The ABCD of Tango

The ABCD of Tango is a proposed model for teaching all essential parts of tango. The idea is that in each and every tango class, students should practice and develop all of the following 4 dimensions:

• Attitude
• Body
• Creativity
• Dance

These tango dancer dimensions result from gathering a large number of qualities for good dancers, organizing the qualities into clusters and finally selecting the most essential ones. Consequently, the starting point for this model is what skills students need, as opposed to e.g. what is easier to teach.



The advantage of using a model such as this is that it reminds you to spend teaching time on several important aspects of tango, that could sometimes be left out in a less structured approach.

Attitude
Attitude is the first dimension, because it will affect everything else. This includes how to take and give advice in classes. Trying to improve oneself before one's partner. Ability to relax and enjoy. Level of commitment. How you invite people to dance and who you accept to dance with. Making an effort to become more attractive as a dance partner. Ability to see the good in yourself and in others. An important part of Attitude is that it includes the self-image of the student. In my view, the teacher should make sure that when students leave a class they feel better about themselves as dancers and as persons.

Body
Managing your own Body well is an excellent way to make it more pleasant to dance with a partner. Body awareness and balance are essential. Posture and quality of movement. A smooth walk. Toning the right muscles and relax others. Dancing in a way that is healthy for the body. All of this is often addressed specifically in technique classes.

Creativity
The Creativity dimension is what makes tango an art form and not just bodies moving around randomly. It includes musicality, with components such as rhythmic play, phrasing and understanding the structure of tango music. It also includes having a variety of steps and figures to choose from, as well as other ways to create variation in the dance, such as using different aesthetics in movement or different emotional expressions.

Dance
The Dance dimension includes much of what distinguishes tango from other dances. Typical tango figures such as the giro and the cross. Walking together in an embrace. The firmness of the physical contact. The flexibility of the embrace. Sensitivity and presence. The fine tuned communication of leading and following. Also, how to move on a crowded dance floor.

The proposal is to make sure that each class includes all 4 dimensions. Even if there's a specific theme in the class, such as "common rhythms in tango", the teacher would still include how this relates to the Dance, e.g. through practising these rhythms in some of the common tango figures.

I suppose that if any of the 4 dimensions seems surprising it would be Attitude. But think about how much attitude can affect both the ability to learn and the whole tango experience! Also remember that attitude is always transmitted from teacher to student, through words and behaviour - but by doing it consciously your students will get more out of their tango.

Acro Yoga with Nina & Boris

Nina & Boris are Acro Yoga teachers.

Nina & Boris

Acro Yoga is a blend between yoga, acrobatics and Thai massage, where the typical image you see is one person on the ground acting as a base with another person flying on his or her feet.

I wanted to try Acro Yoga, since I have many friends who enjoy it and also Nina & Boris were highly recommended to me by two of my friends who studied with them in Buenos Aires. The workshop was indeed conducted in a very welcoming manner, with lots of initiatives for everyone to participate, to trust each other and to build a group: singing to the honour of Ganesha (the elephant-headed remover of obstacles), lead-and-follow games, leaning away form each other while sharing axis, spotting a friend who does a tripod headstand, etc.

The sense of trust is very important in Acro Yoga, since the flyer could fall if sufficient care is not taken. Usually you will be three people when practising: one base, one flyer and one spotter. As much instructions were given on how to spot as on how to be the base or the flyer.

Together Nina & Boris can present an impressive range of experiences: yoga, dance, circus, theatre, kung fu, Thai massage... They intoduced us to two different flavours of Acro Yoga:

1. In the morning we did the acrobatic version, where the person who is flying keeps an active body and sometimes performs yoga postures. The pictures below, where I am flying, are illustrating this.
2. In the afternoon we first learned some Thai massage and then got to try the more therapeutic version of Acro Yoga, where the base is giving a massage and the flyer has a relaxed body.

Flying high

An intricate system of support

Thanks to Boris for taking these pictures!

Nina is Swedish but has been living abroad for the last 7 years, so she was very happy to have someone to speak Swedish to. Boris needs to learn too, since the two of them will be moving to Malmö in April next year. They are obviously very good community builders, so I think we will see a quickly growing kula of Acro Yoga in Malmö going forward.

Dancing the Melody

Melodies are important in tango music, and very often they are what comes up when you try to remember a tango. Perhaps you can recall the melodies of "La Cumparsita" and "Vida mía"?

A notion I have often encountered in tango is that you can either dance the rhythm or the melody. I get the impression that dancing the melody is perceived as better, more sophisticated and a more advanced form of musicality in the dance: "Anybody will learn to dance the rhythm of a tango, but only certain advanced dancers are dancing the melody".

Technically, a melody is a sequence of notes that we perceive as an entity in the music. The most important features of a melody are pitch (how high the notes are, not to be confused with how loud they are) and duration (how long they are). If you change the intervals or the duration of notes too much, you will no longer have the same melody. It's easy to see that there is less tolerance for changing pitch than duration - just try it out with a well known melody. Pitch comes first, duration second.

