Meet Dee Dussault, my new favourite person in the world. Dee offers classes in what she calls ‘Ganja Yoga’.
Dee started practicing Yoga as early as the 90s when she saw it on a VHS tape but it was only in 2009 that she came up with the idea of putting together yoga and marijuana. She started this practice in Toronto, Canada at first and then in 2012 moved to San Francisco.
In her own words:
And I learned that cannabis has been used for thousands of years as a spiritual aid, specifically in the yoga tradition and in Ayurveda, but also across the globe.
So what does she do in her classes? She takes a more inward oriented approach, teaching slow moving hatha yoga and meditation. The marijuana, in her experience. helps with the practice by helping the practitioner become more aware of their body and their posture.
While on the one hand, as an advocate of marijuana legalization I find this a thrilling idea. But on the other hand, as someone who practices meditation on a daily basis I feel like it defeats the purpose. The idea of meditation is not just to reach a state of complete awareness but to be able to enter and exit that state off your own accord. So in all honesty, I have mixed feelings about this.