New school year, new stress. 

People often use yoga as a stress reliever, so the Hasa Team decided to give it a shot. It is good to explore and experience new things especially if it relieves any worries you might have. Even if you are a beginner, it wouldn’t hurt to give yoga a try. 

“If your body is tense, then do yoga,” said co-editor Kae Bee. 

Most of the Hasa staff had never tried yoga before, especially a session led by a professional. That is something else that might hold someone back from trying yoga, thinking they need to go somewhere professional with an instructor but that is far from true. You can do yoga all the way from the comfort of your home to the classroom. 

So that is exactly what we did. We started by moving all the desks out of the way, leaving an open space right in front of the big screen in the classroom. After we killed all the lights, we searched up “Beginner Yoga” on YouTube and clicked the first video we saw. It was “10 Minute Beginner Yoga with Kassandra”. 

A lot of the staffers were not prepared for yoga, mostly we were not dressed in the right attire. Regardless, we still attempted it the best we could. The video we played was a calm and relaxed routine. It seemed the video lost interest of most of the staffers halfway through so we decided to up the stakes a little bit. We started by googling, “Yoga Poses”. What we saw from the search were pretty advanced moves, but Kae Bee continued to amaze us with her flexibility. 

As we continued we laughed out of embarrassment, which goes to show that when trying new things we often get too embarrassed and stop trying, but the Hasa team didn’t quit.

We continued our yoga session by cranking it up a notch. We googled “two person yoga poses”. During this part of our yoga practice, it seemed everyone got a little more comfortable and were willing to give a pose a try, even if we truly thought we couldn’t do it. 

By the end of our yoga for the day, it seemed as if most of us were out of breath, which is probably not how you should leave yoga feeling. Yoga can be used to relax your tensed up or stressed out body. It is a good way to get worthless thoughts out of your brain that are weighing you down. In a way that is exactly what Hasa’s yoga trial did, being able to have a good laugh with each other seemed a lot more rewarding than being perfect at it. 

Take this as your sign to try something new with a rewarding outcome even if you don’t think you will like it or be good at it. Doing an activity doesn’t mean you need to be the master at it. All that matters is that you did it and it makes you feel good about yourself. If you want to try yoga for yourself there are a variety of videos on YouTube and there is a studio on Broadway called HeartWaves Creative Well-Being Center that offers yoga classes. 

As Kae Bee said, “Namaste”.