9.00am Yoga to Surf - Effective Sequences for Wellbeing with Zoe Braithwaite
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:
- tension
- thinking
- breathing
- stretching
- 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...
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| My friend Katie and I totally entered a comp to win a one week Wellness Holiday in Santa Monica, Cali, USA! #hopewewin #santamonica |
