Hip Hop Yoga

@Yoga213

9.00am - Chill
10.30am - Hip Hop

Can't. Move. Arms. Too. Much. Yoga.

Well, after doing back-to-back classes, I guess I deserve to not be able to move my arms. But, it's good pain, not bad pain! So since I've become a yoga teacher, I've always had a couple of hip hop, r'n'b, reggae, funk and even jazz on my playlists. Having started hip hop dance with the amazing Jasmine Meakin (um, over 200 million views on YouTube anyone?!) in the mid 90s in Brisbane, I guess I have always had a love for hip hop and everything ghetto. When I discovered Hip Hop Yoga about a year ago, the fusion of two of my favourite things, I knew that eventually I wanted to teach this style. 

The studio. Yay for fake grass and potted palms!

Now that there are two official Hip Hop Yoga studios in Australia, I decided to visit the one in Sydney (the other is in Melbourne) and see what it was like for real!  I bundled a couple of my students, Olivia and Mary, into my X-Trail at the horrid time of 6.30am on a Saturday morning. Isn't it funny how your body always seems to know it's a weekend and makes it that much more difficult for you to get out of bed? We arrived in Bondi, the land of beautiful, skinny people (think mini-LA), with enough time to have a coffee and talk about yoga. Seeing as I'm still relatively new in the country town of Mittagong, in the beautiful Southern Highlands of New South Wales, about an hour out of Sydney, it's nice to automatically have friends in the form of yoga students. It is still so funny that my non-yoga friends thought that I woke up one morning and decided to be a yoga teacher, which, in their defence, is a legitimate opinion seeing as most of my 63 job that I've had have come about in that exact fashion! But, the majority didn't know that I'd already been practising for 15 years, mostly in my lounge room to the same Geri Yoga DVD!  I believe it's such a personal, sacred practise that you can just do by yourself, for yourself, with no judgement or competition. 

Anyway, off we trotted to the studio to do our back-to-back classes! The studio itself had a lovely beachy feel with semi-vintage pieces of furniture, bunting (I LOVE BUNTING!) and a common theme of pineapples! Our instructor, Tarsha, is also the studio manager and is totally laid back and cool. Man, I wish I was cool.  I've just never been one of those cool people who carry myself with ease and wear trendy, hipster things. I've just always been a bit awkward, frequently tripping over my own size 10 feet, and usually offending at least one person a day with my no social filter.  Anyway, yeah, she was cool.  My friends and I introduced ourselves and she was so excited that we'd driven all the way from the "country",  just to come to her classes!  It was pretty cool…just like her…not me. We put our stuff on a shelf and then went into the studio and chose our mats, at the back of course! The outlook was a balcony overlooking the building next door and a bit of sky, with fake grass, I LOVE fake grass!  I always think that if you have fake grass, it should be compulsory to accessorise with a plastic flamingo and some sort of palm tree. Needless to say, there were real palms. Happy days. 

Chill:

Thank you Side Crow lady. This is not me. 

Both classes were amazing! I don't think I've ever done so many arm balances in one class before. The chill class was a slower Vinyasa class, but my friends and I agreed that it was actually harder than the Hip Hop one afterwards! One of the highlights for me was ss we were in Chair or Firece Pose (Utkatasana), we then twisted to the side and were given the option to do Side Crow (Parsva Bakasana). I gave it a red hot go and for the first time, I actually got both of my legs extended with a one arm balance!  I was so excited that I toppled forward and fell onto my head. Onwards and upwards. Unfortunately, I am still balancing on both arms, so I was so stoked to randomly balance on one.  We then did normal Crow (Bakasana) and did the jump back into plank, which I can totally do now too yay! Tarsha demonstrated it perfectly of course and then continued her teaching, just cruising around the class seemingly floating on a cloud of coolness.

Olivia and Mary with fancy tea. 

Tea break:
After the Chill class was over, Olivia, Mary and I all hung out in the foyer area and Tarsh gave us a delicious Macqi, Acai and Cacao Luvju Raw Organic Superfood Energy Bar from LovingEarth. Now, I don't know what any of those ingredients are, but seeing as I can't pronounce them properly, I'm sure they are all really good for me.  We definitely felt healthier afterwards!  We washed them down with a T2 Tea as Tarsh introduced us to the incoming students for the 10.30 class.  Everyone was so friendly and also looked as us like we were aliens, driving all the way from the "country" to do yoga in the big smoke! Off we trotted, newly energised after our hard-to-pronounce food and embarked on our second class.

