Super Breakfast Smoothie

Every morning, uncle Jonas makes a smoothie for breakfast. It's a super smoothie. Ingredients vary with what he takes home from the market, but usually there is papaya, passion fruit, banana, fresh coconut water, sometimes mango, dragon fruit, etc. The he adds various nutritional powders, like spirulina, rice protein, hemp protein, cacao and different herb extracts.

The spirulina gives the smoothie a distinctive green colour and all the nutritional powders adds a nice thickness. Served with some nuts and almonds. Great start of the day, and actually not too filling to have half an hour before yoga.

Jazz Night in Chiang Mai

Tuesday night is open mike night at a jazz club in Chiang Mai. Anyone grabbing the mikrophone didn't sound like promising to me, and I cannot say that I had high expectations when going there. It turned out to be great! Cool atmosphere, a mixed crowd and really good music all night long (well, it ended by midnight or so). I'll let the pictures speak for themselves.

The Swedish Spike Mat

After yesterday's morning yoga with Jonas I took savasana on a spike mat. I spent maybe half an hour on the mat, and this is the pattern from the spikes against my back:

My uncle's mat is developed in Sweden. Have a look at the official website. This version has remained quite unknown to most, despite the huge recent success of the so called Shakti mat. I cannot say which one is the better mat, but the version I tried feels more hardcore, with it's big spikes that you feel biting good into your skin. It doesn't really hurt that much, it's just that you feel it a lot. You can of course always make it more comfortable with a towel or a t-shirt between the mat and the skin – the important thing is that you get the effects.

So what are the effects? I felt relaxed after my session this morning, relaxed and content. This may be an effect of the supposedly increased production of endorphins and oxytocin. When you first lie on the mat you can feel the spikes a lot, but it only takes seconds before you start to feel the pain-easing effect of the endorphins.

I think that the spike mat is good for your health. Although it is perhaps not obvious why spike marks on your back would be a good thing, I think that just lying down to relax is a very beneficial practice. How often do we do that – lie down and spend 30 minutes relaxing, without falling asleep (or trying to)? On the spike mat you rest in a conscious state, which is a different experience.

Violence in Pune

Many yogis all over the world can personally relate to the bombing in Pune last Saturday. The blast took place in the German Bakery, a popular spot for visitors to the nearby Osho Ashram. Like so many other travelling yogis, my uncle Jonas has been to that café. Among the 10 persons killed was Nadia, an Italian woman who was well known in Chiang Mai and who has taken yoga classes here with my uncle.

The picture was taken from an Osho website dedicated to Nadia.

Terrorist violence may not be personal in itself, but every victim has a web of social connections that will be personally affected. Terrorist violence may strike at more or less random places, but all the people who has once set their foot in a place has an emotional relation to it.

Two Weeks of Yoga

This is the house at Kaomai Lanna Resort where we had yoga classes (up the stairs) for two weeks.

We have completed Anusara Immersion I and II, in all 72 study hours of yoga. I have to say it was intense. The first week felt great, I felt stronger and more flexible for every day. The second week was more hard work, not because the sessions were more tough, but because my body got a bit exhausted. Stepping up from doing yoga twice a week to doing yoga five hours a day every day is a challenge. It was still a nice feeling during the second week, it was just harder work to keep up.

So here's some of the effects on my body:

1. The mild neck tweak I had from the first week gradually disappeared. Now it's gone, which feels great. I usually need to see my chiropractor when my spine gets tweaked like this, but this time I think that a full yoga practice made sure that no blockages appeared.
2. In the middle of the second week I started to feel some strain in joints, e.g. knees, and I thought that it could be that my muscles were tired and did not support the joints as well. However, Anusara Yoga is very kind to the joints and at the end of the week I did not notice it anymore. Always using muscular energy to get a more stable and safe stretch is one of Anusara's Universal Principles of Alignment.
3. During the first week I felt I was getting lots of muscular power, but after the second week, I rather feel that my body is getting more flexible. Rome wasn't built in a day, but I can feel a slow progression towards the paradise of open hips and long hamstrings.
4. The alignment of my body in different postures is getting more automatized. I do not always have to think about activating loops and applying principles of alignment – sometimes my body knows what to do by itself. Nice.

