Yoga for Geeks?

One obsession/passion I have  is Yoga (they’re borderline shifting back and forth, depending on how much time and how lazy I feel). When I talk to my geek friends on yoga, I tend to get two distinct reactions:

1) Noooooooo way, I’m totally unfit and I am not flexible. Or in Codepo8 words, ‘I’m too competitive to not be competitive’. Haha.

2) Yeah I love to try /I’ve tried it and love it! So good for the spine and the joints.  But I probably should do more.

Now since this conversation has happened for numerous times, I decided to just blog about my responses here specifically addressing to my dear geek friends. (note: I followed 43folders definitions of geeks, check them out here).

Why Yoga is good for geeks:

1) Yoga is not about stretching or doing difficult positions.  Yoga is about looking inwards, listening to your own breathing, your body, and your heart. It involves (if you go to the right studio and have the right teachers) medication, warm-up and different positions and then follow-through with a bit more meditation.  For geeks we are by default slightly happily suffering from attention-deficit (just think of how may tabs you are browsing at the same time, or apps), and rarely have time devoted to just check how our bodies are doing, not unless something goes wrong…  Yoga is good because when you devote an hour to yoga, you are actually devoting an hour to listen to yourself and assess what’s working and what’s not.

2) Yoga is a complicated, multifaceted doctrine.  You can never be perfect, but you can be better than your yesterday’s self. Numerous opensource-related sociological research (e.g. this one and more here) has identified that top motivators for hackers include the strive to skill improvement.  Yoga is a great medium for one to improve internally, where it is on the awareness of how to breath, on how you move your muscles, and even ultimately how tune in you are with your internal emotional energy, that can heal and grow souls around you, and most importantly, yourself.

3) Geeks spend a lot of time in front of our computers, this means that we’re always crouching forward with our shoulders hinging forward, spine compressing, and we mostly suffer a bit of shoulder strain if not back pain.  Yoga releases your spine compression and ignite muscles, tendons, strength that you never know exists.  As simple as lying down on the floor facing up and grab hold of your knees in front of your chest can release much of the compression on your back!  If you want a bit of massage you can gently rock left to right, and front to the back.  Try it tonight, or after long hours of staring at the screen.  Then we are talking .

4) Yoga is inward-looking, but it is very challenging for geeks to not compete with others in a room full of people.  Hence, Yoga is a great emotional exercise for us to focus internally and let go of our egos.  No, we don’t need to prove ourselves in a room of yogis – it’s about doing what *feels right* for you.  Now that’s something not we can do for a full hour outside the distraction of the hustles and bustles!  Enjoy the ‘self-indulgence’!

Okay for now I’m tired from my first Bikram [Hot] Yoga class (yes Yoga is like programming languages, there are many of them and it’s up to what to need to fit that into your life!).  So I’ll stop at these 4 points.  Do you have more to add?  Any questions on this?  I’m by no means experts but am happy to share thoughts on this.

Finally for someone who has never tried Yoga, it is indeed a bit daunting to identify what type, style, location, even clothing you should be considering.  All in all, I’ll recommend newbies to enroll in a 4-8 weeks (1 day per week) beginner course as you might risk hurting yourself going into a class without beginner-needed attention as a beginner.  I wish someone has told me that when I first started because I do a lot of position in correctly and it takes more time to fix than to learn.  Remember the key is breathing and internal focus, and try not to compare with anyone else.  Also, don’t rush yourself.  It took me a couple of years to distill point 1-4 and when i first started Yoga I hated how unflexible I am, blah blah blah – but hey, once you switch you just don’t care externally (how other people do better) aymore then that’s the fun begin… Hope you’ll enjoy yoga!