Overall Essay

For this project I decided to research yoga. I picked yoga because I have always been around sports as I was growing up, so I knew a lot of different types of exercise and what types of exercises help you with certain sports. A question on my mind though was what type of exercise was I suppose to do once I grew up and no longer participated in sports. That is when I decided to do my research project on yoga; it would be a great way for me to learn about yoga as a whole and see if I would be interested in becoming a yogi as I got older. I started off researching articles on all the different parts to yoga; I never knew there was much more than just exercising and breathing! Then I read a book called, The Seven Spiritual Laws of Yoga, by Deepak Chopra and David Simon, and literally learned the seven law of yoga. To finish off my research I took a yoga class at Gold’s Gym to get an experience performing yoga. I enjoyed learning all about yoga, but my favorite part was definitely attending yoga class.

I learned so much about yoga that I was surprised at how stupid I was thinking that yoga was just a good way to exercise and relax. I found that yoga can be used spiritually, to become a better person, to go green, for flexibility, exercise, meditation, and even for pregnancy. Usually when you start to become a yogi you practice all of these parts of yoga, well except maybe not pregnancy yoga all the time, but you put the seven laws of yoga into your lifestyle that you live everyday. I also learned that for every day of the week there is certain yoga laws that you are suppose to follow, whether it is to talk nice to someone or recognizing your unique talents. I also learned in my first research assignment that yoga doesn’t just benefit the physical body, but it helps with the nervous and circulatory systems as well. The most surprising and interesting thing I learned about yoga is why some people take yoga for pregnancy. The people that do this are doing yoga because they want to know what the body goes through to give birth; these people are the ones that want to have a natural birth with no drugs. I just thought that was interesting how people care so much for their babies that they don’t want any drugs going to the baby while it was being born. Another thing that I thought was interesting was the "no snacking plan". People say that snacking usually keeps your metabolism going, but in the article I read it said that not snacking when your not hungry teaches your body discipline. It helps you to decide what your body needs and what it wants. I’m so glad that I researched yoga; it was actually pretty fun to learn something new for once. I like the idea of yoga a lot, but I don’t think I’m quite ready to begin yoga classes; I still just want to be care free and not have to worry about obeying yoga laws everyday. I definitely can see myself reconsidering yoga when I’m older though, I think it will bring me more use when I’m stressed out financially and fat. Overall though I can see why people enjoy being yogis, and I might even join the yoga club one day!

I think I researched this yoga project quite well. I liked how we had to have the small print sources and the multimedia, which gave me lots of basic information before I did the yoga class. I wish I had done a different video for the first multimedia post because I felt like I didn’t learn much from it. Also I loved going to yoga class, I wish I had signed up for the whole month of April that way I could’ve gotten a better view of the lifestyles the yogis lived. If I had gone to all the classes, I probably could have gotten an interview with one of the yogis that were in my class. That interview might have given me a sneak peak to a more personal view of a yogi. Overall though I’m happy with the way I did this research project, I still had fun while learning.