Thai Cooking Class

Last Saturday I took a cooking class in Chiang Mai. Bob and Pearl from the yoga immersion joined me for this full day event. The first activity was to go to the market for fresh ingredients. Here our guide is showing us how to squeeze the milk out of a coconut.

The cooking was very well organized with precise instructions. “Now add half a spatula of fish oil”.

“After five seconds, press hard to flatten the fish cake”.

I liked it that we made our own green curry paste (although they said that the one you get at the market is good but may be too salty or too spicy)

...and of course we got to squeeze the milk out of a net full of coconut (this is Pearl doing the work)

We also got to eat the food we had made – here I am having a green curry with tofu (thanks Bob for taking the picture).

Here's seafood in coconut milk.

Dessert: mango with sweet sticky rice.

I was later told that mango is out of season and that they have to transport it from the south, so from now on I will rather enjoy all the other delicious fruits that are available here.

The website of the school is http://www.cookinthai.com/ and they are kind enough to post pictures from every class. You also get a recipe book so that you'll be able to remember the art when returning home.

Heart Qualities

Heart qualities is a big concept in Anusara Yoga. These are virtues that often are used as the theme for an individual Anusara class .Examples of heart qualities are courage, acceptance, unconditional love, contentment, creativity, forgiveness and enthusiasm.

One of our tasks for Immersion II is to find a heart quality that we would like to cultivate during the week. My idea was that I wanted to find something that I could work on both at a physical level in the classes, and at a mental level throughout the whole days. I chose SOFTNESS.

“Soften your heart” is a very common phrase during our asana sessions here, which means that the chest should relax forwards and upwards, so that there is more opening and freedom in the chest, and more support from the back since the shoulderblades slide onto the back.

In relations with other people, softness is liked to kindness and consideration. These are easy to express towards persons you like a lot, but to be soft and gentle with everyone is harder. I think that people would generally say that I'm a soft person, but I know that I am not soft and gentle in every situation, so there's room for improvement. Here's my current state of softness (the green spot is probably just a reflection in my lens and not my heart chakra shining through):

The fact that I'm writing about my choice of heart quality on this blog makes my choice more powerful. Also speaking with friends about it strengthens my commitment to work on softness. This power of the words is called namadea in sanskrit. The higher you speak, the more powerful it will become. I can start by saying it to myself, then perhaps writing it down for myself, then telling a friend, then speaking about it in a larger group of people. So here it is on my blog: The heart quality of softness, or mridu in sanskrit, is something I will keep in mind during the coming week.

One Week of Yoga

It's time for an update on what the yoga retreat does to me. I'll stick to what's closely related to the body for now.

First of all, I must say that I'm amazed how quickly the winter stiffness disappeared. Whether it's due to the yoga practice or to the climate is hard to tell. Probably a little bit of both.

Second, worries over different injuries in my body have almost vanished. The hip that was tweaked when I ran to the bus on an icy street in Lund is as good as new. My left knee that always makes itself heard without actually aching, feels strong. My right ankle, that has been aching in postures such as the table pose or the crow pose over the past year, hasn't been aching for the last two days, although I still feel that the binding tissues are too short and I'm working on that. On the downside is the little neck-tweak that I got after some head- and shoulderstands a couple of days ago, but I've had this problem before (sometimes just from sleeping with the head at a bad angle) and its getting better again.

Third, I feel strong in my body. I could do the seven wheel poses (full backbends) in a row at the final session, and I like to work more with my muscles throughout the practice. On this picture, I'm assisted into a wheel pose, which is good for anyone who is not very flexible.

 

Fourth – and this is the really amazing part – it feels like my face is opening up! It feels like I've had tension in my eyebrow that is now releasing. My face might become yogi's face!

