Yoga Teaches Self Acceptance

Dear Yogis

I’m writing to you in the dead of the night under the deep black night-time Kytheran sky. You can’t imagine a sky so jam-packed with stars and constellations and the white cloud of a galaxy millions of light years away. It’s breath-taking.

Sprinkles of stardust attended our classes and workshops this week and everyone made progress in their postures and wider experience of yoga: Pranayama (breathing) exercises, visualisation, and daily techniques and drills to better understand the fluidity of yoga.

During the workshops, Valentina’s main message of the week was: ‘don’t make it complicated, enjoy yoga’. She said that there are so many rules that these can often form distractions and obstacles instead of aiding your practice. ‘Yoga is practical’, she says.

This is interesting. She said that in order to move on and progress through the postures, you need self acceptance. You are faced with the physical body and confronted with its restrictions. Actually, postures are not so important, in the great scheme of things, but in that moment, they are the most important thing in the world. We get upset and stressed and self-critical. Eventually yoga will make the mind discover the reality... that you can’t escape from what is. This is your body. This is what is. Yoga is how you find out who you are. Only when you accept your body can you move on and improve. The system is to expose yourself to your higher self but you have to start where you are.

Retreat

I can’t imagine not coming here next year! if you’d like to come to Kythera with me next year, please let me have your preference for May or September. And f you want to squeeze in a retreat this year, please get in touch with Andy Gill to find out about his Himalayan monastic yoga retreat, 5th -12th October. You will become part of a Monastic community for a week. I’ve done that in the UK and it is special. I didn’t have added Andy and yoga, though!

Home Studio

October comes next week and we’re back in the game. See attached for class availability. There are plenty of spaces left. See attachment.

Training

This weekend, starting tonight, is Kino MacGregor. She’s back all weekend at the Oval Space near Cambridge Heath, 14:30 - 17:00.  I’ll go on Sunday 29th of September for ‘the spiritual journey of asana‘ workshop

Yoga in the News

The Telegraph has: Find your inner selfie: how 'InstaYoga' became the ultimate cultural paradox. An odd article about yoga on Instagram. ‘InstaYoga...despite representing almost every antithetical value to the practice of yoga itself (ie ego, self-obsession, and a focus entirely on the physical body), it is bringing people to the yoga practice in swathes, and a large number – admittedly not all – are finding the greater depths it has to offer.’