Hip Hop: 
The main difference between the Chill and Hip Hop was that the music was much LOUDER and we flowed through the Vinyasa between almost every pose. It was just exhausting. I think we were probably already fatigued from the Chill class so it did make it a little harder. It included more advanced poses including Bird of Paradise Pose (Svarga Dvidasana) and Reverse Bird of Paradise (Parivrtta Svarga Dvidasana) which I didn't actually know was a thing until today! Then finishing off with Headstands (Sirsasana). Tarsh demonstrated a really effective step-by-step method to get into Headstand, giving Dolphin (Makarasana) as the low option, and immediately making me decide that I need to do my Level 2 Teacher Training ASAP. I am not qualified at all to teach inversions like Headstands and a few students have asked me to do them, but I just have to say no.  It makes me sad that I can't offer my students the full gamut of yoga because I'm still such a newbie!  The relaxation (Savasana) at the end was lovely and accompanied by more relaxed hip hop music. Oh, I totes forgot, the music itself had a mix of old school and modern day stuff, from Kriss Kross, Will Smith and Beyonce to well, more modern day stuff that I don't know the names of. I really liked that she kept the music going for Savasana rather than complete silence. I think I will definitely roll like this when I start teaching my Power Yoga with funk/hip hop fusion (I can't call it Hip Hop Yoga unfortunately because it's now officially trademarked) back in the country.

Teaching:

My students in Savasana…soooooo relaxing :-s

Tarsha had a really relaxed vibe in her teaching style. Her voice was nice and just loud enough to hear over the crazy beats! She rarely did the sequences and taught almost completely verbally. One day I hope to get there. I am still teaching on my mat and occasionally leaving to do adjustments, but with each class I get more and more confident in my verbal cues. It is a little trickier teaching in gyms because I almost always get beginners who invariably rely on the visual.  On a side note, I've put in a picture of one of the gyms I teach at. I explained to Tarsh that it actually has no walls and we often listen to the grunting of guys doing weights or the sound of people running on the treadmill. If it wasn't so funny, it would be tragic.  Gyms are never conducive to teaching yoga, let alone in a "studio" with no walls, but you gotta start somewhere right?  One day I will teach at a proper yoga studio! Finally, Tarsh did a fabulous adjustment/stretch when I was in Lord of the Fish Pose (Ardha Matyendrasana) enabling me to almost look to the wall next to me from the other side! Crazy town!  Oh and in Savasana, she extended my legs and did the push down thing on my shoulder and pelvis which I've only ever done on students sporadically myself, but have never really experienced the benefits. DEF adding this to my repertoire.

View from Tamarama Beach.

Overall, it was everything I dreamed of and more. On the way home, we headed to the Tamarama Beach to do a bit of a coastal walk and it was just the perfect end to the morning. 

Click here for an article from the Sydney Morning Herald about Yoga213. 

Coffee: We went to a trendy place called About Life which had great coffee, a sunny aspect and lots of trendy people with even trendier dogs. The food selection was amazing and had everything from pale to macro to vego. Definitely recommend.

Me, Tarsh, Mary and Olivia. 

Free Yoga in the Park!

@Cherry Tree Walk, Bowral

7.30am - every second Saturday morning during Summer

As a beginning yoga teacher, I felt like somewhat of a fraud expecting people to actually pay me to teach them yoga.  So, I felt the safest option, being new to town and all too (with at least 4 yoga studios in the area that I knew of), was to offer some sort of free yoga in the park during Summer.  I actually got this idea from my big trip!  In New York and all through Europe, I would always see either Tai Chi or Yoga scattered through parks. More specifically, the experience I had doing yoga in the park in Vienna really stuck with me and I was determined to recreate it. (Click here for Yoga in a Park in Vienna Blog) I thought it would be great to do something like this in a little Australian country town that's never had anything like that before.  This would, in turn, give me a bit of practise as a first time teacher, without the pressure of people expecting to get value for money AND introduce people to yoga who otherwise would never have the guts to walk into a yoga studio. Hey, I did yoga from a  DVD for about 3 years before I even set foot inside a yoga studio!  As a bonus, I felt it was a bit of karma yoga too. It still remains my favourite class to teach.  Being outside, under the trees, in the sunshine with ducks walking through the class and working with complete beginners, was total heaven. One of the regular students, the gorgeous Margot, who travelled half an hour just to come to yoga, would always bring me some sort of gift, be it flowers from her garden or homemade marmalade. It was just lovely. 

