Luiza's Yoga Blog

This week's practice was Vipassana Meditation led by Marcello Spinella. I enjoyed how he taught us some science of the brain. I am a science major so it made meditation make more sense to me. Neuroscience is a hard topic to learn, but the way Marcello Spinella explained it made it easy to follow. When meditation is explained scientifically it makes so much sense and also made me want to do it even more. Yoga can be seen as a form of meditation in my practice space. This is because yoga is a way to focus on my thoughts and bring myself to a state of calmness and relaxation. I learned that meditation is not a way to clear your mind completely, but instead to calm your mind and try to bring your thoughts on what the instructor is talking about.  Meditation is practiced for many reasons, relaxation, to calm down, and much more. Meditation can be practiced at a yoga studio or even from your chair at school. First, you have to try to focus on your breathing and be conscious of your surro...

For this week’s yoga practice I chose to do another video led by Lesley Fightmaster. This week she taught a vinyasa flow yoga class. It was a good mixture of relaxing stretches and poses that were not easy. These types of practices are encouraging because it is nice to be able to do some poses well while you still feel as if you are pushing yourself with the poses that are harder to hold for longer periods of time.  I enjoy how Lesley has a nice soothing voice and is very good at explaining the poses. This makes it easy to not have to look back at the screen several times. This is especially nice when I am practicing in my room at school because there is not much space to practice so not having to have the computer very close to me is helpful.  Another aspect of this week’s practice that I enjoyed a lot was the motivational sayings the instructor would say throughout the practice. She nicely explained the poses, what their benefits are, and a little motivational saying. Even i...

  This week I practiced Hatha yoga led by Lesley Fightmaster. It was very soothing in the beginning with all of the stretching positions she had me do. As the practice went on it became more difficult as we had to hold our bodies up with one arm at a time. This was a nice challenge to try to improve my yoga capabilities, but it was definitely not the hardest yoga I have ever done. I would rate it a seven out of ten. The context of my pracice space was different than my usual place. It was at my house in northern Jersey instead of my school house that I rent. It was nice because it is more spacious, my dog was with me and it was much more quiet than my school house with 6 girls. The definition of a practice space is really anywhere where you can focus and practice yoga. It can be in nature, your home or a studio. Connections made outside of the context of the practice space are typically made socially. Since I have been practicing at home and not with a whole class or a live instruc...

This week’s yoga practice was led by Jenn Kretzer from The Yoga Hive. We practiced Shivananda yoga for over an hour which was very relaxing but also felt like a workout. Jen was very good at explaining how to do the poses and corrected us when needed. I did not realize it until we started the practice, but I have done Sivananda many times before. I just did not know it was called that. When I attended Rutgers University during my freshman year I joined a yoga club. The instructor always had us go through the same poses and we finished with three oms. It was nice knowing the yoga prior to the practice because I did not have to look back to my screen multiple times since I knew what I was doing.  After researching this yoga I found that it is one of the only yoga practices that has not been modified from its original form. I find this very fascinating because everyone always feels the need to change things up nowadays to keep people interested. There is also a special feeling of gett...