980 Madison Ave
New York, NY 10075
212.249.3000
I will be the first to admit that traffic was a big deterrent to my practice in LA. If a studio wasn’t right in my neighborhood, it took at least 20 minutes to get there. Add onto that another 10 minutes so you get there early, plus the hour to hour and a half for the class plus the 20-minute drive home. All in all it was a production that often took a good 2 ½ hours out of the day.
When a studio was all the way across town- forget it! Between carving out that chunk of time to finding a class in the perfect time slot that would allow me to (fingers crossed) avoid “rush hour” traffic, the post yoga bliss often didn’t last beyond the doorway. Because of this, I sadly didn’t get to experience many great studios in LA, one being Exhale in Venice.
Enter the NYC subway system. Ahhhh. Even if I want to go from all the way downtown to all the way uptown, it’s usually a max of 45 minutes. No traffic jams keeping me on the freeway for an hour and a half. So, the other day I hopped on the 6 and in 25 minutes made my way to the Upper East Side location of Exhale Spa.
I walked into their second floor location and found the front desk bustling with activity. It seems they were getting ready for the grand opening party at their new location in the Gansevoort Hotel. One of the girls at the front desk signed me in and showed me back to the studio, pointed out the changing rooms and left me to my pre-yoga rituals.
After a few minutes of debating what was the front of the class, I laid out my mat and began to stretch my notoriously tight hamstrings. Eventually the instructor, Anna, made her way into the studio bringing with her a smiling face and cheery disposition. We were a mixed bag of practitioners. We were all female, but ranged in level and age, even including a couple teens who were newer to the practice. It always makes me happy to see kids experimenting with the practice of yoga.
It was a level 2 class, but because of the student make-up, we stuck to a standard class of sun salutations and standing poses working a lot with flowing from Warrior I to Warrior II and adding on from there. It was a nicely paced flow with a couple breaks in child’s pose to keep us from getting too sweaty.
As we moved from standing to seated poses, we took a moment to work our abs with Navasana (boat pose) and then moved on to some cooling and quieting forward folds. As I sat with my eyes closed in Paschimottanasana, trying to breath into the backs of my legs to soften the stretch, I realized the maybe, just maybe, because of the my more regular practice my hamstrings actually were starting to give just the teeniest bit!
As I walked outside I was greeted with the sunshine and a virtually perfect New York summer day. I decided to meander my way through Central Park and carried with me not only my yoga mat, but also a sense of feeling completely blessed.
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