The logistics weren't so bad either.  Here I will outline what I did in case you'd like to do it yourself:

1)  Contact your local Council to get permissions. I had to fill out a few forms to allow me to use  that section of the park every Saturday morning over the Summer months. I also had to do a Risk Assessment of the area to ensure the yoga students were safe. Finally, I had to upgrade my Insurance to include a $20 million Public Liability Plan.

2)  Make flyers.  My friend Sammie and I then did a letterbox drop in the area surrounding the park to deliver all of my "Free Yoga" flyers. I also dropped them at most of the local cafes and shops. They looked like this:

3) Get yourself in the local paper. I contacted the Southern Highlands News to see if they would give me a free advertisement in the "Classifieds" section seeing as I was offering a free service to the community.  Little did I know that they would end up running not one, but TWO feature articles on the concept. Score! Also, hilarious.

Yay for free advertising!

I was just stoked that they put me in the "Entertainment" section!

4) "Borrow" your niece's blackboard and catch the foot traffic once classes have started.  The area where i taught yoga was right near a walking/bike path, so I placed the blackboard, with spare flyers, strategically next to it and managed to garner lots of business as a result.

My friend Nell came to every class at the beginning
until other people started turning up. What a good friend!
Also she taught me this, "one is better than none".

5) Persist! Some mornings, it would get to 7.30 and I had to make the decision to start packing up or hang around. Then I had that dilemma, which I think most yoga teachers have but often don't talk about. That whole, "Gosh, if nobody turns up, then I get to go and get myself a coffee or have breakky. I secretly wish nobody turns up now…" But, I always had at least one person arrive, so that was nice. By the end of summer, I had a maximum of 12 people, including one lady and her 3 children. It was so cool!  Also, after one free yoga sesh, I received an email from a couple of joggers who had picked up flyers on their way past after seeing us doing yoga that morning. I then ended up doing a private session for them and a couple of their friends once a week over the course of a few months.

All in all, a successful and rewarding venture and one in which I will have a repeat performance next summer. Yay for free yoga in the park!

NOTE: Jessica, my niece, now has her blackboard back. My sister told her it was "getting fixed"…for 6 months.

I have to go and pretend to be a yoga teacher now Mum.

OMG!

It's been 6 WHOLE MONTHS since I've updated this blog. Well, I've actually been writing bits and pieces and have like 5 half finished drafts sitting behind here waiting to be published. I am now, yes, right now on a Thursday morning in mid-May, sitting in a coffee shop in Mittagong, NSW, Australia drinking a Chai Latte and rereading some of the drafts as I try not to fall asleep from boredom. They were quite boring and I attribute the "boringness" of them to lots of turmoil in my life and not really wanting to put any flair into my writing.  So, it's official, I have my writing mojo back and will give you a Cliff's Notes version of what's been happening on and off the mat. So, here is a quick recap of what's happened.

AN INURY: 

I had a bulging disc between L3 and L4.

One week before I was due to teach my very own PAID yoga class at a newly opened local gym, I managed to injure myself. Badly. I slipped a disc in my back. Well technically had a "bulging disc" between my L3 and L4 vertebrae for the second time in my life! (The first was the result of a Mountain Biking Injury when I was a lifty for the Summer Season in Whistler, Canada…job #32) Apparently slipped discs never really go away so for my first few months of teaching, I taught with a slipped disc.  In between I was getting acupuncture, going to the osteo, chiro, physio and anything else that ended in "o". I was taking Chinese herbs alongside Valium at night just so I could sleep! Hey man, I'm all for alternative therapies, but sometimes a chick just needs some hardcore painkillers.

As such, I spent my first few months in a bit of a haze, frustrated at not being able to demonstrate the poses properly. I had some very creative ways of explaining sequences, sometimes getting a student to demo it for me, and relied heavily on verbal cues to instruct. Challenging to say the least! Teaching with an injury is shit. There's no two ways about it.

