Fitness goals: Beer Yoga opens your chakras by pairing sipping with stretching

Looks like all paths really do lead to enlightenment. If you want to know who to thank/blame for beer yoga, you'd have to travel back in time about 5,000 years to the Indus Valley in Northern India for the yoga portion and then make a temporal and spatial pit stop in Nevada at Burning Man 2016 for the incorporation of hops and suds. Specifically though, along with fleeting chemical dysphoria and sand in their post-apocalyptic space bikinis, Berliners brought beer-flavoured yoga out of the desert dust to the non-Burners of the world.

We can strike a warrior 2 pose and point right to BierYoga in Berlin for the latest trendy pairing of yoga and stuff. Those pairings have been myriad. With animals in particular: goat yoga, cat yoga, dog yoga (aka doga). Or things: underwater yoga, paddleboard yoga, skyscraper yoga. I for one can't wait for saltwater box jellyfish yoga. At this point, you can pretty much type in anything + yoga in Google and someone somewhere is teaching it as a class. That beer yoga should catch on everywhere including Canada is no shock (you can currently try it in Winnipeg, or Ottawa if you're closer to the GTA). We do love our craft beer and global yoga momentum is in no danger of slowing down.

Staying our cynicism over beer yoga and the criticism that yoga, a once sacred practice, has been culturally appropriated (and since paired with alcohol and cloven-hooved mammals) for the purposes of bolstering western IG accounts, we can note two things: yoga is ridiculously good for you and beer is ridiculously good. Boom. It's a match made in nirvana. In fact, there may even be some scriptural precedent for the pairing.

Dr. James Mallinson, co-author of Roots of Yoga and senior lecturer in Sanskrit and Classical Indian Civilisation at SOAS University of London isn't that surprised by the recent yoga mashups. "It's such a big multifarious tradition you can find precedence for almost anything". Alcohol is no exception. He confirms that certain 6th century yogic practices included alcohol ritualistically. The goal of alcohol then was to usher master yogis into deeper stages of enlightenment while becoming "possessed" by an omnipotent goddess. He jokes that practitioners of beer yoga be mindful of that (though presumably, possession results will vary).

Aleah Nelson, a yoga instructor in Winnipeg, hopes that her beer yoga classes will serve a different purpose - bringing beginners out of their shells and showcasing some of Winnipeg's fine beer. Her light-hearted classes are taught in the middle of breweries with the marked aim of initiating more reserved types to the world of yoga and craft brews. If you fear yoga pants or stretching with strangers but love a cold one, you may just find some courage in a bottle at one of Nelson's classes. "Everybody kind of comes in knowing that they're going to be socializing with each other afterward, so it really opens up the opportunity for people to meet new people who are interested or have similar interests in yoga, and also craft beer".

While Dr Mallinson is certain that ancient yogis weren't as concerned with socializing, craft beer or capturing a likeness of their perfectly yoga-toned haunches and glutes to share on social media, he's "wary of condemning things that make people relaxed, happy and peaceful." Hear, hear. If it feels good to pair yoga with beer, do it. If you're really feeling yourself, you may even want to try your hand at yogic enlightenment while tossing back a DNAle made to your genetic specifications.

Alcohol does loosen us up. There is good evidence that it can help us get out of our own way, mentally (my own studies show that it can ease everything from free-flowing conversations with strangers to bar dancing while wearing your pants as a hat). In moderation, that's a good thing (the conversational benefits more than the pants hat ones). Dr Mallinson reminds us that yoga after all, is "not really about the body but about the mind." And if you'd prefer sipping a little weed to wrap your head around a salute to the sun, you can always try Ganja Yoga next time you're in Montreal.

Again, whatever gets you to paradise.