Time to focus inward. Time to focus on breathing, on here-ness. Time for a timeout on Bali. Sarveśām shāntir bhavatu. May there be peace in all.
(Photo from Yoga Plus, Crete, last summer.)
(Ubud, Bali, Indonesia; August 2015)
Tag Archives: wellness
(A) room of one’s own
At 15 it is a privilege to be invited to come along. At 35 it is a privilege to not invite anybody to come along. And sometimes, just sometimes, there are friends with whom it is possible to share a moment and at the same time have room for oneself, too. 
(Långvik Spa, Kirkkonummi, Finland; March 2015)
Friday mindfulness
For centuries we Finns were born in the sauna, and it was there that we entered the next world, too. In the meantime we cleansed, meditated, and nursed a cold in the same little hot room.
Today it is intended for us to be born and die in a hospital. We are not nursed by shamans but we still nurse our colds in the sauna. We may not believe in midsummer magic but we still bring leafy fragrant birch branches into the hotness. We may buy our beer in the store but we still store it either in the sea or lake or in the cold water bucket on the sauna floor.
And we city-dwellers may not have access to a sauna by the lake or sea every weekend (unless we flee to our summer houses). But each and every apartment building in this country has a sauna, and many apartments in them, as well. There is no living without a sauna, not even today. Not even for me.
On a Friday night, kindly do not offer me a night out in town. Rather allow me to enjoy the last condo sauna slot of the evening. A companion and a cold cider, or a book and just me. Delicious hotness seeping into the bones. Then slowly inching into the cool pool and a few laps, listening to the water splashing against the rim. Finally more heat until the muscles let go of whatever they were worried about.
Is there such a thing as a collective soul of a people? If there is an ancient, cultural core that is still alive, the sauna would be the vehicle that takes us Finns to that ancient source. Not understanding why we love the heat and the cold shocks, or why we bat each other with birch twig bunches, perhaps we are connecting to the consciousness of that ancient people who speak a language almost nobody understands, and whose geographic roots are shrouded in mystery?
As I twiddled my toes in the turquoise pool water, I could not help but wonder how tightly cultural heritage is entwined into our DNA. From lake water into pool water – into something else, will we still have saunas 200 years from now?
(Helsinki, Finland: March 2015)
From loving-to-hate to hating-to-love
Do you also have something you used to love to hate, and then one day you woke up and noticed it had turned into a thing you hated to love? And then slowly, slowly, the hate subsided and you found yourself at least ambivalent, if not slightly attached to the challenge? Did you ask yourself what changed? Was it persistence? Ignorance? Motivation? Or something else?
They say yoga happens when you connect your experience on the mat to your life off the mat. One of the walls I ran into on the mat early on was Wheel Pose. You know the backbend we all easily lifted into as kids, standing on our straightened arms and legs, hanging our heads upside down. Easy-peasy, yes? Since we did it as a kid we can naturally kick into it 15 years later, yes?
No. That pose we all kicked ourselves into as kids seemed impossible to me. I could not budge the crown of my head off the floor. “It is not about arm strength but leg strength”, my teacher said. “It is not about strength at all as much as stacking your bones right”, my sister said. I felt like Neo in the Matrix, trying to understand that it was not my body that was supposed to bend but my mind.
I clearly recall the shock of one of my first led ashtanga yoga classes, where the teacher asked us to go into the pose. I was still working on a Bridge pose variation, where the shoulders and head stay on the floor while the back arches up. Suddenly, there were strange figures lifting up all around me and as I lay on the floor it looked like the shala was invaded by Orwellian, long-legged Martian war machines. Hell’s bells, I thought, these must all have been doing wheel poses straight through their twenties into their thirties. I thought I was the only one in the world whose body forgot how to do it.
And then suddenly one day I mis-aligned my hands, too far from the head. Without noticing what happened I was up, looking at the world upside down. It really was all about forgetting strength and just stacking the bones as they felt most comfortable. It was bending the mind more than bending the body. The next few weeks I worked the pose into something I hated to love, until the one day when I straightened my arms and felt the luxurious stretch in my abs and hips and decided to increase my repetition count from two to four just because it felt so good.
Where did the transformation happen? We never catch the actual “click” as we only pay attention to the effect. The magician snapped his fingers and was gone before we knew it. The end result is all we have, and it can be a marvel. And so here is a challenge: next time I will try to catch the magician in the act. I will try to catch his hem to understand what changed, and why. Perhaps, just perhaps I will be able to understand how to bend the mind after all?
(Helsinki, Finland; January 2015)
(top image courtesy of yogabloga.tumblr.com. Bottom image from Kathmandu, Nepal.)
Timeout on the beach
Starlit mornings devoted to ashtanga yoga. Afternoons spent listening to the rumbling ocean and reading summer books. Evenings passed enjoying Greek cuisine, the company of lovely yogis from around the world, and moments of afterthought.
I am taking a timeout on Crete. Sarveśām shāntir bhavatu. May there be peace in all.
(Crete, Greece; August 2014)
(Triopetra beach image courtesy of http://www.cycladia.com)
Living today
i will wade out
till my thighs are steeped in burning flowers
I will take the sun in my mouth
and leap into the ripe air
Alive
with closed eyes
(e. e. cummings)
(image courtesy of yogabloga.tumblr.com)
The baseline
In-between all the things-going-on it is important to touch home base and remind ourselves of the baseline. While it may be difficult to understand the WHY we are here, it is always easier to ponder on the HOW. The sweet, the bitter, and the bittersweet. Indeed it is a profound skill to both live today and dream of tomorrow – and so much easier and useless to do only one of the two.
Work out your own salvation. Do not depend on others. It is all in how we live today, and what tomorrow we dream of. Buddha was wise.
Dinner like a warm bath
One snowy January night we found ourselves at the doorstep of Trugstad gård. A little blackboard with a swirly heart wished us welcome, as we escaped the cold indoors – and right into a warm bath of candlelight and care. There were flowers, creaky floors, and couches to sink into. There were paintings, pillows, and a fireplace. And there was the most delicious, locally produced dinner and the warmest care, just like at a dear friend’s home.
I took a sip of the lovely Norwegian apple ice wine, looked at my high-spirited colleagues through the candle lights, and marveled what a good restaurant and human warmth can do for team-building.
(Trugstad gård, Gardermoen, Norway; January 2014 – photo from August 2013)
Each day is a life in itself
Stillness.
Remembering to breathe.
Today I choose to live this day.
I choose to live it by my highest sense of right.
I choose to experience what comes my way.
Om shanti. Peace be in our universe.
(Image from yogabloga.tumblr.com)
Cocktail party in a blue mud pool
The weak January sun was melting into a golden glow as we landed on Keflavik airport. As the gold turned into a deep blue we were whisked away to a lava moon landscape, ushered inside, handed robes and towels, and herded back outside under the new night sky wearing nothing but swimsuits. The cold crept under our skins in the split-second it took us to dive into the eerily white, hot, sulphur-scented water.
How difficult it is to recognize colleagues when all one sees is a head bobbing above the dimly lit water. How hopeless to recognize an office neighbor’s face covered in mud. What an odd cocktail party, with three hundred wet-haired heads bobbing next to blue drinks floating on the surface of a blue lagoon.
(Blue Lagoon geothermal spa, Iceland; January 2014)
This blue marble 