Yaletown Yoga

I started my $99 1 month of unlimited yoga today at Yaletown Yoga (YY). I have been there before about a year ago, but they moved in the interim into a new building. It's in a sort of district of startups and small high tech companies. It is Yaletown, after all. To those not familiar with Vancouver, Yaletown is the gentrified section of Vancouver where all the hip yuppies live. You have to be social (i.e. like to party), have a nice job with a nice income (anything computers will do), and be willing to live in a tiny condo where the space under a flight of stairs is considered a "den" and where any TV other than a flat one will take up most of your living room. While the housing is ridiculously small, there are benefits. Simply close your eyes, spin 10 times, walk 10 steps, and heave a rock--you'll hit either a drop-dead gorgeous woman or smash the window of a restaurant which offers a gorgeous dining experience. Now you know Yaletown.

So I signed up for yoga. It was funny entering the studio. It felt like going to work. The environment is "high tech startup" rather than my Capitol Hill Samadhi Yoga (SY) experience of "old warehouse made spiritual". In fact there is a completely different spirituality between the places. Samadhi has an altar in each of its two studios. I've only seen one YY studio so far, but I don't believe there was an altar. We started out with 3 oms, but no intention setting. The title of the class was "Power Yoga". My SY Wednesday class is "Jen" and once you've taken a few of Jen's classes you know what you get.

YY keeps the room very warm. The Power Yoga classes are 30C and the Hot Yoga classes are 40C. To convert from Celsius to English, that's "hot" and "fucking hot." I was slipping all over my mat. I noticed that most students only seem to do about 80% of the entire session, often retreating to Child's Pose. I did a little bit, but I managed to keep up fairly well. Next time I'll take a towel and maybe some water. At one point we had to do a 5 minute shoulder stand. The instructor told us to endure it. I figured it couldn't be worse than some of the bush taxi rides I have waiting for me in equatorial Africa in the summer, so I endured. I hope for the sake of the Africans on the bus with me that I don't sweat as much as I did today.