Do you feel tempted to practice yoga at home on your laptop, or even online or YouTube?  Then, this blog is for you. 

The traditional drop-in yoga classes still maybe the best place to practice yoga for many reasons. Doing yoga at home may appear convenient, but it can be far less effective and could potentially lead to injury.   We would like to share some reasons why you should take yoga classes at a yoga studio:

1. Sense of Community

Our yoga studio is not just a spacious place with cork floors, but it’s also a centre for personal and spiritual growth. By attending yoga classes here, you're joining a large and far reaching community of passionate teachers, committed students and yoga scholars. In addition to classes, we also offer workshops; retreats and yoga teacher trainings, all of which are meant to bring people closer together and add value to your practice.

As more and more technology gets established, it’s easy to see its isolating effects and the current loneliness epidemic that plagues the modern person. Unfortunately even doing the beautiful practice of yoga alone at home, fails to foster a sense of connection with others.

In Buddhism, the sangha, or the sense of community, is one of the few treasures that practitioners look toward for guidance and take refuge in during difficult times. By coming together in the sacred space of a yoga studio, we keep each other accountable and support each other, even in the most difficult of postures and/or times.

2. Hands on Assists

The tricky thing about yoga is that your body doesn't want to have correct alignment. Your body wants to be a couch potato (and sometimes eat that entire bag of potato chips). As a result, practicing yoga alone has a potential to put your body into a position more prone to injury, and also reinforce bad habits. An experienced teacher is necessary to correct any misalignment in the poses, for both beginners and even advanced practitioners.

Yoga teachers at our studio are not simply following a script; they are continually scanning the room and examining bodies to see where students need correction or adjustment. Our yoga teachers customize their verbal instructions to fit the practicing bodies in the room.

3. Insight on Yoga Practice

In our yoga studio setting, before, after or during the yoga class, students are invited to talk to the teacher and ask questions. And although the yoga teacher may not be a sage or a guru fresh off the ashram, they're still a source of valuable knowledge and wisdom.

Whether you have a certain injury or pain in a specific part of your body or simply a desire to gain strength or flexibility in specific area, your teacher is there to provide insight into the problem, or possible solutions to add to your practice.

Unlike your school teachers or university professors who teach you for a semester or two, the relationship you have with your yoga teacher can built and grow over many years.  Also yoga teachers make invaluable friendships with their students.  It’s a source of joy for them to see their students grow in their yoga practice.

4. Focus on Practice

Unfortunately, it can be very easy to slack off in your home yoga practice. There are certainly plenty of distractions at home.  You wake up in the morning and roll out your yoga mat, pop into a Downward Dog, only to notice your toenails need some trimming and on your way to the bathroom to get your nail clippers you notice your cats need to be fed, and then your phone pings with five important emails that need your attention.

By stepping away from distractions at home and joining others in our dedicated space for yoga, your personal practice gets strengthened as well.

5. Mindfulness and peace

While practicing yoga with others can bring up some unwanted emotions such as self-judgement, it also fortunately makes you aware of how your mind is always trying to sabotage you.  When we lose our balance in a Tree Pose, while the person next to us is perhaps barely breaking a sweat in a handstand, a lot of harsh judgement can creep up, comparisons and a desire to compete can come up.

Fortunately, these difficult moments during practicing yoga in a class environment can provide the perfect time to practice mindfulness.  Mindfulness practice can help us recognize the present moment experience from a stance that is both nonjudgmental and nonreactive. It helps us accept ourselves just as we are.

By letting go of the judgements that can arise from comparison to others, we bring awareness, mindfulness and peace in our daily lives.

6. Healing Touch

Although Savasana is already pretty blissful, one of the guilty pleasures of practicing yoga at a yoga studio is receiving the healing touch of a yoga teacher in Savasna – getting a boost of oxytocin.

Do you still feel you have reasons to do yoga at home? Of course! Any yoga anywhere is 100% worth it.  Haven’t given our studio a try yet? Sign Up for unlimited access with our 30 day trial offer for $65. You can always check out our pricing and promotional offers, or just drop by to chat about what options might work best for you. We are so proud of our studio and will continue to build and develop a positive community that supports the health and wellness of our clients. We hope to see you soon!