This was a great article printed in the NYTimes a month ago. I’ve been meaning to share it in my newsletter, but we will air it here instead 🙂
As I teach a lot of classes every week, I sometimes forget that newcomers in class don’t know all of our lingo, from the opening asanas (postures) to the last Namaste (our ending that we say to each other). Below is a humorous run-down of what you might hear in yoga class.
See the article on The New York Times here.
August 24, 2008
NAMASTE by Jaimie Epstein
‘At the beginning of class, we stood at the front of our mats and let out a long, dirgelike moan,” the first-time yoga student recollected. “Then the teacher yelled, ‘Chili-pepper pasta,’ and everyone hit the floor.” Sanskrit, the language of yoga, is said to unite sound and meaning; that is, saying the word gives the experience of its meaning. But for the novice yogi (the word for male as well as female practitioners), whose ears need to be tuned to a new frequency, that experience can be as elusive as an overnight parking spot in Manhattan. Thus, chaturanga dandasana (four-legged staff pose, which looks like the bottom of a pushup, your body hovering inches above the floor) might become “chili-pepper pasta” if you’ve got dinner reservations at the latest outpost of the latest fusion craze. And the ear-twisters don’t end there. So let’s do some untwisting…
To read the rest of the article and learn more about yoga lingo, go here.
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This is clever. I was recently reading up on Ashtanga yoga at http://www.ashtanga.com/html/background.html
It is a great website that has lots of good descriptions of lots of aspects of yoga. I even made myself a list of words so I can go back and review their meanings and derivations.
That is a good reference Anya! Those are the foundations that Pattabhi Jois teaches – we heard a lot of that in the movie Enlighten Up!
Also, as Astanga yoga was the first kind of yoga that I did any teacher training in (although I never taught Astanga formally), I think a lot of what I teach is still directly from my ongoing study of this method.