My first impression of yoga was thinking that I had to be as bendy and flexible as a contortionist in Cirque du Soleil. Only after years of long study under qualified teachers did I learn that isn’t what yoga is about. Yoga means union with a higher energy field than the one your mind and body is generating at this moment. My first impressions of yoga lead me to a conclusion that it was all about proper posture, first mistake. Due to this assumption, I thought I had to look like those pictures in Yoga Journal to be a good yogi. I saw people bending their bodies in all sorts of difficult and almost impossible positions. Most people aren’t built to stretch like Mr. Fantastic. Our bodies are not made of rubber but of bones and muscles that may be strained and injured if pushed beyond their capacity to support your weight in relation to your anatomical position in space. This simply means don’t be a copy cat. Your body is as unique as a snowflake, no two bodies are ever the same. So when yoga students and teachers try to imitate their gurus without proper training and instruction, as Russel Peters would say, ” somebody is going to get hurt.”