David and Goliath cartoon. Legen-dary. 

A BOY: 
I met a boy. Well, reconnected with a guy I met 15 years ago who "happened" to be travelling down this way for a conference and we sort of got together/I had 5 wines and suddenly found him attractive. Also, because, well, I'm not getting any younger, clock is ticking and all that and well, you get it right?  So, after 4 months of "dating" over the phone and doing the long distance thing, he decided to quit his job and move 2,500km to live with me.  SO, that lasted 2 months and I am now just finishing the hideous crying randomly all the time, breaking the 12 month lease (I've never committed to anything for 12 months in my LIFE, what was I thinking?!), packing, crying, putting ALL of my furniture back into storage, a bit more crying and moving back with my parents' for the 14th time!  On the upside, the removalist asked me for my number so I guess that's a plus. He could smell a rebound chick from a mile away! (SIDENOTE: I didn't give him my number. I've sworn off men indefinitely.)

That's me on the left doing stupid, pouty face.

A MUSICAL:
The first thing I did when I arrived at this new country town, Bowral, with a population of like 12,000 after moving from Brisbane, a medium-sized Australian capital city with a population of about 2 million, was NOT look for a job, but was to audition for a musical!  Cue my parents' shaking their heads at my logic and wondering if I was ever EVER going to grow up! #peterpansyndrome So yes, I auditioned for Chicago - The Musical, which is like my third favourite musical and got in as "Pop", a Cell Block Tango girl. SO, I got to meet other crazy theatre types and thus make instant friends. Work could come later. Rehearsals took up much more time than I anticipated and as such, I had zero creative drive left to write my blog :-(  Meanwhile, that's all over after 3 weekends of runs and I slipped into a bit of post-show depression, which is standard after coming down from all the adrenalin and stuff. Yoga has helped me through it though :-)

Next stop…horse yoga! Watch this space.

A HORSE:
It was my birthday a few months ago (turned 25... again) and well, basically, my friend bought me a horse. Yep, I'll say it again…my beautiful friend Michelle, BOUGHT ME A FREAKING HORSE FOR MY BIRTHDAY! Best. Present. Ever.  His name is Nitro and he is a 10 year old ex racehorse and I luff him.  I try and drive the 3 hours to Newcastle to visit him as much as possible. And, as I've become a recent convert to Natural Horsemanship, a form which allows horses to be as close to their natural state as possible and includes lots of groundwork and mimicry of their wild behaviours etc, I will next endeavour to embark on a bit of horse yoga. Oh yes, that's a thing.

A FEW TOO MANY JOBS

This is what the boot of my car ALWAYS looks like! 

During all of these extra-curricular activities, I was working 2 casual jobs AND teaching 7 classes of yoga a week.  (I quickly learnt that making a living as a yoga teacher was not a viable option to keep me in the lifestyle in which I am accustomed to, hence the necessity to pick up a couple of "normal" jobs in the process).  SO, thus, in conclusion, I didn't have even a spare nanosecond to answer emails let alone update my blog.

BUT, I'm back and now the blog will take an exciting twist.  Well, as about exciting as a yoga blog can get.  I'm going to talk about my various yoga TEACHING experiences, most of which have just been a comedy of errors, as well as do the odd review of yoga studios I visit along the way.  I have now cut back to 3 classes a week, which is far more sensible and manageable. After saying yes to any teaching opportunity, which apparently is very common with noobies, I suddenly hit a wall and my body, whilst still grappling with my back injury, began to protest.  Finally, practising ahimsa paid off.  (Click here for a pretty good explanation of ahimsa). I am now in more of a routine and no longer living in my car and planning yoga sessions in my head whilst at my other jobs!  The other night on the way to a class that was a 50 minute drive away, I was starving, so I quickly made myself some porridge when I was at home for 3 minutes between jobs and ate it while I was driving at 110km down the highway. Idiot!

As I've been wearing so many hats over the past 6 months, I would often ring people, mainly my Mum, on the way to or from my yoga classes and almost always finish the conversation with, "Righto, I have to go and pretend to be a yoga teacher now!"

Hopefully one day, I will have enough faith in my ability to leave out the "pretend to be" part!

