For Some People, Learning Yoga on CD-ROM is a Stretch
As if to lend weight
to my contention that your computer can, in theory, teach you anything, along
comes a pair of CD-ROMs called Wellness Yoga and Shiatsu Relaxation.
Lithe young women
demonstrate these ancient Eastern techniques while mellow-voiced narrators
speak over somnambulant music, the better to relax you and make you all well.
Most of us are
familiar at least with the concepts of yoga, its slow stretching exercises and
its often almost unattainable physical positions. Wellness Yoga is a nicely
designed program that packages 74 asanas, or positions, into several packages
such as the Quick and Easy Course, the Beauty Course and the Health Course.
The program consists
largely of what it calls procedure screens, in which each position is
demonstrated in one window while described textually in another. A narrator
reads that same text aloud. In addition to the usual tape-recorder buttons to
pause, stop and restart the action, there is a graph that displays the
approximate duration of each segment of the routine.
The practical
difficulties of using this CD-ROM are fairly obvious. The manual, dragged
kicking and screaming into English from its Japanese roots, advises the user to
First practice forming the pose while watching the screen and try memorizing
the whole procedure.'' This, unless you have a 24-inch monitor or keep your
monitor on the floor, is likely to be difficult. Clearly the actual learning of
the poses could be more readily done with a videotape.
On the other hand,
you can hunt around in the CD-ROM, choose from the positions you want to learn,
and collect them into personal groups. And maybe you've got a really big
monitor, and a cordless, long-distance mouse.
This is a nice
program, well-made and instructive. My only complaint is that it does not
emphasize clearly enough that unless you are as slender as the model executing
the poses, you are not going to be able to do many of them -- the Crow, the
Heron and the Frog, for instance -- correctly. On the other hand, we can all do
the Corpse.
Shiatsu Relaxation,
which teaches a massage technique clearly related to acupuncture, is another
kettle of fish.
The theory is that
rubbing, kneading or poking specific points on the body, called acupressure
points, will make other parts of the body feel better. I am not prepared to
argue that premise, but the entire procedure seems shiatsu yourself is not
clear, either; the program initially suggests you find some of your own more
accessible pressure points, but they are not all available to your own hands
and all the demonstrations show one person ministering to another.
