Gentle Yoga for Beginners

Suzanne Deason
Year Released: 2001

Categories: Yoga


I actually am a yoga beginner, and I was looking for beginner tapes shorter than the more usual 55 minutes, to use after cardio or weights sessions, and also for those days I can't devote a full hour to my practice. In the past, though, I've been a little leery of the Living Arts tapes marketed for beginners, because most of them clearly had more advanced beginners in mind than me!

Happily, this tape really does seem to be created with true beginners like me in mind.

Bear with me in this review, experienced yogis, because I've only done the tape twice and I can't tell you the names of many of the poses, because Suzanne Deason didn't tell me. I still don't know the English names of most yoga poses! :-(

There is no opening breathing section. The workout starts on the floor, with the most difficult hip opener of the bunch (it's like the standard buttocks and outer thigh stretch with one knee pushing into the other ankle, except that she gets you to reach through and grab your knee rather than your thigh, ouch!) There are several knee to chest poses on the floor before she moves to cat stretch and down dog, there's a low lunge in there somewhere. Then she goes to standing poses, starting with one knee on the floor, one leg extended, bend to extended side; mountain pose; triangle pose; right angle pose; and then forward standing bend; those last three are all supported with a block. Then she gets back down on the floor with locust, and pops back and forth between lying and sitting a couple times, in a sequence that includes that hamstring stretch with one leg extended and pulled towards your head, a lying twist, bridge pose, cobbler's pose (several times), a seated twist with legs to one side, a couple of wide legged forward bends, and finally corpse pose with the final relaxation. Many of these use a strap. I'm sure I've forgotten some, but that's the general gist.

The movements flowed a lot better the second time through, and I suspect will get better still as I become more comfortable with the tape.

The 28 minute length is a real bonus, and she covers a lot of ground in that time. The first time I did the tape I felt like I really didn't need the block, but now I'm reevaluating. At the beginning of the video, she says that she made this tape because she observed the trouble her students were having releasing themselves fully into poses. The block and strap are there to aid release, not simply to make the move possible. Though I can do all these poses without a block, I realized that even when I do use the block I'm not allowing myself to fully release into the pose, and that's because I'm tensing against the possibility that the pose will hurt. (I had the same problem in labour, BTW.) I think this tape will be helpful in learning to trust my body and release more fully.

This is a tape that has a lot of room for me to grow with it. Much like the Yoga Zone Introduction to Yoga tape I keep going back to, it isn't that I can't do harder poses, it's that doing poses I know well allows me to work on form and deepening into the poses in a way that working at the far limits of my ability doesn't let me. And this tape does have a fair number of poses that while they're still beginner, aren't on the Yoga Zone beginner tapes, giving me a chance to broaden my practice.

Heather Fraser

11/30/-0001