James, bodyworker

 

This happy man is James. He is a structural integration bodyworker. James joined the immersion to get some time on the mat, and this is actually the sixth year in a row that he joins the event. He is also helping out as Jonas's assistant, so whenever there some participant has a problem in their body that would keep them from doing yoga, James will fix it. He works with connective tissues, which determines the shape of the body.

I mentioned to James that I'm experiencing some pain in my right wrist in certain postures, such as the table pose. He examined me straight away. He asked me to relax my arm and my shoulder, took a firm grip and moved my arm around to feel what was going on, asked me to breathe and relax my shoulder again, tried the range of movements of the different fingers on my right hand and then the examination turned to massage while he explained to me what my problem was. The tissues were too short, and they needed some stretching. The problem was not in the wrist itself (so it's of no use to massage the wrist when it hurts) but due to the shortness of a longer stretch of tissue going from the middle finger up to the elbow - or actually even further up, and even the breathing comes into play. James showed me how I could artificially block the tissue with my hand (or ask a friend to stand on my arm while stretching!). Most importantly, he said I would be fine if I just worked on it a bit.

A couple of days later, the problem that I have sensed for over a year seems to have disappeared. The Anusara Yoga principles of how to root your hand to the ground also helped me, and perhaps the warm climate, but I'm very grateful that James is here. Thanks a lot James!

Here he is again, helping another Anusara Immersion participant:

Elephant Riding and River Rafting

Tuesday afternoon we had an afternoon off from the Immersion schedule. My uncle C-J and his wife Jenny, a couple with lots of energy, suggested that I joined them for a three-hour tour with elephant riding as well as river rafting, and so I did.

Here's C-J and Jenny in action.

 

I knew that some of the yoga people had expressed concern over the treatment of the elephants. As far as I could see they were all right, although you never know what goes on behind the scenery. When we had finished our tour, one of our elephants was relieved from his saddle since he had made enough laps for the day, so apparently there's some attention to the regulations. The elephant keepers have sticks with a metal spike, but considering the thickness of an elephant skin, they generally couldn't do much harm. I suppose that when needed the keeper will aim for where the skin is thinner, such as behind the ears, but as far as we could see the elephant were not hurt. It is of course always questionable to tame animals and keep them in captivity.

It's mind-boggling to see a human child sitting on an elephant's head and controlling its moves. The elephant is such an impressive manifestation of force of nature, so heavy and stepping so carefully. The young elephant keeper is tiny. How many steps of evolution must have occurred before this situation, something so little in control of something so big, was made possible?

The elephants sometimes deviated from their path to get a snack from the bushes, which was allowed by their keepers to a certain extent.

 

I have no pictures from the river rafting, since we were recommended to leave the cameras in the car. Since I could not know beforehand how wild the ride was, I left mine, but C-J brought his compact camera. Jenny went so far in her precautions as to put on her bathing suit. The long and narrow bamboo raft was far from stable, and apart from us three, there was a boy with a rafting stick at the front end of the raft, to get us down alive. The guide said that I was the captain of the raft and I got to stand in the back with a stick to push us forward, but as soon as we took off it was obvious that the direction of the raft could only be controlled from the front. At least I was able to help with some speed.

The ride was mostly calm, sometimes swaying a bit more when there was more stream and tiny waterfalls. We could enjoy the shadow of the trees, and passing by locals who were sitting by the water relaxing with some beers and a guitar. One man was throwing out his fish net just as we came by, and we almost wondered if that was arranged as a part of the rafting experience. It probably wasn't.

We had lot's of fun, taking turn with the captain's stick and taking pictures of each other trying yoga postures on the raft. At the end of the ride there was a little more of a waterfall to pass, so C-J needed to get off to save his camera and Jenny and I were told to sit down. I squatted instead, which saved my Thai pants from getting all wet, since the raft was dipped a couple of decimetres down into the water. Once off the raft, we saw other tourists with wet clothes up to the waistline, so if you go rafting, don't hesitate to follow Jenny's example and opt for the bathing suit.

I was happy to get my camera back, and I immediately found this nice motive.