By Maggie Pruitt
I look down at my ragged running tights from high school cross-country and pull at the threads on my sweater, thinking about my inability to touch my own toes.
Upstairs in an old building in Downtown Bryan, a room filled with plants and string lights holds girls in sweatshirts and tights sipping tea and swinging in bohemian chairs, waiting for their next class and talking about the yoga wall they’ve been mastering.
Yoga instructor and Owner of Om Grown Yoga Studio Lexi Alexander motions for us to come back into the room.
I feel myself nod when Alexander asks me if I would be joining them, adding that I am not a yoga expert by any means.
Students spread out their mats and get situated with hammocks behind them. I follow their lead and try to place my mat in the right place. We gather the silky material and lean back, engulfed inside the fabric sometimes referred to as the “cocoon.” It feels like a trust exercise. For the rest of the class, we are suspended midair practicing yoga, with nothing to hold us up but this fabric.
“It’s controlled playfulness for free spirits,” says Alexander about AntiGravity® yoga.
The purpose of AntiGravity® yoga is to release tension in the lower back and complement the yoga wall class that Om Grown already provides, says Alexander.
“This is another item to kind of brand this studio,” says Alexander.
The class has only been available to members and private parties until January, and the responses have been positive.
“Everybody’s been really excited about it,” says Alexander. “They’ve been asking about it for a while so I’m kind of answering a call.”
AntiGravity® yoga originated in New York and has slowly trickled its way down to the South, but Om Grown is the only licensed studio in Texas to teach AntiGravity®, Alexander says.
Alexander trained in South Carolina to teach the class and has found that it gives variety to her students’ yoga routines because it’s fresh and fun.
Om Grown Yoga Studio has been open for two years as of December 2016, and has expanded from one room to an entire floor, but Alexander says she is through expanding for now to focus on her classes.
At Om Grown, AntiGravity® yoga is a restorative class that is available every Wednesday, taught by Lexi Alexander, from 7:15pm to 8:15pm and costs $25 per class for nonmembers.
As we continue to go through yoga positions in the hammocks, muscles relax and breaths become slower and longer. We come towards the end of the class and eventually end up laying full body back in the hammocks, gently swinging from side to side. I am on the brink of falling asleep…
