September Yoga With Judson
Hi, yogis! Schedule changes are afoot again. First, I’ll tell you what they all are, and then, if you’re interested, I’ll explain them.
“Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes.” —David Bowie
Monday class at the Glowing Body is over for now. Last Monday was the last one.
Tuesday Gentle Yoga at Balanced You continues. Masks and vaccinations are both require this month. Make your reservation each week at https://stillgarden.com. 5:30-6:45pm.
For the new subscribers: my gentle yoga class is a mix of yin yoga, restorative yoga, and some gentle strengthening. It’s well-suited for all bodies, including those recovering from things like hip replacements.
The Thursday Integrated Yoga Series at Breezeway Yoga is shortening to a 90-minute class. 5:30-7:00pm. (I have it reserved for longer just in case.) Masks and vaccinations are required. It is still 3 classes over the course of the month. The dates are Sept 2nd, 9th, and 16th. If I have to cancel one unexpectedly, the fallback date will be Sept 23rd. The price is being reduced to $45 accordingly with the shortening of the class. You can pre-pay at stillgarden.com. (Venmo is now an option.)
For the new subscribers: this class is a balanced blend of yoga asana and some pranayama. The class usually goes like this: warm-up and standing poses (including sun saluations) for the first 45 minutes, then we sit down for forward folds and hip openers, back bends, and then a savasana with guided imagery. The focus is on building body-awareness to better help you relax, safely challenge yourself, and to correct bad habits that lead to injury over the long-term. As always, every body is different, so I work with you to understand your own body’s special considerations.
Now for the promised (threatened?) musings. . .
“Monday you can fall apart. . .” —The Cure
I’m dropping the Monday class just because I don’t feel comfortable teaching without being able to require vaccinations right now, given that we have a record number of cases in Knox County and that hospitals are near capacity.
Vaccinations, like masks, don’t keep us from getting infected or from spreading the disease, but they reduce both. In times of near-capacity hospitals, every bit of reduction is helpful. Logically, that means that it would also be helpful if we all just stayed at home all the time wearing N95 masks around our family members. Well, you have to draw a line somewhere, and so this is where I’ve got my line for now. I’m currently comfortable teaching yoga with y’all for an hour or two while we’re all masked and vaccinated.
“Just Wait on Thursday” —The Weeknd
The Thursday class is shortening from 2-hours to 90-minutes because I got a lot of feedback from folks that two hours was intimidating. Given that attendance wasn’t what it could be, we’ll try coming back down to the usual 90 minutes and see how that goes.
The reason Thursday is still a “series” and not “drop-in” classes is because Breezeway is flexible enough to let me require vaccinations for my own classes, but drop-in classes are still expected to meet every week and to participate in the Breezeway class package system, neither of which is something that works well for me currently, for reasons having to do with getting subs on short notice and other things.
“Where do I go from here?” — Barry Manilow
What’s our longterm outlook for yoga and COVID? I read a nice article in the Atlantic about the COVID-19 endgame. It observed that the goal is no longer the eradication of COVID-19. It’s never going to go away, just like the Spanish Flu of 1918 never went away. It just faded into the background and became one of those things that some people catch now and again. So, ideally, we want to get most people vaccinated (or otherwise immunized), and the case count will drop again, and we’ll just go back to ‘normal.’
I look forward to hanging out with folks normally knowing that very few people have COVID and even fewer get seriously ill from it.
Occassional mask wearing might be with us as a cultural thing now, like happened in Asia 20 years ago after SARS. There, covering your face is just a polite thing to do when you’re sick so you don’t make other people sick.
But the case counts have to go down first. The early delta-surge states like Florida and Lousiana and Mississippi are finally seeing peaks in their new-case counts. Things aren’t better there yet. They’re just not getting worse every day.
(I subscribe to the “Your Local Epidemiologist” newsletter here on substack. She also writes on Facebook and probably other places, too.)
Once things get normal again, I’ll probably try the 2-hour class experiment again. It was stymied by the fact that just as it was starting, Delta hit, and I wasn’t sure how long I would be teaching in person at all. With that ambiguity, I didn’t put any effort into getting the word out to a larger audience. Long term, that’s definitely a class I want to teach.
namaste,
judson