There are 3 main reasons people seem to come to Bali: yoga, surfing, or diving. Watching the surfers navigate the surfs breaking offshore at Jungutbatu I realized that all three lifestyle “sports” combine overcoming, or mastering, your body’s capabilities. All three also are grounded in nature. Even yoga, even if it perhaps is grounded in the universe at large. 
Surfing, diving, climbing, and yoga seem to attract similar people. Many gear shops and brands specialize in more than one of these at once. Yet I felt as out of place in the Jungutbatu surfing community as I did in the Mushroom bay diving community. Ubud and its yoga community, however, felt just right. Organic, raw food, wellness shops and quiet temples in town; and rice paddies, chickens, and rural life just around the corner. Yet Ubud is a bubble far from ordinary Balinese life – just like a surf shack village is.
In the end, any activity that increases awareness of ourselves as well as of the health of our beautiful but threatened planet is good. I wish more people chose surfing, diving, or yoga over computer games or the gym. I wish more people prioritized to live in the world, instead of just existing in it. Our world is beautiful – but it is not forever, not for us humans. 
(Jungutbatu and Mushroom Bay, Nusa Lembongan, Indonesia; August 2015)
Tag Archives: yoga
The yoga of living – or staying alive
I am unable to describe (in words or pictures) the rain on the leaves, the rooster caws, the incense smoke from the morning offering, and the silence in the soundscape. There is no distraction and nothing else to do except for a sun salutation. And another. And then a padangusthasana, a padahastasana, a trikonasana, and onward, and inward. Stiff shoulders and tired thighs are to be acknowledged, nothing more or less. Yoga is not about stretching to reach the next pose, but about the process that happens in any pose. It is not about just striking a pose that looks kind of right, but making sure that it is grounded, and centered around breath and gravity.
Yoga is also about accepting that a knee injury requiring surgery means going back to the basics and then rebooting the system of practice. And it is understanding that not many people master to truly live while surviving intact throughout life. In the last 4 years I have not only crashed and burned, but also experienced my first emergency surgery, my first stitched wound, my first broken bones, and my first sports injury. The 31 years before kept me unscathed.
As I sipped my daily post-practice coconut water, I could not help but wonder whether yoga means living in it all, or living despite of it all?
(Ashtanga Yoga Bali Research Center; Ubud, Bali, Indonesia; August 2015)
Time for yet a timeout
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)
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.)
Happiness
The light in the Mediterranean is unique. In contrast to many tropical landscapes where sunlight blends with humidity or dust into a soft haze, the Mediterranean sky is as neverending blue as the sea. There is sharp contrast between the rugged rocks and the fluffy green pines, and the white houses and the pink oleanders. Yet what draws painters and dreamers is the blazing sunlight that bounces off every surface, enveloping every object and surface in a soft gleam like watching the world through a camera obscura.
Lapping up the mid-morning sunlight I thought of the painters and dreamers who came to the Mediterranean to seek happiness. I thought of the Greek who seem to live longer than most people, allegedly due to olive oil, yoghurt, and happiness. I thought of people who change professions, relationships, and countries in pursuit of happiness without ever searching inside themselves first. And I asked myself whether happiness really can be found by rearranging the external factors in our lives? By attaching happiness to the environment it will be brought by and whisked away by circumstances beyond our control. Perfect happiness will be followed by equal amount of loss and grief, such is the law of our world.
Before the sun slowed my thought I asked myself if the definition of happiness did not contain a fleeting, temporal component, and perhaps I was better off seeking something else altogether? Maybe leaving the shoes by the door and stepping inside would be a good first move?
(Agios Pavlos, Crete, Greece; August 2014)
Touching base on Crete
Dawn is the only hour of the day when the cicadas are quiet. It is also the hour when long, deep ujjayi-breaths slip out through the screen door of the yoga shala, mixing with wisps of incense. Inside, a room full of sweaty yogis move in meditation on the dark gray marble floor, each at his or her own pace. The air is electrified with immense concentration and infused with tranquility, a paradox that strikes me every morning as I enter the room.
Working through my poses I quietly ponder upon another paradox: there is nothing new under the sun and yet everything is always changing. Nothing is permanent and yet the patterns that form by change are always the same. We learn new things by making the same mistakes countless people have made before us. An ashtanga yoga sequence is identical from today to the next and yet it feels different every time I practice it.
Change is a sneaky little thing: we never catch it in action and only notice the effect. And so what is more valuable: development itself, or what happens to us when we become aware of how we have changed?
(Agios Pavlos, Crete, Greece; August 2014)
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)
This blue marble 