Instructor DamaDé has practiced yoga for over a decade, was very knowledgeable and led the class well, walking around to make sure students were using good form. While many yoga classes are offered at local gyms, I liked the atmosphere generated by a yoga exclusive space where weight lifters and treadmill warriors weren’t around to distract.

This class was definitely tougher, especially moving from one posture to another (the flow part), and I left tired. At the end I could definitely see the benefits of going to yoga regularly, including increased mental focus, reduced stress, and increased strength and stability.

My housemate said I looked relaxed when I got home, so the classes seemed to do the trick. My muscles weren’t nearly as stiff as before my yoga journey started, and I’m already looking forward to the next class.

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