Not every yoga class takes place in the bamboo-floored, Ganesh-statue littered, lightly saged yoga studio of our dreams. Lots of us have had very powerful and meaningful experiences with yoga at places like the good old neighborhood YMCA. While locale is far from the most important thing about a yoga class, classes that take place in gyms, community centers and dance studios have a feature that most yoga studios don’t: mirrors.
If you regularly practice in a room with mirrors, there is some value in assessing what effect that literal reflection of self is having on your practice,With the proliferation of yoga selfies on social media, one wonders if people are falling in love with their asana reflections a little too much. But in a time before “selfie” was even a word, one of my teachers advised her students to take a video of themselves practicing. The purpose wasn’t to share the video on Facebook and wait for the “likes” to roll in, but to really study our alignment and tendencies. Video evidence, she said, could reveal a less-than-desirable hand placement in downward-facing dog, or a pattern of holding one shoulder higher than the other, etc. You might think you have a perfect upward-facing dog in the moment, but the video of your shoulders hunched up by your ears doesn’t lie.
