Hellooooo…

Tags

Healing, Simon Borg-Olivier, toute de suite, workshop, Yoga

So I totally meant to draw the winner for my give-away this weekend. I even planned on making a little movie to show you the drawing.

BUT I failed to realise the yoga workshop I’m doing this weekend would take over my life quite as much as it has! It’s my second Simon Borg Olivier workshop for the year and I’m feeling… overwhelmed, amazed, excited, grateful and blown away.

Since the first workshop I did with him in May, I’ve been doing classes with one of his senior students here in Melbourne (Simon is Sydney-based). Also since then, I’ve gotten very sick and made something of a rebound (still working on it!).

I’m pretty sure that switching to Simon’s style of yoga has played a role in my recovery to-date because it’s quite simply amazing.

Simultaneously, this yoga builds strength and yet is both graceful and beautiful. Instead of being exhausted after a class, I usually feel like a jumping bean – full of energy. And today I’ve just finished up six hours of workshop with another six still to come tomorrow.

My teacher (who is assisting Simon) hugged me at the end of today and complimented my pink cheeks (showing excellent circulation), while reminding me how well I did to get through the entire day. And actually, I feel really good. I need of a sleep, yeah. But otherwise really, really good.

Dear readers, I have so much to tell you about this workshop and the classes I’ve been doing.

What Simon teaches is profound – most yoga teachers come away from his workshops re-thinking the way they teach asana completely. So hopefully soon, I’ll be ready to write up a few bits and pieces for you about what I’ve been learning.

For now,  I just want to state a few things that are probably self-evident to most yoga teachers, and perhaps some students, too. This is more my observations in recent times rather than anything I’ve been taught explicitly.

Are you ready?

Okay, so some of us are prone to saying things like: “Yoga is not about doing sick arm balances”, and this is VERY true.

But to expand on that, yoga is not about how a pose looks or even about achieving/mastering various poses. I mean hey, it’s not a bad thing to have mastered a pose but one’s practice should never be about the goal of mastering a pose. Yeah?

In other words, yoga isn’t about looking good and showing off what you can do. That means nothing whatsoever. It’s possible to use brute strength/force/gravity to maneuver your body into a yoga pose. What does that prove? More importantly, what does it do or not do? Is the pose “dead” or “alive”? Does it help keep your circulation functioning well or do you over-heat/get cold fingers and toes? Are you relaxed in your practice or do you try so hard to do various poses that you hurt yourself?

But what if instead, your yoga practice could improve your blood pressure, or your immune system? How would you feel if learning to breathe properly changed the acidity levels of your body? What if you could learn to do a back bend that didn’t squash your lower back? Or if by doing a very simple practice and without any forcing, you discovered access to more “advanced” poses without doing them obsessively?

Wouldn’t all of that be amazing?

This is some of the essence of what Simon teaches. But there’s more. So. Much. More.

I think I’m ready to try to craft a couple of posts on it all. And I promise, once the weekend is over I’ll draw the giveaway toute de suite.

In the meantime I’m pretty absorbed in everything I’m learning. And thankful for being fortunate enough to receive these teachings.

And very soon it’ll be time for bed.

More soon, y’all!

~Svasti xx

Simon Borg Olivier workshop redux

Tags

circulation, Hatha, internal force, Kundalini, relaxation, Simon Borg-Olivier, Stretching, Tantra, workshop, Yoga

Here I am, finally reporting in on last weekend, where lucky, lucky me got to spend a day and a half learning from the wonderful Simon Borg Olivier.

Simon is all joyousness, fun, passion, love, enthusiasm, knowledge and wisdom. His teachings make so much sense, and yet some of what he has to say flies in the face of what is taught to many yoga teachers.

Seems to me that many of the most interesting yoga teachers out there each have pieces of the “yoga puzzle”: reviving and expanding modern-day western-world yoga from the benign practice of “stretching”.

Simon is another of these teachers.

In this particular workshop – a day and a half of teachings and practice – Simon spoke of Hatha yoga as being the right-hand side of Tantra (which concurs with all of my previous training). Tantra, of course, being a series of practices designed to bring awakening of consciousness via raising kundalini energy. He also spoke of a little of left-hand Tantra – which includes practices of extremes and taboos to achieve the same result.

[Note: my training in Tantra has included these aspects, but also a strong focus on various forms of meditation, ritual and deity yoga.]

Far from being the generic name for yoga until it branches out into Iyengar, Ashtanga and all the rest (the refrain of “all yoga comes from Hatha yoga” being extremely common), Simon speaks of Hatha yoga as being about creating internal forces. These forces, if used in the correct way, can bring about awakening of kundalini.

And it’s with this view that we began the workshop (the room was packed wall-to-wall with yogis).

So let me give you a taste of the weekend, if I can. There’s so much to say and my puny brain has no hope of remembering it all, let alone fitting it into a single blog post…

Simon’s style of practice has a very funky flow to it – lots of beautiful flowing arm movements and both small and large movements of the body. There’s plenty of video footage on Simon’s website and blog for you to check out if you like.

He walked us through making tiny movements with the body that are in effect the same as the grosser movements – forward, side and backbends, for example. But rather than a side bend that focuses on the bending side of the body, Simon asked us to think of lengthening the non-bending side. This still creates a side bend, but without jamming the spine.

Another thing Simon asked us to focus on was keeping our lower belly “baby soft”. By that he means not sucking the belly to the spine in most instances – instead, the belly is engaged by pushing the belly button away from the spine. This action creates strength and space, but also once again, does not squish what shouldn’t be squished. In fact, it’s possible to create firmness in the belly while keeping it soft, and still be able to hold a conversation without gasping for air.

