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| - It breaks my heart to give DWD two stars, but alas, I feel that I must do so after a long conflicted battle with my thoughts about the studio, especially over the past year.
I began coming to DWD in 2006 and fell in love with it. I couldn't imagine doing yoga anywhere else, and I didn't (except for the few sporadic times when I attended their other location in the Beach [now rebranded Beach Yoga]). I practiced yoga since 2006, ritualistically, benefitting from the beautiful, the inspiring, the calming, the grounding, and the mesmerizing instructors such as Diane and David Bruni, Ron, Delia, Jennifer H. And so on - the 'old timers,' as I came to call them, of course, in a figurative sense. I loved every minute of it and I continued to do yoga there until my departure from Toronto in 2011 for about two years.
Upon my return to Toronto, in fact the immediate neighborhood of Queen & Bathurst, one of the first things I did was go to DWD, take a deep nasal breath in and return to the beautiful scent and space of the studio. I got an annual unlimited membership and began practicing there again. Much to my disappointment and sadness, the once fantastically calming, grounding, people-centered and humble studio no longer existed.
People are now being packed like sardines, the men's change room is getting more and more to be a hazardous storage space for equipment (ladders, boxes of sort, etc.), and that's not really the issue for me. The biggest problem was the dramatic personality change and culture shift of the studio. I found myself sitting (stretching pre-practice) often for 20 minutes or more, listening to various people loudly conversing about their everyday trivialities, often from which people retreat to yoga in order to escape. Many times, I observed little groups of people (read cliques) huddled together, loudly debriefing irrelevancies to me, of these, many were yoga instructors themselves or what appeared to be their acquaintances. I could not find a single day in which this did not happen, thus, never since my return to DWD I was able to bring myself into a calm and quiet space before any of my yoga classes. Compare to Moksha's practice of "the quiet room," and what a beautiful and simple idea that is!
I am disappointed, saddened, and disheartened that this shift is taking place at DWD, but I am hardly surprised, especially after Diane's departure and the business-first-type paradigm everything seems to be heading towards.
I practiced for three months, and while sitting on the fence about quitting DWD, waited another month but couldn't bring myself to go back, and so I sat out for a whole month thinking...then sadly, I left the studio. DWD now easily melds with the rest of the Westernized, dilute, cliquey, efficiency-driven businesses.
Awful!
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