Emoga=Yoga+Emojis. If you didn’t think yoga has already jumped the metaphorical shark with its trendy combos, then wait til you hear the latest tech-savvy mashup. Welcome to Emoga, where yoga classes and poses are dictated by the little emoticons aka emojis on your smartphone. We know! You’re all like 🙄 😯 👿
We’re not joking about this, though we kind of wish 20-year-old UK native and Emoga creator Charlotte Bell were. Bell developed Emoga because, “London is desperate to do social media rather than talk about it,” she told the Evening Standard. “I’m tired of people misunderestimating this language, while at the same time trying to mime in a random way so that they just look like an emoji without intending to.”
Classes are set up through WhatsApp and Emojili, an emoji-only social network (no text allowed). And the sequences themselves are based on the actual emoji icons.
The actual emoga class starts with a poo (turd) emoji task warm-up position. Participants adopt a foetal position — which essentially looks like a happy crap. They then stretch out for a screaming cat-face emoji, then an angry yellow person with face-mask posture, followed by a dancing lady with a red dress asana.
Hannah Lyal Bingham, an emoga enthusiast (apparently they exist) from Utah and social personality (with 30k Instagram followers) says: “Emojis are part of our daily lives, as should yoga be. Every time I do an emoji pose I centre my life and spirit daily, around that character. Namaste.”
It’s a relief, really. We always wondered what yoga pose the smiling poop emoji was. Perhaps this will spur on the creation of a whole new set of yoga-related emoticons. But that wouldn’t be as much fun.
Emojis are cute and fun and all, but we’re thinking folks might be ‘misunderestimating’ the universal language of actual words, lately. </curmudgeonly hrmph>
What’s wrong with good old fashioned plain old yoga? Ah, but there may be a resurgence when all of these trendy yoga combos play out. We’ll let the cheekiness of Evening Standard reporter Nimrod Kamer play us out on this one…
True yoga addicts were so depressed they started doing just “yoga”, the classic yoga — Eighties-style. The edge is gone, boring gym sessions are taking over again, partly because the yoga entrepreneurs and hash-setters (hashtag trendsetters) got caught adding just one miserable word in front of the word “yoga” (like “laughter” or “harmonica”) while pretending it was something profoundly new.
[Via London Evening Standard; H/T Buzzfeed]
photo credit Sam Mitchell
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Earlier…
- Brewery Yoga, Where Beer and Yoga Mix for the Latest Detox Retox Trend
- Dungeons and Dragons Yoga May Be the Nerdiest Thing Ever
- Come On, Voga (Yoga+Voguing is a Thing)
yeah,i just joined yoga classes. i like your yoga moves. Great work