The Sounds of a Silent Yoga Practise

Going to and from work, I spend on average about three hours a day behind the wheel. It’s a pretty decent chunk of time, and being the fussy muso that I am, I’ve always got one hand on the wheel and the other playing with CD’s and radio stations (don’t worry, traffic is so bad that this can’t possibly be considered multi-tasking behind the wheel).

Since being at my yoga retreat, I decided to give something a try: what if I listened to NO music to and from work? What if I turned it all off?

What I found surprised me.

A) Traffic is not nearly as stressful as when there’s no radio playing (counter-intuitive, right?)
B) Silence has a lot to say. A lot. When you beat through the resistance grind, you can really hit some pretty cool stuff.

So let’s just say, silence has been on my mind, and it hasn’t exactly been ‘silent’. And being a ‘silent’ practise, I started thinking about the sounds of yoga.

A Teacher’s Dialogue, or Teacher’s Monologue?

In Bikram yoga, the instructions are called a ‘dialogue’ – even though technically the only one speaking is the teacher. When I posed this question on Twitter, @ibendbackwards, a good friend from my studio, jumped in with “We speak with our bodies!”.

I thought it was a pretty cool concept. The teacher talks – we reply to the instructions with our bodies and energies – and hence, the instructions are a ‘dialogue’. Silence has spoken.

Trance Music and Yoga?

A work colleague runs a trance website, and he was giving me a definite run for my money on site statistics. Then a touch of karma hit the conversation and he got a few words jumbled up, asking me “So what kind of yoga does your music listen to?”.

The question was so awesome (and came with such timing) that I couldn’t bring myself to laugh at his mistake. Seriously – think about it.

If Yoga Had a Soundtrack, This Would Be It…

Nathan, who ran the yoga retreat I went to, sent over in a comment the following YouTube video. And – yes – it’s yoga and music. It’s all about timing these days, right?

If there was a soundtrack to yoga , this would definitely be it.

May your yoga sound like the innocence of these kids doing yoga in the middle of a street side market place – 1) because they can, and 2) because it’s making people stop their day for a moment and smile

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Five Things to Take Away From a Bikram Yoga Retreat

So as some of you will now be aware (and may have even joined me), I spent last weekend at a three day Bikram Yoga Retreat from the one, the only, Nathan Dennett, who runs the Sutherland Shire Bikram Yoga Studio in Sydney.

Now I’d never been to a yoga retreat before, but Nathan used to teach me at my old studio and I’ve always remembered him for the ‘Final Spinal’ song and always dressing up on Halloween (yes, in class). So I thought, hey, I’ll go along for old times’ sake. My older brother, who is moving overseas for a year, came along with me for some ‘brother/sister bonding time’ – being the, ahem, flexible and regular yogi he is (not)…I was definitely keen to bring him along.

So we took a long winding road through the bush on a Friday night (I said it looked like murder territory. My brother told me to stop being so unnecessary, until we saw police tape hanging off a lone branch), and gave up my mobile phone, coffee and meat, while dousing myself in yoga and 4.30am wake up calls.

…And here’s what it all came to.

1. The Camel Pose can be loved. Really. Truly.
If a beginner can love it, anyone can. There was one woman on the retreat that had never done bikram before – when I asked her how it went on the last day, she bit her lip and quietly confided, “I don’t like that camel one. I can’t put my hands on my feet. I’m too scared – what if I can’t get back up?!”. Ten minutes later, she was on stage in the posture clinic, with the rest of the group calling out “you can touch your feet now!” and when her hands made contact, she exclaimed, “Wow….wooooow!!!!!”. I don’t think I will ever be able to enter the camel pose again without the image in my head of her facing her fears with an exhilarated “wow!!!!” – yes, in a backwards, upside down, topsy turvy, hands to feet back bend. Love it.

2. Yoga turns you so upside down that curry and vegetables makes an awesome breakfast.
After the hiking in the dark, watching half a sunrise, and then coming back for yoga in the dark, by the time breakfast comes four hours after wake-up call, you’re ready to eat just about anything – even a vegetable stew with rice that tastes kind of like curry. The scary thing is, somehow it just worked. It tasted good. The whole group’s waiting on the recipe. It has a name – kichari. Talk about compression of the internal organs.

