Never in recorded history have so many read so much and found so little.
Please allow me to apologize to the memory of Winston Churchill for this crude paraphrase....but when it comes to the much ballyhooed-naked yoga there is so much sizzle, so little steak.
A quick Google search reveals (no pun intended) 4.2 million mentions of "Naked Yoga" including even a Wikipedia definition http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naked_yoga stating that the practice is becoming popular in Western societies. Really?
Certainly, there are oodles of websites and presumably places for gay male "Hot Nude Yoga.".....Good for them, but what about women and straight males?
In many ways, the Naked Yoga phenomenon got off the ground with super coverage of co-ed Naked Yoga classes http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2005/05/24/DDG9FCSNDS1.DTL at the One Taste Urban Retreat Center in trendy San Francisco www.onetastesf.com. Alas, One Taste didn't want to be the "Naked Yoga" place and the program was abandoned and slow sex and orgasmic meditation classes took its place.
There are still outposts where one can find coed-nude yoga including the Phoenix Temple in downtown Manhattan www.nakedyoganyc.com with classes on Monday nights and Friday lunchtimes and also in Austin, Texas www.austinnakedyoga.com
The biggest issue as always is gender balance. Most conventional yoga classes...there are an estimated 16.5 million yoga practitioners in the US....are weighted to the female of the species. Not true for Naked Yoga.
Writing for the Austinist, a Central Texas on-line publication, http://austinist.com/2009/07/29/hello_my_name_is.php an unidentified female wrote about her trepidations and pleasant surprises about taking naked yoga. "Maybe heightened awareness due to my nakedness made this realization so intense, or maybe it would have had the same effect even if I were clothed," she wrote. "I don't know, but it felt like an epiphany. It was about so much more than yoga: the balance of effort and ease, of lightness and heaviness... It was so thought-provoking that I completely forgot I was naked."
And the end analysis?
"I waved goodbye to Naked Men Numbers One and Two and sat in my car for a good ten minutes before I felt balanced enough to drive," she wrote. "On the way home, I did a quick cost-benefit analysis of the whole experience, and believe it or not, the proswon out. Or maybe that was just the chai talking."
And no story would be complete without the box score. Gender: 18 males; 5 females; Likelihood I would do it again, 7.5 out of 10; Average penis size, average and most awkward naked yoga pose: happy baby http://www.tracis.info/tracis.info.pictures/Happy%20Baby%20Pose.jpg
So Godiva must ask....Can we save Naked Yoga? Can we ever expected real gender balance? Should we restrict the number of males participating in a co-ed class? Should we even care? Inquiring minds would like to know.
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