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The enthusiasm with which Americans, in all our couch-potato glory, have embraced yoga is understandable. It’s exercise that can be as lazy or taxing as you like, and ends with a few minutes of lying completely still.
A friend once observed he’d be more into working out if it were more like sex — “some vigorous activity, and then you get a little reward.” Yoga is probably the closest thing to it.
What’s more, the yoga world’s underlying philosophy of community, harmony, acceptance and charity leads even bottom line-focused studios to offer a fair amount of free, cheap or introductory sessions for curious students. “Yoga meets you where you are,” teachers croon as they coax novices into their first child’s pose. Child’s pose is easy and feels really good. Soon you’re handing over your credit card and signing up for a package, and the next thing you know you’re dressing in stretchy clothing all the time and able to touch the floor with your palms.
Not long ago, I woke up on Sunday with sore everything, the result of too many hours spent in chairs, walking in crappy shoes and otherwise abusing the only body I’ll ever get – a major case of misaligned chakras. I resolved to spend a week doing yoga every day, with an emphasis on unusual, new, cheap or free practice.
In a city the size of Detroit, it wasn’t difficult. Within a three-county area, you can take hot yoga, paddleboard yoga, even goat yoga -- though goat yoga classes at Pingree Farms seem to have been suspended for now. (I suspect the spring crop of cute kids have now grown into animals you no longer want climbing onto your back.)
Anyone looking for a few sessions to get one’s spine limbered up has plenty of variety to sample. Here’s how the week went down:
Sunday
Donation yoga at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit. Unroll your mat, throw whatever your conscience requires into the jar, and start working on your breathing. When the teacher suggested we go outside and practice in the yard of the Mike Kelley house, my heart sank. Outdoor yoga, in my experience, always involves an ant crawling across my nose when I’m trying to concentrate on corpse pose. (Once, at a class in Grand Circus Park, no fewer than three drunken pedal pubs went by, and nothing makes you want to bring a little martial arts to your practice like that.) But this was a good class. A warm day, but quite pleasant in the shade. The teacher mixed just enough woo into the class to make it feel like yoga, but challenging enough that I failed big-time on a couple of poses. Rating: 9/10.
Amie "A-Bomb" Burke sells merch at her Sailor's Mouth Yoga classes at PJ's Lager House (Photo by Nancy Derringer)
Monday
Sailor’s Mouth Yoga at PJ’s Lager House. This is the class you take your salty-mouthed auntie or granny to. In a nutshell, it’s yoga with swearing and beer. Teacher Amie “A-Bomb” Burke calls the class F*ck Mondays, only without the asterisk. You won’t hear a word of Sanskrit, because A-Bomb gives every pose a naughty name. Camel pose is camel-toe pose; downward-facing dog is “head down, ass up.” And so on. The yoga was kind of a joke -- A-Bomb demonstrates a pose, you do it three times, drink, move on. But it was hilarious and weirdly yogic, in the sense that your brain gets reset and the world seems a better place afterward. If it’s the cat/cow stretches, while chanting “moooo, motherf*cker” and “pussyayyyy,” well, if it works, it works. As A-Bomb says: Namaste, bitches. Rating: 10/10 for fun; 5/10 for actual yoga.
Tuesday
The Collective at True North. The Oberon was nice to sip between camel-toe poses, but it was time for a traditional class, and this was it. Housed in the quonset huts off Grand River on the west side, class was held late on a hot afternoon. The doors were open to let in the sounds of the wind and the birds -- calming in the heart of the city. Then I heard, “Today we’re going to work on core and legs,” and knew I would soon long for a quick death. But. The teacher was attentive and good about tweaking student positions, and provided some essential oil dabs during savasana. And at the end, we’d worked your legs and core. A good thing. Rating: 10/10 for the yoga, 3/10 for some major sweating.
Wednesday
Moonlight yoga at West Riverfront Park. Full disclosure: I have a history with the teacher for this class, Michelle Moten, who runs the Urban Solace studio in Rivertown. And I think she’s awesome; she’s found the sweet spot between pushing you to work a little harder, but not shaming anyone who can’t quite get there. For $5, we got an hour of practice, glow-stick jewelry, a glow wand to be extra fancy and a free microfiber towel, courtesy of BCBS Michigan -- all to benefit the Riverfront Conservancy. Oh, and a house-music mix from the on-site DJ, a nice break from the usual Chinese-restaurant music. I don’t recall any moonlight, but the Ovation, a party boat that cruises the river, honked at us as we all waggled our glow wands in warrior pose. Rating: 10/10 all around. Michelle does free outdoor classes all summer, too.
Raise your glow wand to the sky: A previous year's moonlight yoga class at West Riverfront Park. (Riverfront Conservancy photo)
Thursday
Christian yoga at Living Waters, Grosse Pointe Farms. Stop laughing. It was a perfectly fine hour of yoga, and if the usual eastern mysticism vibe was replaced by amorphous Christian prayer, no worries -- yoga meets you where you are, and this is where some people are. In this polarized environment, one might fear something like hellfire-and-damnation yoga, but it was mostly about reaching arms not to the ceiling or the sky, but to heaven, and instead of concluding the class with namaste, we had a short, non-denominational prayer from the Psalms, and a little in-class preaching about being a little more open to the Lord’s mysterious ways. Amen, yogis! Rating: 8/10, mostly because it was a gentle-flow class and by the end of the week, my aches and pains had subsided enough I found it a little too gentle.
Friday
Exhausted. YouTube Yoga in my bedroom. There are so many yoga channels on YouTube I can’t even tell you, but that day, I chose Yoga With Adriene. She’s very nice and pretty and nothing at all like Gwyneth Paltrow. And unlike the live teachers of the previous few days, she had a pause button, a volume control and a channel. When my energy returned 15 minutes in, I switched from a restorative class to one with some side planks. Google her on YouTube. She’s worth the search. Rating: 7/10, because your iPad can’t dab your temples with essential oils.
Which brings us to Saturday. I ran errands and flaked on the final day of my pledge. By then I was feeling flexible and pain-free again, and if yoga is anything, it’s nonjudgmental and cool with whatever you feel like doing. You’ll be back to the mat eventually. Maybe with a goat.
