Just how is it that I am sitting down to write this at 12:22am? 2 weeks ago I thought I'd better get all 21st Century so I made a "trial" website. Today I received an email to say that my trial was ending tomorrow, so you guessed it, at 11:55pm I signed up for the real deal (after a small amount of panic at losing 5 days hard graft doing this website building thing).
Now 27 minutes later - after scanning through all the pages of my new website - (because surely it doesn’t go LIVE straight away...does it?!!) here I am writing a blog post. Because said website says that I have a blog. So here is some blog.
I do love listening to anything yoga, and especially to my new Yin yoga teacher Ram. His latest lecture was all about how prior to the 80's and the rise of Ashtanga yoga (sometimes referred to as Power yoga), yoga was only about how it made you FEEL. That no one cared how it looked, and certainly there was no pressure to be wearing a bikini in the Maldives while you executed gravity-defying gymnastic-like manoeuvres. It made me reminisce about my first forays into a personal yoga practice aged 23 - I had just moved to the Bay of Islands and lacked a teacher to guide me, having carelessly left my original and dearest teacher in London. So I did the sensible thing and bought the now-classic book "Light on Yoga" by BKS Iyengar and cultivated my own yoga experience. On the deck of the catamaran sailing yacht I was living on. Which had I owned a mobile phone, would have been fully insta worthy - a girl in her early 20's doing yoga on a yacht somewhere sunny? Lol, the irony!
All was not in vain though. While I was not and am not a pure Iyengar girl, I will never forget all the alignment cues I endlessly studied and memorised from that book and that I will be forever grateful for. I held my Warrior II for minutes and minutes, gazing into the distance just past my middle fingernail and feeling every bit the warrior goddess. There are no photos to document this, but I can still remember how it felt to build my strength from 20 sec holds to 3 minute holds - and even better, I can still channel this feeling whenever I drop into good old WII. It’s like I wore the right groove in my brain with that one.
My real thought here is that it's so important to me how the pose, the breathing, the meditation, the practice FEELS. And even thought I do love a good yoga pic as much as the next yogi, who really cares how it looks? I really am going to get back on Instagram soon because I do miss the funny yoginis I met on there…and the wealth of yoga knowledge that is on there. So it’s not about hating on social media and all those bikini yoga shots. But let's not forget that more important than exterior looks is what's going on inside. As I try to tell myself with each wrinkle I find. Actually that's not a good analogy, I'm a walking pharma-cornucopia for Living Nature day creams / night creams - you name it, it's going on the crow's feet. But yeah, yay inner beauty and all that haha.
And with that, here endeth the first blog. It's all about the feels! Don't let anyone tell you (or adjust you into a weird shape) otherwise!
With lots of love, Lala X