Physical Education

I like "Yoga with Adrienne". She makes 30 day series and they get increasingly difficult with each day.

Ive yet to complete one through, but the furthest I've gotten is like day 22 I wanna say. Yoga's great tbh and I should do more of it. For me, it helps provide awareness of my physical state which makes assessing my mental state a lot easier. An ex of mine had told me they did some pose before and it caused her to see colors somehow...weird, I've never had that happen.

Sounds a bit woosah to me, but even just the physical effects of yoga alone are amazing.

Yoga is great. My only gripe with it is that yoga and meditation are frequently associated with the divine in India because of which the "yoga industry" is full of charlatan hacks who try to amass a following kinda like how Gandhi did. If you look at this list of modern yoga gurus on Wikipedia, many of the recent ones are hacks as well. I can only speak of the ones that are alive because I don't know about the older ones. Yoga (and ayurveda) is also the pride of Hindu fascists who like to bask in the false glory of a mythologised past where yoga (and ayurveda) was a cure to a multitude of ailments, an art which now has supposedly been forgotten about due to the rampaging colonisation by Western ideas. They take the popularity of yoga in the West as affirmation of the idea that India of the past was the most advanced civilisation and other idealist notions like that.

Mostly though if you go to a normal gym which has yoga classes, it is usually fine and normal. But there are a ton of "foundation" run by aforementioned hacks. My neighbours tried to indoctrinate me into one when my parents told them I was depressed. It was extremely stupid.

I used to do yoga with a group of people as an extracurricular activity during my teenage years. With that, I mean that I did it for three weeks by insistence of one of my parents during a time where I did zero exercise. I absolutely loathed it, to the point that the experience still has me disregarding yoga as something to practice to this day.

It was years later however when I began to understand what was it that made me dislike it the most, and truth be told, it was nothing regarding yoga in itself, but the whole culture surrounding it: the talks about auras and chakras, about mantras and vibrations and all those concepts painted in an exotically orientalist light that so strongly attracts new-age "spiritual" westerners and, probably, gives it that "feminine and hippie" image that you speak of too.

If there is a chance in the future that I may be practicing yoga with a group of people again, that will be only if I ever find a place where it is practiced with a secular tone, with the same approach to the sport that you would see in someone practicing tennis, weighlifting or almost any other sport. And it is too my opinion as that yoga would get many more practicioners if it began adopting that image to the general public as well.