Learning Through Yoga Videos
Welcome to the new millennium and, to a large degree, the new way to learn.
I was at lunch the other day with a very motivated and highly intelligent thirty-ish young man who answered my question as to how he learned the subject we were addressing by announcing that he learns everything, on YouTube.
YouTube is the second-leading search engine, after Google, for young people. Learning through video does have its benefits as well as its detriments. Einstein once said, “all knowledge comes from experience, everything else is just information.” I believe the yogis would concur. Learning from a video can be like an animated book, loads of information yet no experience other than imagination. Yet if the video got you involved, if you participated with the video, listening, responding and feeling, learning through video can give you access to powerful experiences that are transformative. This is what I would consider a Yoga Video could be! Many of the health conditions these days can be traced to technology, as technology allows people to accomplish that much more, creating a situation where people are busier and stressed. Yet the issue is not technology, it is our ability to handle technology in a balanced manner. Yet yoga videos are one way we can use technology to help alleviate the effects of technology, which is rare and special.
I remember, before computers and the new tech wave swept our world, at a time when we were just being teased with the possibilities of technology, I remember thinking we could use the computer to bring yoga videos into everyone’s house with the best yoga videos for beginners, intermediate and advanced practitioners. The teachings of yoga in all its diversity would come to us, instead of us needing to drag our butt to a yoga class. When I use the word diversity, this is an understatement, as what you can get at an online studio-like poweryoga.com dwarfs what you can find at any one yoga studio. You can find therapeutic yoga videos, yoga videos for kids, yoga workout videos, yoga videos for relaxation and yoga videos for meditation, even free yoga videos, etc…. You can find ten-minute classes and thirty-minute classes, one-hour classes, and two-hour classes and even three-hour classes. This is just the tip of the iceberg! Driving in the big city can be stressful, hazardous, and time-consuming, yet with streaming yoga videos, all these issues are alleviated. Now you can practice at your convenience, and if you have not tried this, you will see the online classes are every bit as effective — you could even argue more effectively, as you can more easily personalize your experience.
Now as you practice power yoga in class or at home, you not only get an amazing, dynamic complete exercise program, you also learn how to develop the ability to face greater and greater difficulties, whether it’s gridlock traffic, marriage or family issues or career stuff, in a less reactive way so those situations affect you less stressfully. How is all that for streaming yoga videos?
Bryan Kest
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