OPEN – Loft

Lovely instructors, the studio is very clean and the red light pilates is my new obsession now!

This was one of the worst yoga classes I ever attended. I have been doing yoga for over 18 years and this was dangerous and on a moral level very questionable. Alex Perez— Grace yoga— let’s start with the yoga and move on to the absolutely morally wrong casual misrepresentation of indigenous people. Yoga wise there were things being said like “grab your ankles and give a little pull” when are we meant to ever pull?, “now just a simple twist” for something that is actually quite dynamic and subtle, we had no warm up and ended with sun salutations and chair pose (i don’t need to follow mysore or whatever we want to call traditional-ish styles, but no warm up is dangerous), the sequencing had my legs so over worked after no warm up I was shaking and falling over between transitions, he instructed us to bear weight on the top of our heads if you can’t do wheel—not safe for the neck, and lastly no description of alignment at all—most of the time I couldn’t figure out what we were doing and he wore jeans and a t-shirt and just walked around telling us what to do—no one there to help us see what we are supposed to do, just put your foot here, your arm there, some asanas felt completely made up. So there’s the yoga. Now, the misrepresented indigenous people of north america, this was just plain wrong and I really question the motivation. If we are in a “conscious environment” why call the writers of a song he wanted us to sing along with him “american indians”? I’m in on singing a “Lakota song” from a Lakota person who actually speaks that language. But this was just pure arrogance and a mistreatment of a group of people who are critically on the verge of their language being wiped out completely. That being said, the song was a repetition of 3-ish words that meant something like, “we are all related.” It was said over and over for around 4 minutes with the words “pacha mama” thrown in the middle— I have to say this, why is a another culture’s language from over 2,500 km away in this Lakota song that we all don’t actually understand? He started the class with this “conscious breathing” and a little too long lecture on his day (not sure why we needed this either). If we are being “conscious” then why are we singing songs in languages we don’t understand and calling the people who we assume wrote the song a name that was wrongly given to them over 500 years ago and used to suppress them, while also adding Pacha Mama for kicks? It’s like calling all Europeans white people only and singing a song called, “mindannyian rokonok vagyunk. Obrigada, Mãe Terra.” Yes this is Hungarian and Portuguese. Why does this all belong in a yoga class?? And Indian tradition, which I have to say is funny and points the finger back to our american indian song. I will not be coming back and I was really having a hard time getting through this class. We need yoga standards for this practice if we are to make it a truly body balancing, healing practice of body work.

Really enjoy Alex‘ Vinyasa class. The space is also very beautiful.

Beautiful room. Nice teacher