Yoga grounds you.  You root yourself into the earth in tree pose, bury yourself in the ground in corpse pose and center yourself in downward dog.  Yoga seems like it ties your body earthward while freeing your spiritual energy. And that’s why Aerial Yoga seems so probable and so unlikely at the same time.  The practice, which suspends participants in fabric trapezes similar to hammocks, has yogis flying in the air, a few feet off the ground. 

More specifically called Unnata Aerial yoga, the practice became common in North America around 2006.  The term “Unnata” is Sanskrit for “elevated,” in both the physical and spiritual scene.  Creators of this type of yoga take this idea seriously, continuing with the spiritual elements of yoga—breath, living in the present, meditation—while lifting practitioners off of their mats. 

Most styles of yoga employ some sort of elevation techniques.  Elevated postures improve blood flow, help regulate sleep patterns and make practitioners more aware of their breath.  Traditional yoga uses headstands, handstands and bridges to “elevate” practitioners in a similar manner.

Unnata yoga takes these poses a step further. The idea is that the fabric trapeze better supports the weight of a body than a body standing on a yoga mat.  The practice encourages better alignment without the force often exerted in traditional yoga, helping the practitioners to relax.

Many traditional yoga practices, like inversions and backbends, can injure the practitioner without proper care.  In our society, which is so focused on improvement and reaching goals, yogis can injure themselves trying to perform too trying postures before they should.  Unnata allegedly staves off this risk of injury, allowing practitioners to move much more quickly and safely than other types of yoga.  It also prevents shoulder and lower back injuries caused by overstretching. 

A typical Unnata class includes floor time as well as time in the hammocks.  Students improve their core strength and alignment on the floor, but also work on spinal decompression in the hammocks. 

At the beginning of Unnata practice, students only put a portion of their body weight into the hammock and work on adding more and more until they are completely in the hammock.  Students also share hammocks occasionally; a practice which proponents of Unnata yoga say fosters a more communal atmosphere than other isolating forms of yoga. 

Unnata yoga is offered mostly in studios in Vancouver and the Pacific Northwest.  For interested practitioners, however, there is something called the Yoga Trapeze that purports to strengthen and loosen back muscles and ease pain. The advertisement says that compressing vertebrae into one another is what almost always causes chronic pain.

To use the Yoga Trapeze, you hang it from a doorframe, an exposed beam, tree branch or swing set. Then you can practice your backbends, inversions or as the advertisement says, just lay backwards in it.  

I’m all for Unnata yoga in a yoga studio with a teacher to guide your motions, but it seems very possible to seriously injure yourself trying a Yoga Trapeze on your own.  Unnata seems like a potentially valuable, if unusual, addition to the ancient practice.