Bending the Rules to Offer Yoga With a Beer Chaser
July 9, 2014 by admin
Filed under Yoga Articles
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Fashion & Style|Bending the Rules to Offer Yoga With a Beer Chaser
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Rob Rice, a chef and a certified yoga instructor, stands while leading a yoga class, after a 2.3-mile run, at Angel City Brewery in downtown Los Angeles. Credit Stephanie Diani for The New York Times
A chef, 24 yogis and a dog walk into an Art Deco bar. Itâs 10:30 a.m. on a recent Sunday, and most of the yogis have just completed a 2.3-mile run through downtown Los Angeles, led by a chef, Rob Rice, who is a certified yoga instructor.
Mr. Rice fires up his latest Detox Retox Spotify playlist and guides the class through a series of sun salutations, including a handful of downward dog poses, which arouse the canine into shaming the human yogis when he completes the namesake move perfectly.
Ninety minutes later, the beginner/intermediate class is over. But instead of his traditional signoff of ânamaste and cheers,â Mr. Rice extends gratitude to attendees at this inaugural class at Angel City Brewery, which follows Detox Retoxâs yearlong success with a Saturday class at Golden Road, a nearby brewery.
Ten minutes later, most participants have paid the $10 fee and traded the drink ticket for a beer at the bar.
Detox Retox is part of a growing trend of yoga paired with post-practice beer. These classes, often placed in breweries, are popping up across the country, and some have cheeky names like Happy Hour Yoga with Joe Sixpack (which began in Philadelphia in 2008), BrewAsanas in Colorado (Boulder and Denver) and Three Sheets to the Warrior Pose in Wilmington, Del.
The trend seemed to really take off two and a half years ago in Charleston, S.C., thanks to Beth Cosi, a restaurant worker turned yoga instructor. Ms. Cosi regularly invited her friends to take her class, but few actually made it to the studio. After connecting with a local brewery, she extended another invitation to her non-yoga-practicing friends to attend a beginnerâs class that was followed by a beer tasting.
Ms. Cosi, whose friends showed up, learned that beer is an effective carrot on a stick.
âThe biggest surprise is how itâs taken on a life of its own,â she said. âI never envisioned for these classes to grow larger than the one brewery, Holy City, and need to move into other.â
Bendy Brewski classes regularly have more than 50 attendees, so Ms. Cosi added an assistant to help with student adjustments. Ms. Cosiâs most popular class in Charlestonâs largest studio? Less than 40, the maximum occupancy of the studio.
Ms. Cosi recently added a class â Bendy Boozey â at a distillery.
The post-class beer adds a social element to yoga. âThe largest component is connection: They get permission to hang out,â she said. âPeople talk and laugh. Itâs very social. Itâs totally about community. The yoga is secondary. Itâs a way to bring people together.â
These classes often include more men than in Ms. Cosiâs traditional classes.
But some purists frown upon adding alcohol to the ancient practice of yoga. Ashtanga Yoga Boston states on its website: âWe consider the consumption of alcohol, being both an intoxicant and a poison, to be inconsistent with the practice of Ashtanga yoga. We expect that all students will make a good-faith effort to reduce to a minimum and ideally curtail their consumption of alcohol while enrolled in the school.â
Rhonda Hobgood, the owner of Salt Room Yoga in Seattle, said: âIt depends on what your goal is. If your goal is to live yogic lifestyle, paring those two, alcohol and yoga, donât go together.â She added: âIf youâre drinking, youâre detracting from that very subtle process of fine-tuning your consciousness. Alcohol is a toxin. It creates its own state of mental being, which typically people use as an escape. The practice of yoga is the exactly the opposite of escaping yourself. You want to go full into whatever youâre experiencing, without altering it with an external substance.â
Before being lured to Detox Retox with the promise of a post-class beer, Mark Roden had taken about six yoga classes in the last 14 years. In the last 12 months, Mr. Roden has completed about 30 classes and compares the experience to the rise in popularity of atheist megachurches.
âA place for people without spiritual beliefs to get the community aspect of a church,â he said. âThatâs what we have at Detox Retox.â
An article last Thursday about several yoga studios that offer beer tastings referred imprecisely to the origins of the trend. While at least one such program, Happy Hour Yoga with Joe Sixpack, started in 2008 in Philadelphia, the practice seemed to gain in popularity after the Bendy Brewski yoga program started two and a half years ago in Charleston, S.C.
A version of this article appears in print on June 12, 2014, on page E3 of the New York edition with the headline: Bending the Rules to Offer Yoga With a Beer Chaser.