Bondi Yoga Festival

9.00am Yoga to Surf  - Effective Sequences for Wellbeing with Zoe Braithwaite

This yoga class was designed specifically for surfers. I have never surfed in my life, so it was only logical to take this class right? Also, my yoga bestie, Katie had signed up for another class in this timeslot so this was the most convenient.  Now, I want to learnt to surf!  I also wanted to do this class, because I've been toying with the idea of teaching yoga to specific people like swimmers, runners, office-workers, tradies, you name it.  So I wanted to get some ideas on that approach. The coolest part of this class was that Zoe, who was an amazing, tiny, ball of muscle and also a circus performer, made all 60 or 70 of us get into a massive circle and we did the warm ups together, holding hands and stuff like that. Now, I'm not big on any sort of hugging or touching, or really being in too close a proximity to people, but this was a nice experience all the same. A good start to the day.

11.00am - Fearless in Nature with Duncan Peak

This class was exhausting! With the combination of epic power moves like inversions and arm balances, plus the ensuing humidity with the oncoming storms, sweat was dripping for almost the entire hour and a half!  Being a "vatta/pita", I really should be doing more Yin Yoga or Restorative to couteract this fire, but to be honest, I just love this style of yoga.  I feel just the same benefits from a slower class as I do from a stronger class like this. A feeling of ease, peace and balance.

I decided to meet Duncan Peak at the end, to get the obligatory photo for my blog and also to ask him a legal question. As a lone teacher, without much guidance, I want to make sure I do right by my students and the business world.  So, it's inevitable that I seek information from whomever I come across. I had one question to ask him and so I did. "Am I allowed to teach Power Yoga without getting sued?" He sort of laughed and explained that the word "power" and "yoga" cannot and will not ever be patented or copyrighted or anything like that.  So, I should go forth and teach power yoga! That's all the explanation I needed. Thanks Duncan!



Sequence:

After a million Sun Salutations (Surya Namaskars) going through the Vinyasa, where I kept collapsing in Up Dog (Urdhva Mukha Svanasana) due to sheer exhaustion, we repeated this fabulous set sequence. Something I love about the concept of Power Yoga is learning such a sequence, almost like learning choreography for a dance, and then cranking the music up and repeating it in your own time and at your own pace. Pure bliss.  Here it is:

After flowing through the Vinyasa

• step back to Crescent Lunge with both arms up, pinky fingers turned in
• sweep back to Warrior 2 (Virabadrasana II)
• scoop back hand through to the front, like you're bowling a ball, ensure back heel up
• stretch hand up and hold in Reverse Crescent Lunge
• front hand to the floor and take front foot halfway back to a variation of Revolved Side Angle (Parivrtta Parsvokanasana) but really twisting the top arm around, with your buttocks about an inch from the floor and balancing on the edge of the back foot
• step up into Standing Splits (Urdhva Prasarita Eka Padasana)
• kick up to Handstand (Adho Mukha Vrksasana)
• jump back to Plank (Chaturanga) 
• flow through the Vinyasa and repeat on the other side!

Amazing.

1.00pm - Yogic Secrets of Strength, Flexibility and Fitness with Simon Borg-Olivier

Simon Borg-Olivier is amazeballs.  He demonstrated a sequence with one of his proteges, Christie I think her name was, and I'm assuming a fellow teacher who was clearly a ballerina, either past or current.  Her strength was amazing. When my ADD kicked in for a mere millisecond, it made me think of an experiment that was carried out somewhere testing the fitness of a team of footballers versus a troupe of ballerinas (or whatever the collective nouns are for these groups!). I'm a bit sketchy on the details so you might need to Google it, but it turned out the ballerinas by far exceeded the footballers in all aspects including strength, stamina and not surprisingly, flexibility.  Anyway, this display was simply incredible and I wished I had videoed it.  Again, on a tangent, isn't it cute that we still use the term "video" when really we are simply "recording it digitally on our smartphones ready to upload to whatever device we want?" I love that we still say "video".

Both before and after this mesmerising display, Simon gave a lecture on the following topic:

"How mudras move energy (prana) and information (citta)    through the subtle channels (nadi) in yoga."

What on EARTH is this gobbledygook? You may be thinking. But alas, it really was quite a simple and logical concept in which I will attempt to explain in lamen's terms. One of the aspects about Simon Borg-Olivier's teachings is that he used both a philisophical and scientific approach to yoga, which is something that really resonated with me.

