I attended a yoga workshop yesterday with Mika at the studio I teach at in Boz. I’m not sure where Jessica found this French yogi, who was not only easy on the eyes but also a fantastic teacher. Who doesn’t like yoga + French accent? Anyhow, I was thinking about what makes a good yoga class/practice, and why after yoga I sometimes feel…well, to be honest, so much better than others. And I decided that well-rounded yoga is most important to me, both in practice and in teaching. What do I mean by that? If certain elements are missing from a practice, the post-yoga result is a raw, incomplete feeling. For example, if I leave out backbends, which are very important to my body, I’m out of balance. Which is not why I am doing yoga, right? It’s about approaching yoga as an integrated system, vs. just doing random poses. The true art is in the sequencing. There is a sequence to follow for how you warm up, and when you practice inversions. There is a lot of flexibility to that, and like everything else, different styles produce results for different people. But imagine if you started your practice with an advanced posture, like the inversion forearm stand I posted on earlier in the week, without warming up your shoulders. Yikes.