Yoga can be - to use a punny term - a flexible exercise form.
You can sweat it out at “hot yoga,” focus on silent, meditative stretching or power up in warrior poses.
Yoga is reflective, yet challenging. A solo venture in a room of solo venturers. … Most of the time.
For a relatively new discipline called AcroYoga, yoga goes outside for recess. It’s when yoga becomes a group activity with a childlike sense of exploration. It is, essentially, playful.
Yoga?
Yes, especially if your idea of playtime involves hanging upside down.
AcroYoga is the intersection of acrobatics - think “Cirque du Soleil” - and yoga - think “downward dog.” What that looks like is “three people in a downward dog pyramid.”
AcroYoga, the business, was co-founded in 2003 by Jason Nemer and Jenny Sauer-Klein, according to acroyoga.org, to promote AcroYoga, the discipline, which “blends the wisdom of yoga, the dynamic power of acrobatics and the loving kindness of healing arts.”
The acrobatics portion requires three essential players: a base, a flier and a spotter.
The base is the support system for the pose. The flier is the person in the air, and the one who does all of the trusting. The spotter is there to add another level of safety. Like a spotter in any other athletic capacity, this person provides an extra set of hands in case gravity gets the best of everyone. She also gives feedback to the flier.
“When you’re upside-down, it’s really hard to tell what you’re doing,” says Nga Peace, a Little Rock resident who does AcroYoga. “If someone says, ‘Move your leg down,’ you think, ‘Well, wait, which way is that?’”
AcroYoga pays very little attention to the size and strength of its participants, says Recreation Studios owner Camille Rule. Rather than using brawn, it defers to the efficiency of proper alignment and body mechanics to accomplish seemingly impossible feats.
“A lot of people come in thinking ‘I’m not strong’ or ‘I’m bigger so I can’t fly.’ That’s totally not true. Anyone can fly. Anyone can base. A small girl can base a huge guy,” she says.
The discipline concerns itself with “stacking” the bones to suspend a flier in the air, which means making the most of the body’s hinges and balance points to support another person’s weight.
“They teach you how to align your body, how to align your bone structure and the safe manner to do that in, and it’s an incredible tool,” says Breezy Osborne, owner of Barefoot Studio, which has been the host of three AcroYoga weekend workshops. She has another scheduled in the fall.
“People are very shocked [by what they can do]. But what I didn’t realize is how much the entire weekend makes you really start to trust yourself. You start to trust other people and you learn a lot about yourself,” she says.
Despite those efficient body mechanics, it still requires a bit of yoga conditioning to pull off some of these poses, but the exertion doesn’t feel overwhelmingly strenuous in the moment, Rule says.
“I would say it is more strenuous than a regular yoga practice, especially if you’re the base or even when you’re the flier and you’re in some poses, but that focus on the other person and having fun with the partner means you’re not thinking, ‘Oh, my God, my arms are dying’ or ‘I’m sweating so hard.’”
The collaborative nature of AcroYoga encourages her to put in even more effort, she says.
“I definitely notice that I perform better whenever someone else is depending on me or my own safety is depending on how well I’m doing the move,” she says. “And there’s something about being with a partner that’s really magical, and you’re coming together to create one energy while you’re doing the poses.Regular yoga is a deeper look inside yourself, and for me, that’s tougher to do, so I enjoy AcroYoga more than just plain yoga.”
Since the weekend workshops, a small community of AcroYoga devotees have been meeting fairly regularly to practice and play in central Arkansas parks and yoga studios.
“It’s a lot of fun. You really do form friendships because you have to feel comfortable to, um, stick your foot in places you normally wouldn’t stick your foot, and to trust somebody to hold you up and support your weight and not let you fall,” says Deanna Ray, who took an AcroYoga workshop in March.
“I was really hesitant to do it because I’m really new to yoga,” she says. “But it’s really been a life-changing experience, the whole thing -when you’re able to do these things you never thought you could do, and you walk away and you have so much confidence.”
Practitioners also get a good stretch in the process - this is yoga after all - and that’s where the “healing arts” aspect enters the picture.
For example, watch three women do a pose called “Folded Leaf”: The base lies on her back with feet straight in the air. The flier places her hip bones on the soles of the base’s feet, forming a fulcrum that supports the movement. The flier essentially folds over the base, resting her weight on the locked legs of the base and lifting her own legs while holding onto the base’s hands for balance.
If executed correctly, the flier feels like Stretch Armstrong.
“It makes you taller,” says Mindy Simonson as she “bases” a fellow AcroYogi in Riverfront Park behind the River Market on a recent Saturday. “You can feel people’s spines stretch.”
She has attended three AcroYoga workshops and has been practicing yoga for six years. She says that whereas yoga doesn’t usually involve contact with anyone else, the partner work of AcroYoga requires practitioners to abandon their notion of a personal physical space.
“Most Americans have a physical bubble around them. They don’t want other people in their space, and AcroYoga sort of breaks that down,” she says. “You start with a group of people and keep in your bubble and by the end of it, you’re just all up in each other. You have to lose your inhibitions.” FLOWING TOGETHER
Rule says partner yoga is a great way to build a bond or strengthen a relationship, and if applied broadly, bring a community closer together.
“There’s a lot of trusting and letting go that has to happen for the process to flow correctly, so it’s a really great way to strengthen relationships and build community and play within the community, which is what AcroYoga is all about, which is divine play, and that’s play coming from this place within your heart, that is real and intimate and wonderful and creates a sense of community with people around you.”
That often translates to a childlike “let’s see what we can accomplish” sense of playfulness, and the willingness to make a mess or fail in a way that “ends with a heap of people,” Simonson says.
“There was a thing we were trying where Susan [Staffeld] was standing next to me and she was going to cartwheel onto my feet and end upside down. The first try didn’t end like that. It ended up with a lot of people on the grass,” Simonson says.
DRAWING STARES
The other thing about AcroYoga, when you’re successful, it looks very impressive. When they practice in public places, they often collect an audience.
“People just kind of stop and watch,” says Peace, looking around the park. “We had someone another time over here who clapped after we were done.”
The next AcroYoga workshop will be Sept. 13-15 at Barefoot Studio, 3515 Old Cantrell Road. Admission is $35 for Friday, $50 for Saturday and $65 for Sunday. Or $165 for the full weekend. More information is available by calling (501) 661-8005.
ActiveStyle, Pages 23 on 08/19/2013