He basically said that the purpose of Hatha Yoga is "to help your body live long enough and be healthy enough for your mind to realise yoga". Of course, yoga meaning "union" and Hatha meaning sun/moon, masculine/feminine, heat/cold, high pressure/low pressure, yin/yang or whatever school of thought you have! He then told us that there are 5 main "blockages" or hinderances that are preventing us from finding "yoga". I'm not sure if he was also referring to reaching Samadhi (like Nirvana), but that's a little of what I took from it.

SO, the 5 blockages that we need to unblock are:

1. tension
2. thinking
3. breathing
4. stretching
5. eating

In a nutshell ("help, I'm in a nutshell!") and in relation to the above quote, he explained that we need to do less of the above, in order to effectively move the energy freely around. For example, too much stretch can lead to loss of energy flow. Too much food leads to lethargy and thus loss of energy flow. And so it goes on. It really was an eye opening lecture and one which can be viewed online. He puts much of his material on YouTube, both lectures and sequences. What a champion.

Oh another piece of totally handy advice, "we live in hip flexion ALL the time". If you think about it, the act of sitting, whether it's in a car, at your desk or at the dinner table, forces our hips to stay in extension (even thought it's at right angles, our hips are flexed and not extended). Food for thought.

3.30pm - Restorative Vinyasa Flow in Dynamic Movement with Melanie McLaughlin

This class was awesome and exhausting! I didn't write out the sequence sorry because by the time we got to the end of the 1 and a half hour class, it was absolutely pouring with rain and we were freezing! We thought the marquee was going to collapse around us from the wind gusts alone let alone the pelting rain, so we just wanted to head home. It was pretty cool though with all of the elements lashing the big tent whilst we were doing the most relaxing session of the day. I bloody love mother nature! She rocks. 

The main thing my friend Katie and I really noticed when we were discussing it over a late lunch and hot chocolate at a lovely little bar we found on the way home with a prime couch by the window, were the names of many of the poses. It really was true Yin Yoga as I later discovered after my friend Google told me. Gosh, on a side note, do you remember life pre-Internet? I think my family still own a set of World Book Encyclopaedias from 1989! In fact, I remember getting the "Year Book" delivered by the mailman each year with the latest events. Remember those? In fact, remember books? A true primary source of information? The first port of call for settling any dinner-time argument about world history? Now it's all online, more specifically on sites like Wikipedia or Ask.com.  It really is incredible that Google is our first go-to place and is not only a proper noun but also a verb?  Like back in the day, we certianly never said, "Oh, hey guys, I'm not sure who won the 1986 Decathlon. I'll just go and "World Encyclopedia" it. " Today, it's more like "I dunno. Ima Google it. "

Anyhoo, where was I ? Oh yes, so after flicking through the only yoga book I've found in one of my 43 boxes to unpack after my move down south, I found a few references to Yin Yoga poses and many of them were utilised in this class, some even without Yang equivalents.   We did "Dragon",  "Swan" and "Frog".  Some of this terminology I have heard or used myself, but never really understood their origins. It really is cool to hear them used exclusively in a Yin class and  further confirms my love of Yoga and the fact it can be whatever you want it to be. Evidently, I myself, use a mishmash of yin and yang asana names and am proud of it! Nothing like a bit of cross-promotion.  

Overall a great class, but one in which I did struggle a bit by the end of a long day of yoga workshops and a freezing cold wind coming through the marquee. As such, the next few days I could hardly walk and, well, I ended up getting a pretty serious injury, which I am just about to research. Hang on, let me just Google it...

My friend Katie and I totally entered a comp to win
a one week Wellness Holiday in Santa Monica, Cali, USA!
#hopewewin #santamonica

Yoga in Tamworth (new studio!)

Yoga @ Zen Body and Mind

6.00am - Zen Flow with Kimberley

This studio has only been opened for a few months so it was nice timing that I was passing through. Kimberely, who is also the owner of the studio with her husband, was a past student of Byron Yoga Centre Teacher Training, just like me! It was nice to hear some familiar instructions, including the Sanskrit names of all the poses, as she has also been trained in the Purna Yoga style.

