Intro to Yoga - Yoga Zone - Dv

I have made several attempts to rekindle my initial enthusiam by purchasing over a dozen books and videos and taking numerous classes. Up until I saw this video, I had failed to find anything that replicated the quality of the instruction I first experienced.

It is unfortunate that two prior reviewers of this tape called it "boring" and one went over the top and panned everything about it, ending the review by citing preferred videos made by people in the fitness industry.

First of all, if anyone finds this video boring, I suggest the problem may not be with the video but rather the person. Even though now there are many styles of yoga to choose from (Bikram, Kundalini, Ashtanga, Kripalu, Iyengar, and so forth)--and I have tried several of these--the fact remains that classical hatha yoga is supposed to be slow, deliberate, precise, meditative and mindful. Anything that deviates from that is usually some bastardization of it. I once took a yoga class from a local high-quality health club and the instructor never once even went over the proper way to breathe, never made reference to the mind-body discipline of it and the hour passed as nothing more than a stretching class.

Now that yoga has gone mainstream in these intervening 20 or so years since I first discovered it, there are a lot of people out there teaching it who obviously have no business doing so. It seems that every celebrity and fitness guru has a book or video out on it and there is nothing that authenticates these people as qualified to teach it other than their names.

Don't get me wrong, I am not a yoga expert, I still consider myself a beginner, but I can recognize excellent instruction when I see it. Alan Finger is all a yoga teacher should be--he teaches the proper breath and form throughout. He is gentle, slow and tells you where every every toe, arm and vertebra should be. He is thorough, exacting and precise: since yoga is not some new phenomenon of pop culture but an ancient art and science, his manner of instruction recognizes that and dignifies it as such. I am so inspired and impressed with him that I would lay out all the extra money it would take, and schlep all the way down to the other end of this city, if I thought I could study at his studio with the man himself. Trust me, this is a quality video. All the superlatives apply.

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The instructor's voice is very soothing and relaxing, and the poses are challenging but definitely not unattainable for the beginner. What's more, there's always room to grow. When I started to feel like I really had a pose down and might feel bored by that section of the video, instead I started really examining the pose to see how I felt, or noticing that I could be relaxing a particular part of my body more, or breathing better. Someone else in these reviews mentioned that they felt bored during the explanations if they'd done the video a while -- what I've begun to do is simply start doing the pose while he's explaining. I get more workout that way and I'm growing in my ability to do it.

I highly recommend this video for any beginner interested in yoga.

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