Yoga and photography.

Me, at 3 years of age, doing Prasarita Paddotanasana
(Wide-legged forward bend) and also apparently looking like a boy.

According to this lovely picture my Mum just dug out of a very old school photo album, I've been doing yoga since I was three!  Ah, I miss photos. Don't you?  There's just something so nice about flicking through an old photo album with the musty smell of pages and stain marks where the photos are held by now petrified blu tac. It's just so nice to have something tangible and able to be passed to someone.  Rather than everyone sort of uncomfortably huddling around a computer to have a look.  Remember the days of real photos, we could choose between shiny and matte? We could get even "doubles" printed!  Remember when every photo was sacred because we only had a roll of 24 or if you were lucky, 36 to shoot with?!  Remember when you had to wait a week for processing and were so excited when they invented "overnight processing"? What? We can go and pick up our photos the very next day? How exciting?! Then, we got our parents to drive us to the shops to pick up our photos at Kodak, only to find that half of them were light-affected and ruined? Remember the heartbreak you endured by a photo not working out?  OH the tears!  I wonder how many rolls of film B.K.S Iyengar went through, when creating his book, Light on Yoga (originally published in 1966)?

Iyengar, doing Prasarita Paddotanasana
and who is actually a boy.

There's nothing romantic about clicking through a bunch of photos on a laptop most of which are duplicates and nothingness.  It really reflects the nature of society today. The urgency and immediacy with which we are all engrained with.  The younger generation are born with it whereas us older ones have had to learn it to keep up.   As an ex Primary School teacher, I have had many conversations with kids about "my day".  Oh the 80s, days of swatch watches, bubble skirts and riding your bike without a helmet.  Where gyms were a rare thing and the queen of exercise was Jane Fonda in all her lycra clad glory!

Anyhoo, this one time, at band camp, no wait, close, it was at school camp. One of my students had a camera with "film". Wow! Poor thing. All the other kids had their very own digital cameras, but this girl's Mum had just chucked a really old, manual wind up camera with a roll of film. This was in like 2006 so it really wasn't that long ago! Anyway, poor girl was sitting there trying to figure it out and didn't understand why there wasn't a display screen on the back, couldn't find where the SD card went and didn't know what to do the plastic tube that came with it.  Bless. I then sat down with her and explained how it worked. She was actually really intrigued by it all and couldn't believe we had to wait a week to see our photos back in the olden days!  Nonetheless, the polish wore off when I told her that each photo had to be carefully thought out because she only had 36 to take. She then asked me why her SD card wasn't that big and could only hold 36 photos. Sigh.

My Mum actually owned the video (VHS) on the left!

Perhaps that's why yoga is so popular this century?  Our society is constantly on the move, over-stimulated and forever searching for meaning.  Perhaps that's why, as I embark on my trip starting with New York, there's practically a yoga studio on every block? Why a third of the population of Australia which is crammed into a tiny island, yoga is the one hour of relief in a day that you might get to escape the chaos of it all. To just be. That is how yoga worked for me.

Even though I am pretty much an attention whore, who always does "photoshoots" with friends (ie. makes my friends take photos of me), I'm a completely different kettle of fish when it comes to yoga.  Yoga is just for me.  In fact, when I signed up to do my teacher training, a close friend of mine actually asked me: "Yoga teaching? Really? Do you even DO yoga?" To which I replied, well, yes, for the past 14 years. Cue blank stare from her! It really has been the one thing for myself and nobody else.

It's funny. I guess it's because I don't LOOK like someone who does yoga. I certainly don't fit the stereotype of a stick thin, zero body fat yogini!  But, yoga certainly has helped me overcome this.   Even though I was called "fat" at yoga camp. Yikes!  Onwards and upwards.  Thus, I will endeavour to take photos of myself doing yoga poses as I travel the world and put them out there.  Photography is also a good way to self-critique your poses, so if anything, it's a good teaching/learning tool.  Also, I won't be doing as much writing because I really need to enjoy my holiday and relax! SO my blog will be mainly photos, favourite sequences and coffee!

So keep following along on this blog if you want, otherwise I've now got an Instagram account (yay4yoga_coffee_dogs_travel) and it doesn't get any more immediate than that!  In less than 48 hours, hopefully, I will be uploading a photo from NYC!  As instantaneous and addictive as this kind of photography is, it is still not as satisfying as having to wait for your photos to be developed!  Bring back Kodak shops!

Also, here is a picture of a really old lady being flexible.
Yoga rocks.