Final Journal Write up

    I want to start off by talking about my expectations for this class, before I started. I was expecting to do in person classes, however the pandemic stopped that real quick. Unfortunately, I had to attend online classes, which in my experience, limited the classes capacity to actually teach its students. I expected to practice more physical yoga, than learning about the history of yoga. It is a college course, so I really did not mind all of the writing, since it is a very diverse topic to teach.

    This course provided me with a reliable journal to reflect back to, whenever I need. I also was able to see my growth throughout the semester, which was pretty interesting. I started my weekly journals with a observation post on yoga and provided my background and experience with yoga. The class was taught in a way, that corresponds to what I needed to write about in my weekly journals. It's also interesting to note, that the content of each weekly journal, should be used to correlate the next weekly journal response.

   I talked about everything yoga, in tremendous detail.This course's weekly writing journals, made me think about things I would normally glance over. For example, I had to write about how the yoga studio is treated as a ritual space, which really opened my eyes to the symbols that are commonly shown in yoga. The use of smells and certain sounds, allow a practitioner to become fully engaged in the practice. 

    Ritual practice is also a useful tactic to create community, because it creates a connection between practitioner and yogi. This same connection, creates a similarity among the practitioners, which forms a community. I wrote about community practice and how powerful it is in my journal. Yoga communities started to become very popular and allowed for more expansion, ultimately spreading across the entire planet. 

The expansion of yoga, also, led to many variations and different styles of yoga. These different styles, allowed the principles of yoga to fit in with everybody's personal values. This allowed for more growth, and also added more power to the spiritual aspect of yoga. Ultimately, when yoga branched into different styles, each style modified the definition of yoga that was best suited for their practice. I talked about the different definitions of yoga in my journal. 

In conclusion, I think the most important thing to take away from my practice is that, I can do anything I put my mind to. This class has taught me so much about my mind, than any other psychology class I have taken. Meditation is a very powerful tool that should be utilized by everybody, even if they don't do yoga. I also believe, that I have learned a lot about my body and how to move it. I do recommend doing some MPY to stretch the body so that you can live your best life.