3. Anyone – and I mean anyone – can get into the seated toe stand.
My brother managed this. Yes, it was on stage in a posture clinic, and I’m sure he wasn’t breathing, and it sure as hell looked painful – but if someone that I’m amazed can even bend their knee in the first place can go down, then no excuses, right? I’m still stunned and still not sure how I feel about this. I think even Bikram would have been clamping his hands over his eyes and cringing while watching that one.

4. It’s so totally okay (and somewhat necessary) to be a kid sometimes.
Insert body percussion. Insert stamping feet on the ground with sore legs. Insert lack of coordination and lack of sleep and lack of coffee late on a Saturday night. Insert a song about the rhythm of life. Hilarity, spontaneity and fun ensue. I still have the song in my head now – but hey, it makes me smile every time.

5. Respect your teachers. Then, respect them even more.
Two words: teacher training. I struggled to get through three days of what they go through for months – and mine was without the heat, lessons, dialogue memorisation and Bikram himself. So respect your teachers some. And then throw them more respect. They deserve it.

So it was an enlightening weekend, to say the least. Lots of yoga, lots of meeting new people, and as for yoga retreats in general – my first, but definitely not my last. The beautiful Govinda Valley retreat location and amazing food (I don’t know what was in that ayurvedic Apple Crumble, or what that white sauce was that was put on top, but seriously, I almost converted to ayurvedic cooking on the spot) definitely helped too.

The best part is – I’m more excited than ever to get back into the yoga studio and try out all the cool tricks I learnt in Posture Clinic.

Anyone else done a retreat before?

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Tears, Fears, and Stinky Yoga Mats

For some of my regular readers (and one commenter in particular who gave me a nudge of ‘any updates soon, Noor?’), you might have noticed my slight hiatus. No, I didn’t forget about you or my blog. In fact, I thought about Strike A Pose! pretty much all the time. So what was I doing not on here, writing?!

In my very first post, I pointed out ‘fear’. I got into a posting rhythm. I found some awesome yogi’s and inspirational bloggers online. I jumped onto Twitter. I started telling friends about my blog, who told their friends, who mentioned it to their friends, who emailed me to tell me they enjoyed it, etc…. should I have jumped up and down on the spot and been more inspired and motivated than ever to keep going with what I was doing?

Maybe…probably. In all honesty, I ran out of a yoga class crying.

In addition to running out of a class oh-so-dramatically (seriously, who hasn’t really wanted to do something like chuck a tantrum in the middle of a yoga class before?), I also chopped off all my waist-length hair (this thought came to me in the middle of the eagle posture, which I fell straight out of in a moment of epiphany that had my hair off within one hour of class ending). Yoga has a weird way of throwing sudden decisions at your head like that. I think Bikram said something like, ‘yoga shows you who you are’. Which is true. You just can’t run from yourself in that class. And if everyone in the world loves your crazy long hair except YOU, then you’re likely to realise this while staring at yourself in the mirror for ninety minutes under extreme heat.

Of course, I could go into some long spiritual spiel about the symbolism of cutting all my hair, but instead I’m going to go into what it took a three day yoga retreat in the middle of nowhere without meat, phones, or coffee to realise (more on that retreat soon, I promise)…

• My posts don’t have to be perfect everytime. It’s even okay to post without a picture. It’s better to do that than not post at all.
• Telling people about my blog, or flagging my posts up over Twitter, doesn’t make me a spammy wannabe blogger.
• It’s okay to run out of a yoga class crying, then be open about that on my blog. It doesn’t make me a fake – quite the opposite. No-one’s going to connect to a perfectly balanced person that has ‘their shit together’.
• It’s also okay if the first thing I do when I get home from a yoga retreat is run to the coffee machine. It’s even okay if my three-day headache suddenly dissolves as soon as I have coffee in my system.
• Procrastinating on my posting for several weeks doesn’t make me a failure. It just makes me scared. But that’s okay too.

And while we’re on the confessionals – another thing I discovered this weekend was that my yoga mat stinks. It took driving two hours with it in the back of my car for me to notice it – but it stinks. Any suggestions on how best to clean a yoga mat?

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