Here she comes…the “over-enthusiastic yoga chick.”

Seriously, can we think about leaving some of our practice on the mat?

Sometimes I think we’ve let ourselves go a little too far. I hate to be a buzz kill, but you might want to hold back a little, before you burn yourself out on karma talk, Pressed Juice cleanses and handstand selfies and your yoga practice starts to resemble the likes of that Jane Fonda workout tape collecting dust in a box in your storage.

For the love of Shiva, let’s get a hold of ourselves.

Here are 21 ways some of us have taken this yoga thing a little too far.

1. You say “namaste” with your hands in prayer at your heart every time you mean thank you. Every. Single. Time.

2. You call your parents and everyone you know after your first 90 days of yoga practice (thanks to that Groupon) to tell them you’re headed to India to kick it with some groovy monks, learn to play the sitar and study the Bhagavad Gita. Hey, if it was good enough for George Harrison…

3. The constant gratitude. Moving through this wretched world with blind appreciativeness for all the good, the bad and everything in between is poor yoga-ing. It’s okay to get upset or even completely unglued over the the sad state of this planet and the people in it every once in a while. Acknowledge how you feel. It’s healthy; don’t fight it.

4. You give well-meaning, but terrible advice. “Don’t worry about that depression over your divorce. You have thousands of lives ahead of you to make it all better.”

5. When the lights go out in a theater at the start of a movie, you take a moment to set an intention.

6. You quote people without knowing it. If you’re running around spewing lines like, “you’re either on the bus or off the bus,” “be here, now!” or “instant karma’s gonna get you!” without knowing their context, we’ve got a problem.

7. You can’t help passing on sage words of wisdom. Say you’re hanging out with your friend on a Friday night at a bangin’ club and she remarks, “this vodka and Red Bull sucks!” You offer up, “what a spiritual bummer! Just breeeeeathe… you’ll be taken care of by the universe.”

8. Sometimes, we just don’t hear how things sound when the words come out of our mouth:

“Look how sweet your baby looks in corpse pose!”

“I meditate to get self-centered.”

“Wanna try a garlic enema with me?”

9. You offer support to others in yoga class when you have no idea what you’re talking about, trumpeting widely believed myths—otherwise known as lies: “forward folds can really help your painful sacroiliac joint issues… and going upside-down reverses the flow of blood in the body, which cleanses the system. Now let’s crank the heat and sweat out those toxins.” Please stop.

10. You attach sanskrit suffixes to words in everyday life: I’m moving through the Sunday Times crosswordasana like a pro! 

11. You insist on wearing your new Hard Tail yoga pants everywhere (and they actually look surprisingly cute with boots) mostly because they were $75 and dangit, you’re gonna get your money’s worth before the ass starts to wear thin. (Actually, just paying $75 for yoga pants is going a little too far.)

12. You compare your practice to crack, opium, Tetris or any other self-destructive or addictive pastime, no matter how inane the comparison may be. It’s not a weird compulsion, friends…or is it?

13. You desperately try to get your boyfriend to go to yoga with you with nonsensical pleas like, “c’mon, it’ll open your heart! Don’t you want to improve your karma? Virabhadrasana 1 can take you where you wanna go!” Big mistake.

14. You constantly infuse your speech with yoga terms: I’m flowing through this traffic jam like a warrior!

15. You know your best friend requested her favorite super-rich chocolate cake with the bourbon butterscotch frosting, but you bring a batch of gluten-free, sugar-free, non-dairy, fruit juice sweetened vegan trail mix cookies to the party.

16. And those cookies have hand-written gratitude messages on a ribbon made out of deinked pre-consumer waste paper.

17. You sprinkle buzzwords and unspecific sayings from an oft-defered to rotation of  yoga terms you may or may not fully understand, including stillness in motion, honoring the “authentic self,”  bringing both sides of the body together, laying the ego down or my subtle body is on a diet. Huh??!

18. Joining an Instagram yoga challenge might be fun, but seven at once? Please, one at a time. I didn’t want to be the one to tell you this, but you’re doing most of those poses completely wrong.

19. You use the word “bodhisattva” to describe, well, anyone you find cool, or someone who knows stuff you don’t.

“Excuse me, do you know what time it is?”

“It’s 10:30.”

“Thank you, my bodhisattva!”

20. You wear a sports bra under your wedding gown.

21. And if your cake topper is a bride and a groom in yoga poses, you’ve definitely gone a little too far.

Relephant: 

How to Meditate.

Author: Anne Clendening 

Editor: Renee Picard

photo: flickr