Explaining Social Yoga
What exactly is “Social Yoga” and why do we care about it so much?
Well, exercise is cool. Hanging out with your friends is cool. We like mixing the two together and we figured that you do as well.
The problem with living in Los Angeles is that if you’ve managed to wrangle enough friends to join you for a yoga class in the first place, the 30-45 minutes it takes to get to your cars, drive to a bar, and then find parking is enough to put the brakes on any post-yoga plans.
Solution? Have the class in a brewery. Your commute from your yoga mat to beer mat just got decimated. It’s an exercise in efficient time-management more than anything.
We like to think that brewery yoga is a great activity for couples both new and old. It’s never too far along in your relationship for date night. Get your parents to look after the kids for a morning and come down and have a good old stretch together before sitting down and discussing Jackson’s latest detention over a delicious craft beer.
That covers off friends and couples but the most important one for us is actually the most difficult one to address and to overcome: The loneliness of Los Angeles.
LA is a big city and it’s difficult to meet new people here. With the transportation system what it is, it’s not so easy to go to bars without driving to them, so they’re generally populated by groups of people who already know one another.
I noticed at my regular Tuesday evening yoga class in Hollywood that I’d see the same people pretty much every week and we’d even wave and shyly mutter a greeting and farewell but that was the end of our interaction. We had the same interest (yoga) and were on the same schedule. We should’ve become friends, but that thing about getting to the bar and it already being late kinda killed the desire to try.
The hope is that Social Yoga helps to solve that. That the likes of Facebook and Apple decided earlier in 2018 to focus on personal relationships rather than public content only fortifies our belief in what we’re doing. Our group on Meetup.com is closing in on 100 members and is growing every day.
We believe in community and we want to build our own. The fact that we can do that by practicing yoga in LA’s best breweries is an incredible bonus.
I’ve already met so many fantastic people through Downward Grog and I really look forward to meeting so many more. Here’s to Social Yoga.