yoga review: the ashtanga yoga centre of melbourne

FYI - The yard is back to normal as we don’t think Carney’s parents want to buy the house next door after all. Hopefully no amazing potential neighbours were put off by the garden being temporarily turned into a tip (see here). Maybe we’ll bake something and stand in the yard trying to look friendly/not deranged during the next inspection. That wouldn’t be weird at all.


This weekend I missed my Studio Yoga class for terribly un-zen reasons, involving cocktails and (critically) not involving dinner (unless you count cans of tuna desperately and rather unsatisfyingly inhaled at 1am ‘dinner’. I certainly do not). So Sunday morning, recovered, I went to the Ashtanga Yoga Centre of Melbourne in Fitzroy. In fact, I nearly missed the AYCoM class as well because it’s upstairs and I queued behind two girls standing, chatting at the front door. This would have been fine had they also been queuing, but I was the lone ranger on that count and consequently looked like a sort of desperate, lingering eavesdropper.


The awkwardness continued upstairs when the instructor informed me I’d managed to bowl up for a make-up class for people doing their Intro 1/Intro 2 program. This appeared to be big deal and after lecturing me on how little I’d know (nothing) relative to how much everyone else would know (everything) the instructor finally said ‘we’ll just take it easy’ in such a way so as to convey that she was doing me a favour and that she disproved of me generally. She made this point even more apparent by asking, at the start of the class, the ‘intro one’ people to put up their hands, then the ‘intro two’ people to put up their hands, and then – pointed look in my direction - ‘those who just came along’ (of which there was one) to put up their hand. Undeterred, I vowed to impress her with my downward dog (which is impressive) and generally awesome yoga skills (grossly overstated).

That said, WOW. AYCoM is awesome. For all her fastidious intro 1/intro 2-ing the instructor was fantastic. She touched me several times (tick, tick!*) but even if she hadn’t I’d still be singing her praises. There was lots of movement, no pretending to be a potato and minimal blanket work. I expect it would be a good place for advanced yoga too – their most senior class is the aptly named ‘MySore’ and runs for between 1.5 and 3 hours. Personally, I think three hours is a bit long in the tooth, but nice to know such options exist (pending achievement of respective intro courses I hasten to add).

Four and a half stars. Great workout. Polished floorboards. Slight Nazi vibe on check in.


Kitty

*In a posture adjustment way. Refer 5 star rating systems.