A well known melody

But how would you make a corporal expression of a sequence of pitches? Once suggestion I heard is to be higher above the ground for higher pitches, and lower closer to the ground for lower pitches. This might work on rare occasions, but if performed more than for a couple of notes in a row, the effect would be purely comical.

And this is clearly not what "dancing the melody" is. It's rather a question of reflecting the melodic line in the dance, as opposed to the (often more rhythmical) accompaniment of the melody.

The duration of the notes in the melodic line does not seem to matter much either. In workshops where "dancing the melody" is introduced, the rhythms of the melody are not danced, but it is rather a matter of slowing down the dance, as opposed to following the steady pace of a repetitive, rhythmical accompaniment ("dancing the rhythms").

So, interestingly, when "dancing the melody", you will not take into account the two foremost characteristics of a melody: neither pitch nor duration! Instead you will need to focus on the quality (timbre, emotional expression, etc.) and on the phrasing of the melodic line.

Isn't it confusing to say "dance the melody" when you do not move to the most typical features of a melody? To me it is.

Dancers will achieve greater variation if they at times emphasize the music in a manner similar to the singer or an instrument playing the melody. But to describe this way of dancing, don't ask people to "dance the melody" - it is more accurate to talk about longer and shorter phrases, emphasis and direction in the music. Or to simply say "slow down".

Slowing it down

What kind of yoga should I start with?

Starting up this blog again, now from Buenos Aires, I will give it a broader spectrum, including tango and other major themes of my life. There will still be yoga-related posts, and lots of people around me show a great interest for yoga.

Banking colleagues at Nordea have asked me for advice on where to start taking classes in Copenhagen. They tend to look for yoga that and keeps your body in good health and that relaxes their minds after stressful days at the office. The tango crowd also takes interest in yoga, as a means to improve body awareness, balance and focus.

I always recommend the aspiring yogi to try a few different styles and teachers. To give you an idea of what you may encounter, here's a brief summary of important yoga styles.

Hatha Yoga is a broad term that basically includes all yoga practices where you work the body (with the aim to "unite opposite patterns"). This is what people in general think of when they talk about yoga. In Hatha Yoga we practice postures (asana), breathing techniques (pranayama), mediation and cleansing techniques. So all classes that you might take in studios will most likely be forms of Hatha Yoga, although they often bear different labels: "Vinyasa", "Power Yoga", "Yin Yoga", "Ashtanga Yoga", etc.

Confusingly, many studios have classes specifically labelled "Hatha Yoga", and here the term is used in a more narrow sense; it means that you will do asana, and take some time to explain how to do the postures well. These sessions sometimes include pranayama and meditation.

Asana - the postures - is the dominant yogic practice in yoga studios. This emphasis has grown dramatically throughout the 20th century. In traditional yoga, asana played a much smaller part, and was more or less a preparation for being able to sit comfortably in meditation. For many Westerners, asana is the most accessible entry point to yoga, and the first classes I took myself were all about asana.

Asana session, Anusara Yoga in Chiang Mai, Thailand 2010

"Iyengar Yoga" is a very widespread form of Hatha Yoga, developed by B.K.S Iyengar, where explanations can be extremely detailed. It will make you do a very healthy yoga for your body, although some find these classes to be quite slow.

Vinyasa is when breath is synchronized with body movements. Classes labelled "Hatha Yoga" usually include some of this, but in a "Vinyasa" labelled class there is often a much stronger focus on the breath leading each movement. In many Vinyasa classes, the teacher will assume that you already know the postures and won't explain them carefully.

Some Vinyasa classes can be very physically demanding, and especially so the "Ashtanga Vinyasa Yoga" classes, developed by Sri Patthabi Jois and one of the largest Hatha Yoga styles today. It is often simply called "Ashtanga Yoga" and although originally meant for teenage boys in India, it has become very popular in the West, giving you a great workout and promoting discipline.

Ashtanga Yoga is actually much older than Jois' contribution, and here's also room for confusion. Ashtanga means "eight limbs" and in this yoga utilizes a set of eight different methods for enlightenment. Asana is one, pranayama another, but there's also e.g. yama, which are moral rules of conduct where ahimsa, "not to cause any suffering", is the principal one. This traditional Ashtanga Yoga is also known as Raja Yoga, the royal yogic path, and was outlined by the sage Patanjali in the Yoga Sutra, one of the main scriptures of yogic philosophy.

"Anusara Yoga" is the Hatha Yoga style that I'm mostly into. Just like Iyengar Yoga it has a strong focus on good alignment in postures, to make sure that the practice is safe and efficient. In Anusara we are also cultivating "heart qualities". These are good qualities in ourselves, such as "courage", "kindness", "sensitivity" or "gratitude", which we want to develop further in the sessions, but also off the yoga mat.

Besides Hatha Yoga and Raja Yoga, I should also mention the 3 other major yogic paths:

• Karma Yoga, the yoga of action
• Jnana Yoga, the yoga of the intellect
• Bhakti Yoga, the yoga of love and devotion.

