GUIDO PETRI

On yoga - my first impressions

I heard Kyle Hendricks, one of the Cubs pitchers, practices yoga. He says it helps him a lot with maintaining control over the location of his pitches and keeping his emotions out of the ballgame, if I recall correctly. Since I'm very open to new things and new ideas, I decided to read up on yoga and try it out.

Here's a few notes:

The vocabulary sucks.
Having all these new words that are extremely confusing and don't have a very specific definition, or even any sort of translation, just makes me think that it's a kind of "barrier of entry" to newcomers. A sort of "we're better than you because we use these fancy words like Asana and Chakra".
Some of these positions are really weird. Like the Corpse one.
Yoga doesn't actually have a precise definition either. Plus there's like.... 15-20 types of yoga. So what's up with that.
The barrier of entry for this is REALLY high. There are so few reliable resources on the internet. The top hit for yoga is a website that's more about women's health and "feelgood" stuff rather than yoga.
Which brings me to another point: yoga is VERY geared towards women, which is fine and all, but... it feels as if they shun men a little bit. I don't want to believe that.
Yoga mats are really expensive. No, really. 100 GBP for a mat?
Some of the position descriptions/movement descriptions are terrible. "Expand the base of your skull" is a good example of a terrible description. I don't understand what's being said because obviously I can't expand a bone.
On the other hand, it feels really relaxing to just lay there and focus on the position of each of your body parts.

Overall I think I'd be willing to try yoga again. I'm more interested in its meditative properties than its exercise value, however. I also don't think I'll be visiting a class any time soon, if ever - given how yoga became a kind of fad, I think it's safe to assume there are plenty of instructors out there who have no idea what they're doing.