Stoner yoga, not just for hardworking mommies anymore!
Though the concept of stoner yoga is hardly new (we hear the 60s and 70s were pret-ty trippy) organized classes offered regularly on a studio’s schedule is certainly an interesting new phenomenon. The Daily gives us a look through the haze at Brazilian Yoga and Pilates in LA (where else!) where 420 yoga is lighting up the town.
Says one yoga stoner student:
“The basic idea is it just sorta helps with the same goals you have for meditation: it stills your mind, it helps you be still and find a stillness in the mind, you know.”
Totally, man. You feel that stillness? It’s SO. Still.
Actually we tend to dig the slow flowyness. Here’s the class description:
Relax “naturally” with a mixed level deeply stretchy Slow Flow Yoga class that encourages you to inhale. Set to a dope playlist, arrive early and sip tea in the courtyard.
Mhmm. Tea. (ps. they do say there’s no smoking on the premises, so come prepared.)
Got the munchies? Get to 420 yoga. According to Liz McDonald, studio owner and enlightened brain behind of 420 yoga, students seek out the class for the community aspect, but also to help them feel like they’re doing something, like not sitting on the couch with a tub of ice cream, cheese doodles, a mysterious half-eaten mushroom and pineapple pizza and the beginnings of what looks like an episode of “Hoarders.”
Is stoner yoga the perfect gateway?
“A lot times in yoga people feel that they won’t be accepted for who they are, they think it’s just for the skinny girls in spandex. I know a lot of people have come to me after class and said ‘I didn’t think yoga was for me until I took your class. Now I really love it.'”
These days marijuana is legal via presciption in some places for medical purposes, often pain relief. We know yoga can help relieve pain as well, among other things, like you know, stillness. Is this combo the newest, hottest/chillest trend and Liz the dopest entrepreneurial yoga dealer in America?
[Via Death and Taxes]
——
Earlier…
- Stoga: Hardworking Mommies Get Stoned and Yoga Together
- Yoga Gets Hotter (Like 110 Degrees), Or the Sweat Obsession and the Detox Myth
- Yoga in Top 10 Growing Industries Alongside Hot Sauce, Self-Tanning and Green Stuff
- Yoga’s Survival Guide: Does it Need to Grow Up? Does it Need Saving?
- Yoga Helps Rehabilitate Veterans With Brain Injuries
Is she hiring?
Funny!
Personally, I’m not up for stoner yoga, but it’s as valid (maybe more so) than drunk yoga or chocolate-gorge yoga.
So whatev. Let them eat cake while we’re at it!
Vegan cake?
Lololol …
It is true that a little bit (emphasis on the little) can actually enhance individual sessions of practice.
The danger with making this a regular thing is that marijuana use and dependency will greatly decrease chi flow. Too much marijuana use drains the chi, which causes loss of mental stillness (monkey mind). Specifically, too much use will imbalance the chi flow in your kidneys, and sensitive yogi’s will notice a drain in one nadi.
A couple of small pulls once in a while before your practice is all that is necessary, don’t get “totally baked maaaaaan.”
Just another micro-niche that yoga insists on filling because it hasn’t grown up to embrace the broad masses who don’t sit around and toke all day.
I am still waiting to see the yoga geared to the disabled gay Native American Vietnam War veteran who crossed the border illegally?
Only then will I know that American yoga’s evangelizing mission is complete.
By the way, how does Stoner Yoga differ from Ganja Yoga? Different cannabis brand or source? One has the Kashmiri Tantric influence, while the other is strict Iyengar?
“By the way, how does Stoner Yoga differ from Ganja Yoga? Different cannabis brand or source? One has the Kashmiri Tantric influence, while the other is strict Iyengar?”
Full disclosure: I do teach cannabis enhanced yoga at this studio (Brazilian Yoga and Pilates) and I have no idea what you are asking. This class is a venue where people are welcome/encouraged to come in an herbally enhanced state. The point is that cannabis is a means of creating a quieter mind and an enhanced attention to the present. For thousands of years, yogis have used cannabis as both a sacrament and a means of quieting the mind for meditation on the internal.
Without the yogi, ganja would never have made it to the western world (endentured Indian servants, brought by the British to the caribbean brought holy cannabis seeds with them, as well as the tradition of dreadlocks or ‘jata’).
Yoga is, according to the Yoga Sutras, the stilling of the turnings of the mind (1.2 yogashchittavrttinirodhah). And just like practicing asanas, cannabis use can help us bring our focus to our breath, and quietly observe the present moment, free from the indriyas (sensory inputs).
Like most modern forms of physical yoga, this one too does call on tantric tradition (though most people misunderstand the meaning of tantra).
However, Kashmiri Shaivism is a distinct monistic tradition that does not directly relate as we are not teaching our students to become Shiva or see the universe as a series of trinities. We are also not an Iyengar school, but the influence of Iyengar is undeniable in almost any modern studio. Personally, I teach mostly based on a school of dualist philosophy known as Samkhya, the basis for the traditional philosophical school (astika) called Yoga. But this is not a class to espouse an ideology or reach out to a niche population; it is an embrace of the ancient tradition of cannabis influenced meditation.
Read More: http://www.samveda-yoga.com/en/420_therapy.html
or just visit one of our classes!
Sat Nam
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