My First Yoga Class in Japan: Part II

In Part 1, I wrote about how my girlfriend and I decided to try yoga in her hometown of Sapporo, Japan. I’m now going to continue by telling you how my first class went.

As the class gathered together in the studio, I started to get excited about trying my FIRST ever yoga workout in Japan. I was interested in finding out how similar or different the yoga practice would be and how good the instructor was.

The instructor started the class by having us massage both sides of our feet. Now, this actually felt really comfortable and made me think that our yoga session would focus a lot on our feet. Boy – was I wrong! Even though this class was advertised as a “basic” yoga class, I personally felt like it was more of a “warm-up for stretching” session than a regular yoga session. There just didn’t seem to be much yoga happening. I was hoping that things would get better, but unfortunately they didn’t.

The ONLY pose that I could say was close to being a yoga one was the triangle pose – and you can imagine how GREAT it felt! But just when I started to get my hopes up, we went back to more “basic” poses, including one that I couldn’t do, which was to sit Japanese style on the yoga mat for a lengthy period of time. The instructor noticed that I was having trouble with it and was nice enough to tell me to just relax – so that’s exactly what I ended up doing.

Overall, I was a bit disappointed in the way yoga was taught at that particular studio. In a 1½-hour session, we did a variety of stretches that I felt anyone could do at home rather than pay 3,000 yen (the equivalent of about US$30) per session.

Still, it was worth going through the experience of practicing yoga in another country, and I’m looking forward to trying out yoga in other countries around the world sometime in the future.

[tags]my first yoga in japan, first yoga class, yoga workout, yoga session[/tags]