If you are like me and love yoga, but haven't got the funds to spare you are probably very well versed with the search phrase "free yoga videos online" on google and you know it can be rather difficult to find. There seems to be a multitude of places you can find free
yoga poses, but for me personally I like to do the classes with someone
guiding me. And I must say that it is easier to google the free yoga poses than to find the
videos that's for sure!
So I feel like I am consistently always searching for free places to practice yoga online. There are several sites that give you "free trials". Those sites are great, but I have only found one that doesn't ask for your credit card information (which make it much less obligation free in the end):
http://www.myyogaonline.com/
I love this site, but after two weeks you have to pay, and at this point in my life that is not an option. So what is next when you have run your subscription and just want to do yoga for FREE everyday and don't want to keep doing the same class over and over?
Well there are sites like www.hulu.com, which has several GREAT yoga videos with a group called yoga zone and gaiam. The only catch is there are commercials which can really throw off your practice in a bad way. I know many times I will be in the middle of a pose and they cut to commercial suddenly jarring me out of the mood my practice is putting me in. It is very annoying, so personally I have stopped doing yoga with hulu searching instead for something that is truly free and doesn't subject me to commercials when I am working on finding my zen.
After all of my research to find completely free (including obligation and commercial free) online yoga classes here are a few places I have found some lovely videos:
http://www.yogaclass.com/
http://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/yoga-other-useful-stuff-tara/id284197564
http://yoga.prevention.com/
http://www.yogajournal.com/
http://www.doyogawithme.com/
My favorite thing about all of these sites is that there is a multitude of videos on all of them. You can pick from the length, difficulty, what part of the body you would like to work on, and with a some of these sites you can even pick the teacher of your choice. I feel that I should also mention that there are many free yoga videos on www.youtube.com as well, but I have always felt like you have to cycle through a lot of videos in order to find a few good ones.
By far I have to say that my favorite of all the free sites I have found is www.yogajournal.com. I keep my home page set on this site because on top of all the great free videos they offer there is also a multitude of wonderful articles about health, beauty, the newest benefits discovered through yoga, etc. It is a great place to be used as a reminder on a daily basis that I need to be doing yoga to find my center, as well as the other obvious benefits.
I also feel that I should mention that if you have a netflix account there is a
limited amount of great yoga videos on there, but of course only if you
are willing to pay the $8.00 a month! They do however give you a free one month trial, so if that is your cup of tea you can do your yoga as well as watch a lot of great and MANY more bad movies when you are done!
If you have any other sites that are for free online yoga classes and would like to share please comment here or contact me and I would love to include them in this blog entry.
I spent a couple of days last week busy in Asheville, NC getting stuff
for school done. (I'll spare you the boring details). In between
testing and talking to councellors and whatnot I found time to visit
America's largest home - The Biltmore Estate.
If you do not know what it is; the place is completely gorgeous! A bit pricy
to see, but if you buy a two day pass you will certainly get your moneys
worth with gardens that spread across acres, a mystical enchanted forest, a winery (with FREE wine tastings), and of course the gigantic estate.
The Biltmore is a very beautiful mansion that you can take tours of, however you cannot see even half of the house when you are going through it. There are several wings that are completely roped off, as well as floors that guests are forbidden to visit. I would have loved to see the place with the ropes completely gone and no one there seeing as the crowds were large even early in the morning.
The estate was built by George Washington Vanderbilt in the late
1800's. There is a long and interesting history about the family,
though I do think a lot of the history the Biltmore gives you is sugar
coated. They do talk about a few tragedies, such as G. W. Vanderbilts
death, a flood that happened in 1914 which killed a lot of people in
Biltmore Village (it is a few miles away from the mansion), and of
course the great depression. I felt though that a lot of the family
drama was left out of the history of the sprawling mansion and
surrounding lands. One gets the feeling when reading about the
Vanderbilts lives that it is all fluffed up stories of their past
sparing the details of who they really were. The original family still owns the place however which would explain why the family secrets are still in tact.
The mansion is completely beautiful, but there are sections of the estate that are downright eerie ( which further suggests that there is more to the story than what is shown at face value). The upper floors of the estate are lovely; breezy and beautiful with lavish riches spread throughout the rooms that could give even the most poverty stricken person a feeling of decadence. You can almost see the family and their guests through a veil of the past as visitors walk around looking at everything. I didn't think that the energy on those floors felt bad, rather it was airy and nice, but there was an air of sadness that even the Vanderbilt family's fairytale story of the estate could not get rid of. The energy after all does not lie.
The basement is where the energy goes from airy and nice with a twinge of sadness to weird and foreboding. The air feels of tragedy and the most immense sadness, yet there are no stories as to anything tragic ever happening there. However there is a story about a wild three week party they had there back in the 1920's. It is unknown what happened at this party, but they did paint the most creepy murals in a room called "The Halloween Room". The guests
were handed brushes and buckets of paint and told to paint whatever they
liked.
Truly the above picture does not do the room justice, nor does it really show the other parts of the mural which are very strange. There are many weird animals, witches, angels, demons, etc painted on the walls. It is hard to explain what the room felt like. The word tense comes to mind however, and it is a great precurser to the weird energy one encounters in the rooms following the "Halloween Room".
The energy just gets stranger as you walk out of the Halloween room through the changing room(s) hallway. This was the only time I had a chance to be alone in the house and while I was there I couldn't shake the feeling of being watched. The feeling increased when I walked into the pool room.
I don't know what it was about that room. Perhaps it was the empty pool, likely unused for 50 or 60 years, but that is just a guess. I couldn't help but wonder if something terrible happened in that room, but there aren't any stories about anything bad ever happening there. I know that I am not the only one who has felt this way. When I got home I looked on the internet and low and behold many other people had the same feelings as I did.
So what did happen in the Biltmore house to give it such an odd feeling? Why is it not mentioned that the daughter of the builders of the estate had a tragic divorce from a man she didn't love and left the estate never to return leaving her ex husband to run the place?
So many strange things, and such and interesting place with a lot of hidden secrets which tempt the imagination but likely will never be revealed.
