Tuesday, June 7, 2011

10 days, 15 yoga classes, 13 lectures........

and hopefully not as many movies to go.

But that's it folks! I have officially started my countdown! Today we started prep for our graduation ceremony and the teacher tonight spoke about the end of our yoga journey being within sight, so I thought I might as well join in and start counting down. To date I have been really reluctant to do so, as the end still felt a little out of reach and not something I could hold onto just yet, but as tomorrow is Wednesday and means we are halfway through our last full week then it certainly is starting to feel the end is within reach.

Somebody asked me today, if I knew it was going to be like this would I still have signed up? I am still unable to answer that question with any certainty. While it has certainly been an interesting journey for me with some unexpected twists and turns thrown in, it is no secret it has been nothing like I expected or hoped for. And I am sad that I didn't ever reach that "sweet spot" in my time here that would make me not want to leave as this was all I dreamt, ate and talked about for the past two years :-(

Part of our "Karma yoga" is to come back and volunteer at future Trainings and there are some people who come back every year and do that. Oy! Most of the Training is "run" by volunteers which just astounds me considering what we pay.

So in light of the fact that my Karma Yoga is due, I will instead be going out and adopting ALL the children from an African village, I will rescue orphaned Orangutans from the snake infested Amazon jungle, I will fight fires in the Australian outback....... you get the idea. But I will NOT be coming back to TT as a volunteer. There is plenty more random weird sh*t that goes on here that I haven't discussed and couldn't come back and even pretend that I believed in to be able to enforce it upon the next group of unsuspecting trainees. Enough said.

Anyway, we had a lovely class tonight with Lisa a visiting local teacher. I really enjoyed her class, it was straight up dialogue, she got you into the postures and got you out of them no messing around. Then she finished the class with some mantras which was really great. She explained their meaning to us but we said them in Indian so though iI didn't know what the words meant being in a room with 430 yogis all chanting mantras created an awesome energy. Thank you Lisa for sharing that with us. Namaste.

This was all followed by a "lecture" with Bikram about .....? ah...........? ...........um?...........??????
He let us go just after midnight which was about the best thing to come out of it.



Lock the Knee

This afternoon we had a lecture from a visiting teacher on the need to learn how to properly lock the knee in our postures as this is the foundation of our practice. It was really interesting and I have to say I can't wait to get into the hot room to put into action the things she mentioned and to see how it affects my postures.

Essentially it was about focusing on contracting the muscles around the knee rather than the knee joint itself - that is the quads, the hamstrings and especially the glutes which are often forgotten about. You can try it just standing up and feel the difference when your glutes are included in this action versus when they are not.

It was SO refreshing to have a lecture on something relevant, to feel that I learnt something and was gaining insight into why we do things the way we do. Insert super happy smiling face here. THIS is what I came for!

Unfortunately, my happiness was short lived as this was then followed up by a long winded drawn out process in an effort to get things ready for our graduation ceremony. An exercise that could have taken 10 minutes with a little forethought instead took over an hour and a half. Seriously, these guys couldn't organise themselves out of a brown paper bag. And its not like this is the first graduation ceremony they have had, they have been doing this for over 10 bloody years. Sigh............ yeah yeah I know, I can put it down to another lesson in patience, but to be honest I am bloody sick of lessons in patience as a result of incompetent management.

Anyway, I am off to the 5pm yoga class. Needless to say I will try and dump my frustration at the door and instead focus on locking the knee! :-)