We also focused on circulation of blood/energy (they’re one and the same, right?) by engaging all body parts – the trunk, arms, legs, fingers and toes – in each asana. Not just having some parts of the body come along for the ride. I have to say that being quite sensitive to energy as I am, this part of the work had a huge impact on me!

Simon posits that if our circulation is working properly, we don’t waste energy. That profuse sweating and/or numbness or coldness in our body while practicing suggests our circulation isn’t working as effectively as it could.

All very interesting stuff!

And hey, I know I’ve got some work to do on the circulation front. Coz okay, I might be a pitta/kapha constitution, but I sweat a hella lot even when practicing in a cold room!

Another important point from the workshop surrounds the common yoga teacher instruction of making sure your shoulders aren’t raised when you bring your hands over your head. How many of us were trained with that instruction and have in fact, said just that to students?

The thing is, that by pressing our shoulders down when our arms are above our head, we are in fact jamming the spine. Which isn’t particularly helpful for circulation and the flow of energy in the body, yes?

He also emphasises a point that I’ve never forgotten from his teachings 12 years ago: that yoga creates artificially tense situations for the body, in which we need to learn how to relax. In fact, Simon says that he relaxes throughout his entire practice (even in all those “fancy” poses, as he calls them), which is better than just waiting for savasana at the end!

Interspersed with all of these lovely little wisdom nuggets, we completed three full practices over Saturday afternoon and all day Sunday, while Melbourne’s grey skies opened up intermittently. With lots of intense instructions to go with the asana, wow did I sleep well Sunday night!

The other brilliant thing about re-connecting with Simon via this workshop is that I discovered there’s someone teaching his style of yoga right here in Melbourne, and actually not far from where I live.

Can I hear a HUZZAH? Coz this yogi now has a new yoga studio to call home. 😀

I’m not sure if Simon teaches much further afield than around Australia and Asia, but if you ever get the chance to do some yoga with him then go for it! Not only is he a lovely, adorable person but he’s got an encyclopaedic knowledge of the body and yoga.

Enough for now. My brain had a wee melt-down this weekend and I need some rest…

More about that soon.

~Svasti

P.S. Please note the above are my recollections of the workshop, so if I got something wrong, my apologies!

P.P.S. There’s also a lot of stuff Simon covered that I haven’t mentioned above. There just isn’t the space here…

Rainbow yoga love

Tags

frowny, rainbow coloured love, serious, Shadow Yoga, Simon Borg-Olivier, Yoga, yoga teacher breakup, yoga teaching

Friday night's sunset, captured as I got off the train. Glorious!

Confession: since the whole Yoga Teacher Breakup Debacle, I haven’t been to any yoga classes. Instead, I’ve just been doing my own practice and teaching, and kinda getting over the sting of what happened.

It’s nasty when things go wrong with something you hold so close to your heart, like I do (and I’m sure many of y’all do) with yoga. And it took me a while to see that clearly, something about me pushed that particular yoga teacher’s buttons to the point that she had a very unpleasant (and rude) reaction. On top of that, she wasn’t any good at apologising or admitting her mistakes.

So, she lost a regular and committed student and I lost a place to practice a form of yoga I love doing. I haven’t actually done any Shadow Yoga since then either. I need for the situation to lose its taint and for me to feel a natural pull towards doing it again. Luckily, I love all kinds of yoga so that’s not a problem!

But today I’ve broken my yoga teacher fast and I’m feeling the love. LOVE! So. Much. Love.

A couple of weeks ago, someone mentioned to me that Simon Borg-Olivier was going to be in Melbourne this weekend. As I’ve previously mentioned, he was my very first ever yoga teacher in Sydney. My introduction to the beginning of the rest of my life – not that I knew it at the time!

So I tracked down his workshop and signed up as quickly as I could. Today’s session was a half day – an hour long talk, followed by a demonstration of his awesome yoga skills and then three hours of practice. Delicious!

I’m not sure exactly how long Simon has been teaching, but I think he said he’s been practicing for around 40 years. The dude is also a qualified physiotherapist and is insanely knowledgeable about the body. I’ll have much more to say about the workshop after tomorrow’s all-day session (HUZZAH!), but for now I’ll say that he has lots of wonderful yoga goodness going on.

Today, what impressed me most is that despite his years and years of teaching and really, being one of the biggest stars in the Australian yoga world… he’s just so human. Before and after the workshop, Simon made a point of introducing himself to as many people as he could, shaking their hand and having little chats. So lovely and inclusive.

After today’s session, he came up to me to say hello and I explained that I’d taken his classes a good 12 years ago. He had also come across this blog and left a comment on one of my posts last year, and when I told him I was the blogger in question he remembered and was so sweet about it.

It’s human nature to compare and contrast things, and I can’t help but notice the vast differences between his teaching style (warm, inviting, fun, engaging) and the woman I was learning Shadow Yoga from (serious, sharp, strict, harsh). What was I thinking?!

That Yoga Teacher Breakup Debacle was one of the best things that’s happened to me this year. Even though I currently don’t have access to that style of yoga, I’m so very glad to be out of that woman’s classes!

You see, I like my yoga all heart-centered and fun, filled with rainbow-coloured love. Not Nazi-harsh and mean! I’m just not that kind of yogi. I’m always trying to get my students to laugh in class (intentionally or not) and I wanna be in classes that make me feel like that photo up there – full of vibrant colour and life and far from being all serious and frowny.

Know what I’m saying?

Anyway, time for sleeping. Gotta big day of yoga (filled with rainbow coloured love) ahead of me and I wanna be well rested.

Update: Here’s the review

Til soon, folks!

~Svasti