The studio was just gorgeous with lots of natural light filtering through the beautiful arched window as the sun rose. The class was nicely sequenced with floor work, a few sun salutes and then some balances. I really liked the space, the mood and the general feel of the place.

Kimberely had a good combination of demonstrating poses and then just instructing whilst watching the students. It made me think of an article I've recently read located here: http://yoganonymous.com/9-rules-every-yoga-teacher-should-follow/ in particular Rule #1. "Pay attention to me!" This is a great way of outlining how some yoga teachers might just get caught up in their own practise. The rest of the article is pretty funny too!

Anyway, I really hope Kimberley succeeds in her business, because like most yoga teachers, she has a "normal" full-time job during the day and follows her passion by night...and also really early in the morning!  I would recommend this studio to anyone who lives in Tamworth, or who is passing through.

Sorry I haven't written much more, it has been 2 months since I have completely moved my life 1,200km away. Chaos has ensued. More to come...

My 2 month absence.

Hello to my fan/s. (ie. Mum)

Do you want the happy travel yogi blog-writing reason I've been absent for 2 months?

Or the actual reason?

Yoga in Kenmore (new studio!)

Urban Yogi @ Kenmore

7.30am - Urban Flow with Mary-Ann

This once sleepy little street has been revived with this
yoga studio and awesome coffee shop on the corner. 

I HAVE A LOCAL STUDIO! Weeeeeeeeeee!

Been back in Brisbane for a month and a half now and have managed to discover a lovely little studio right in my neighbourhood. It's a gorgeous light and airy studio with all yellow mats and bolsters.  There is a feature wall with little bird decals on it which is just gorgeous. It really adds that special something.

I love yellow stuff!

I did the Introductory $25 pass for 14 days which is great value and managed to experienced four different teachers and thus four different teaching styles!  I am happy to say that my favourite teacher there was Mary-Ann who taught a lovely Power Yoga that was easily sequenced from start to finish.  She would begin with Pranayama and give many options for this initial position where we could still our minds and find our breath eg. lying down, sitting on knees, siting cross-legged or sitting cross-legged on a block.  I chose the latter and I have never looked back!  Why have I not embraced this sooner?!  Sitting on a block with legs crossed enables the pelvis to tilt forward just that subtle little bit which in turn creates a perfectly straight spine and posture.  She would then talk us through some breathing, one day she did Nadi Shodana actually, and then we would start with floorwork.   One thing I really noticed about her teaching style was that she always gave options for every pose which was handy because there was such a mixture of abilities. Then we would do Sun Salutations, a few balances, followed by heading back to the floor for inversions. Here, she would always give us heaps of options like bridge, shoulder stand, plough, headstand or handstand.  Her pace of the class was great and I really felt comfortable doing a headstand as she would be nearby and say encouraging things!  She would of course always finish in Savasana and coincidentally, would always play this beautiful track (Somewhere Over The Rainbow/What A Wonderful World by legendary Hawaiian musician "Iz") that Steve from Bonfire Yoga in Jindalee who I LOVED used to also play at the end. For some reason, it always manages to bring a tear to my eye. Click here to listen.

Mary-Ann would also play "normal" music in the class which I just loved too. There was a bit of Mumford & Sons and some old school chill-out music which I'm a huge fan of so I really think I'm going to incorporate this into my future non-existent classes if I ever decide to become a teacher, which is becoming more unlikely with each passing day! More on that later.

Sequence: 
Starting in plank through the Vinyasa to Chaturunga, right foot thorugh, Vira 1, VIra 2, flip the front hand then extended side angle with bind option, then back to Vira 2, then triangle, then back to plank and repeat on other side. back, but this flow was really quite slow and seemingly more effective. I really enjoyed it. At least, in the mood/physical parameters I felt today, at that moment.

Quote: 
"Find the place between strength and ease"
- This was very effective particularly in the standing strength.

"Take this option, if it's available to you"
- Genius! It's pretty much saying, YOU know your own body, so if this is an option that is "available", then do that. Such a great way to word it. Totes gonna copy this. Thanks Mary-Ann.


Coffee: Dennis' Espressivo Coffee and Wine Bar - about 20 metres up the road. (Made even better by the correct use of the apostrophe on their signage!)

Mary-Ann even took a photo of me doing or attempting to do
a headstand in front of the bird wall. Thanks Mary-Ann!