Yoga In Your Underwear Part 3- Skipping the Underwear

I rolled over in bed one morning and asked “Did I show you the naked yoga video on YouTube?”

Mrs. Yogi, my in-home guru, blinked a few times.  “What?”

“Well you know how me and Friend-Who-Shall-Remain-Nameless pass videos of women doing athletic things back and forth on Facebook?”

“No,” she said, “I didn’t know that.  What kind of ‘athletic things’?”  Mrs. Yogi is open minded, to a point.

“Stilt walkers, knife throwers, burlesque shows with trapeze setups, crazy yoga postures…”

"Okay, cool.”

“So one of us found a series of people doing yoga naked.”

Skepticism crossed her face.  “Men or women?”

“Both, but mostly women.”

Skepticism continued.  “I see.”

“So the weird thing is that it is actual yoga, and the models are really fit.  It’s not like a stripper watched a yoga video and did a bunch of awkward postures.” Truth be told, there are a ton of those on YouTube as well.  I continued, “and the cool thing is that because everyone is naked you can really see the body dynamics at work and the muscle groups working together.”  We practice a type of yoga that spends a lot of time discussing whole body integration in postures.

She still wasn’t convinced, but was getting there. Mrs. Yogi is versed in the benefits of naked yoga from our mutual Friend-Who-Shall-Remain-Nameless, who practices in the altogether most of the time.  When we took a class together once he looked at me and said “I don’t remember the last time I did yoga with my pants on, I wonder if I’ll be okay?” 

I grabbed my I-Thingy from the side table and said “here, let me show you.”

“Wow, they are real people,” she said.

“I know!”

“And look” she said, “you can really see how she does that (only ¼ of the way into Yoga Teacher Training and don’t know the name of that posture) by the movement in her (really need to work on the anatomy homework so I can remember these muscle groups).”

From Asana Exposed

“I know, and you can’t see that muscle group move in yoga pants, but here you can see how the whole posture comes together,” I said.

So there you go- naked yoga.  Not for everyone, not for me (at least not now), but a way to be in the practice and better appreciate the practice of others.

For a great blog about the topic see Asana Exposed over on WordPress.  There are also a few studios that specialize in naked yoga- the FAQ for Austin Naked Yoga is particularly good.  Namaste.