Looking for a way to unwind from your work day, find calm and be inspired? We may have the solution for you: Art Yoga!
The Houston Chronicle today covers the latest trend in this popular form of exercise: practicing yoga in a museum! Seems art lovers across the country are taking part in art yoga sessions as an effort to soothe the soul while toning the body!
"Yoga is really more than fitness," instructor Rachael Nickel of Utica, New York told the Chronicle before one of six Saturday morning classes. "It's a tradition that's over 5,000 years old, and it's really a spiritual tradition. So it's really a wonderful blending of art and movement."
More than 12 million Americans participated in some form of yoga in 2004, up from 11 million in 2002 -- and specialty classes are everywhere. Nickel's art yoga joins power yoga, baby yoga, kickboxing yoga, chair yoga, punk rock yoga and plus-size yoga as one of the trends.
But as much as any of these trends - if not more, art yoga seems to make sense. Museums and galleries are places for quiet contemplation and inspiration and yoga is a quieting of the mind, a way to become one with the flow and be fully present in your body. Not a bad combination, if you ask me!
Amy Hofland, director of the Trammell & Margaret Crow Collection of Asian Art in downtown Dallas says her museum has been holding yoga classes for three years.
"We realized our niche as an oasis for calm, meditation and relaxation, so yoga seemed to be the perfect manifestation of that environment," Hofland told the publication.
"For many people, it's a way to end a stressful workday," Hofland said. "They'll shed their suits and start the class."
Ralph La Forge, a physiologist at Duke University Medical Center, told the HC that the value of a "mindful" yoga class like one in an art museum is found in the way it enhances the ability to focus on relaxing, breathing and meditating. That helps reduce stress and improve body control.
"I would think you'd get more bang for your buck," La Forge said.
Some art-yoga instructors alter their meditations to go with a theme.
"An artist goes into that ... meditative, contemplative space and manifests ideas or visions," Nickel said. "Yoga means to yoke, or to unite. So we're going inside that infinite part of ourselves and kind of getting in touch with that and just being in this space where someone has done that."
In other words, art yoga can be a meditation on a meditation. Those who try it have the opportunity to commune with the spirit of the artists on display, and make some of that energy their own.
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