Demystifying the Yoga Menu: Choosing the Best Form of Yoga for You

Often I hear someone say to me: “I want to try yoga. I have friends who do yoga and they recommended I try it. But I don’t know where to start.” It saddens me when I hear that someone hoping to benefit from yoga comes out of their first class either shell-shocked or bored to tears, and as a result never goes back. A lot of negative first experiences with yoga have much more to do with goodness of fit than anything else. Like psychotherapy, there are some common factors to what makes a yoga class high in quality (i.e. compassionate and educated teacher), but also like therapy, the diversity of approaches and techniques is immense.
 
If you are interested in starting a yoga practice, first ask yourself what you are hoping to get from yoga, and go from there.
 
Today I’ll be reviewing a few of the major forms of yoga. I will do my best to be as objective as possible, but want to acknowledge at the outset that I am myself a certified yoga instructor in the vinyasa school, and so this is the form of yoga I am most familiar with. However, I’ve practiced as a student in many forms of yoga, and can speak from personal experience about the benefits and challenges of each school. For the purposes of this post, I will not be going into great detail about the philosophies and theories behind each school of yoga, but rather focus on the lived experience of attending a class, so you can find the form of yoga most likely to fit your needs and have a successful first experience on the mat.

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