These are my thoughts on Slavic Excercises for Women or so called Slavic Yoga (relax, it is not even called that. It is just a simple term for Americans instead of Gimnastyka Słowiańska dla Kobiet w Tradycji Białoruskiej :). A quick summary of 4 years of my experience. Do I recommend it? Is it worth it? Read below.
An official version first as I’ve heard it around 5 years
ago.
The Minsk University (Belarus) Professor Genadij
Adamovich have heard from a student in the 90s about
a practice that she learned from her Grandma in a
village. It was supposed to give Belarussian ancient
women their beauty, luck and even bring them
husbands… In another version of the story, Adamovich
himself went to the villages and collected the moves
which then he composed into Gimnastyka Słowiańska’s
system of 27 exercises. Ladies from Minsk University
started to practice and… feel it… so it gained popularity
with time.
I learned about it around 2019 and started to do it. There were quite a few
teachers in Poland and around 2021 I met a most
famous teacher of all straight from the land of Belarus! I will not name her here, as she
pick fights with literally everyone😆. She was furious
with someone once for… naming her in a book about
Gimnastyka Słowiańska, at the same time being furious
if someone didn’t name her:)
I was so excited to learn from her the „proper” moves,
the right technique. Then naturally I joined her course to
become a teacher myself. Well. It was a 1:1 course,
yet it turned out I was in a group after signing in. It was
3 month-long course, yet it turned out to be longer. The
course was great and I was praised, yet after it I
couldn’t pass the exam. Literally I was praised as ready
on Monday and ridiculed on the exam on Wednesday 😆
There were no instructions, apart from changing
impressions from the teacher, and some old recorded
instructions that were full of mistakes. Chaos, changing
times, changing rules… After some time she asked us
to record some stupid training videos for months… and
judge each other 😆Chaos. And so much time wasted.
Also a lot of opportunities to humiliate us and be rude. I
remember this Soviet style of teaching from when I was
in school in the early 90s in Poland. Eventually I got
scared to ask, scared to disagree, even writing this
took me a year or two to process and gather courage ;/
Then I signed up to a more advanced, physiotherapy
component of this stupid course, taught by a
professional PT from a University. This I easily passed
first time. Because there actually were rules 😀 Well, I
was also pregnant at that time so while in birthing class
we had exact same things about the pelvic floor, posture
etc… It turned out to be not that secret, just stuff every
PT knows. Meanwhile the unprofessional nature and rude style of
this school made me ask questions. And – as they say
– if You start to see, You can’t un-see…
The official version changed so quickly it was funny,
actually. The course in a matter of months morphed from
„ancient slavic practice taught by an etnographer” to „a
course for doctors” ( 😆 ) to „Traditional Women
Birthing Exercise”. Oh, and the Chinese horoscope
suddenly got involved.
Well, I had questions:
1. the only evidence of anything is a photo of an old
lady doing completely different moves, 😆
2.Adamovich wrote a book on Vietnamese yoga before
he wrote on Slavic Yoga, and it looked pretty similar to
me:)
3. If Slavic Yoga for Women is a general exercise to get ready for giving
birth, then what does it have to do with Slavs and why
would anyone who is not preparing for birth do it? Also wouldn’t it be wiser to just do birthing excercises recommended by PT or a birthing school, instead of some “ancient practice” from 2020?
BTW my pregnancy and birth were meh and I was after years of practice and advanced course for teachers, so…
This is another problem with this. The only ones who come to this teacher to share their experience are the ones who will praise it. So naturally with time she gets even more and more proud and sure of her ways, while in the meantime when it just “didn’t work” for someone, she will just plainly not get informed of this. So her success rate is 100 percent, because it isn’t. I didn’t tell her of my experience because I knew I would be ridiculed.
4. Why we never learned a name of the village or a lady
where these exercises were discovered? Wouldn’t it
be a really cool tourist attraction for Belarus? If this
lady exists… of course.
5. Is it possible for an ancient practice to survive only
thanks to a single lady from a Belarussian village 😆?
6. If technique is so crucial, how exactly did this old
lady with stiff joints passed on 27 different exercisesto a guy? If exercises in the „best and only” school
were then corrected and changed with PT, and are still
refined, then why other schools are wrong if they make
changes too? Wouldn’t it make sense to say: we are all
learning, do what works for You; instead of this
dogmatic approach? Anyway; our Belarussian teacher on one hand finds “evidences” and “traces” of this practice anywhere in history even if it doesn’t really resemble it, like Indian temple dances from the past that are just something else. On the other hand a slight movement of Your hip can be a reason to ridicule You as not practising correctly…
7. From the main teacher herself I heard every possible version of Slavic Yoga for Women:
that female hormones are so unique, so this is a
technique precisely for women 😆AND that these are
exercises for men and children too, because they are
so universal 😆. That You just have to do it here and
there for 5 min and it is fine, AND that „you only need 35 mins every
day to do it”. That “just put your arms up when You sit in front of the computer and stretch, it is not about the right mudra gesture of Your hands!”, and also “do it in this precise way, because every detail counts”…
9. Why being so brutal about other schools with
different moves, if the ‘official’ school is also composed
by a teacher herself on her whim? Why so much hate towards other
teachers?
10. If Chinese Horoscope is involved all of a sudden
and exercise should „harmonize the energy”, why not
just do chi-qung or tai-chi that is established for
centuries? Hm?
11. The Slavic Yoga teacher claims that exams are held by professionals in their fields that are separate from her for transparency and fairness. All my exams (apart from PT component) were her and her two pals that as far as I know have no PT, midwife or academic qualifications for anything like that. The exam process is so vague and arbitrary, at the same time it is all from a high horse like they teach Latin or something. The process is a mess and such a waste of time.
And so on, and so forth.
But do You know what is the worst part? Slavic Yoga for Women DID
transform my life, I did “find a man” and had a child while
doing this idiotic practice, and I know many similar
stories. BTW it all happened before the advanced
certificating course, when my technique was
supposedly so wrong!
Many women said to me something along the lines of:
I don’t know if it was „Slavic Yoga” or something else,
because it all happened so fast and I did other spiritual
practices at the same time…
So there are two options:
1. This stuff actually works. Don’t ask me how 😆
2. If a woman puts her mind into something and calms
down herself for 15 mins a day in peace, believing that
it is beneficial, SHE CAN transform her life just like that
:O (Joe Dispenza’s book on placebo comes into mind
here),
So there You go. Have no answers for You. Have a
great day 😀