Enough for one post, but if you encounter other terms that you would like an explanation for, add a comment about it, and I'll get back on that.
Last but not least: If you want to try yoga, the teacher matters much more than the class labels. Choose someone that inspires you to develop a physical, mental or devotional practice.

Anatomy Self-Studies: Books and Tools

After lots of yoga workshops this summer, I have started to realize that anatomy is something you will not learn just from taking yoga classes. Just the basic knowledge of the 206 bones in our body, the muscles to move them around,  the cardiac and smooth muscles,  the connective tissue, the lungs and different modes of breathing, the reflexes… I need to spend some serious study time on this!

To my great satisfaction, I’ve found several nice books and tools to assist my hard working hippocampus.

For the names of bones, muscles and ligaments I’m using Netter’s Musculoskeletal Flash Cards. I realize of course that it will be a different thing to identify it all on real bodies, but at least it is a good start.

H. David Coulter’s Anatomy for Hatha Yoga is a well-known best-seller with a scientific approach, where you are guided through the bodily functions that are of special interest for Hatha Yoga. I thought it would be more of a reference where you could look up specific details, but it turns out that you can very well enjoy reading through the whole book, and there's lots of practical exercises.

Anatomy of Movement by Blandine Calais-Germain is even more accessible though, rich with illustrations and straight to the point in captions and the few paragraphs of text. Probably very much used by both yoga and dance instructors. I know that there is a supplemetary book with exercises, but I do not have it (yet).

My friend Ellinor recently studied anatomy with yin yoga instructor Paul Grilley. She borrowed me his Anatomy for Yoga DVD, where he shows in a very pedagogical way the consequences of natural variations between the bodies of different yoga students. If it is compression rather than tension that stops you from going deeper into a pose, it will not matter how much you effort you put into it: your particular body is not built to go there.

For the fun of it, I also got The Anatomy Coloring Book by Wynn Kapit and Lawrence M. Elson. Using a set of 20 coloured pencils, I am hoping to employ a large variety of circuits in my brain to learn more.

Finally, for inspiration, I also got a poster of the muscular system, which is now on display in my living room. The only other decoration I have on the walls of this room is a huge Anusara Yoga syllabus poster - when I bought that one someone actually told me that she also wanted one, but could not find anywhere in her apartment to have it: “… ‘cause you can’t really have that in your living room”. I guess you actually can, and I cannot wait until the bookstore gets a new delivery of posters of the skeletal system!

Yoga Kendra Initiation

At Yoga Kendra studio in Malmö, the yoga is part of a tradition. Before coming to class, there is an introductory weekend, compulsory for everyone, beginners and experienced yogis alike.

Very few postures are performed during this weekend, and it is more like a lecture with Daniel, the founder of Yoga Kendra. Anecdotes of his travels in India and his encounters with yoga masters are mixed with bits and pieces of yoga philosophy and details on what you should and should not do when performing asana.
There is no structure to the lecture, it’s almost a stream of consciousness, where Daniel’s speech flows from one aspect to the other, from practical matters to the highest purposes, from hilarious jokes to solemn serenity.

In the traditional way of learning yoga, the masters wanted their students and disciples to show themselves worthy, often by setting their patience to the test, only sharing yogic knowledge after a lengthy period of trivial tasks. This order made sure that the students would persevere also in their studies of yoga. In a similar fashion, Daniel requires an investment of ten hours, which might seem a lot for anyone who would just like to try a class, but not much compared to the weeks, months and years of the traditional trial.

In fact, the arrangement also acts as a clever way of creating a bond between a yogi and his students to be. During ten hours of constant talking, you have time to express a lot of thoughts and opinions. You have enough time to show who you are, to gain credibility. Everyone at Yoga Kendra knows Daniel - they perhaps even know him better after a weekend than they know e.g. the colleagues that they see every day at work! Daniel in his turn makes sure to learn the name of everyone in the room. The connection is created.

The weekend is sealed with an initiation ceremony, which involves meditation, looking into an eye and getting protection for the third eye. Here’s Martine and I after her initiation last weekend (where I followed the initiation for the third time), our third eyes well hidden.

Eye of the Tiger at Wild Rose

Eye of the Tiger sessions started as a way for Anusara Yoga teachers to meet and practice together, to inspire each other and to explore their limits. No one acted as a teacher in the usual sense of the word. Instead, one of the yogis were guiding the others while also participating fully in the practice himself or herself.

Another version of Eye of the Tiger is where the session is actually lead by a teacher. The teacher will participate, but still have focus on the students and give useful comments and directions when needed. There are no lengthy interruptions for demonstrations, so that a flow is kept throughout the practice, and although this means that most postures have to be well known by the majority of the room, an Eye of the Tiger is a great opportunity to go a bit further.

Jonas held a three-hour Eye of the Tiger workshop at Wild Rose studio in Chiang Mai one week after the Immersions had ended. It is a nice and spacious time frame that allows for a full practice and still leaves some room for further exploration. Strong from two weeks of daily practice and relaxed from one week of massages and saunas in Chiang Mai, I felt like I could have continued for three more hours!

Here's Jonas giving Pooh an assist for baddha konasana with a forward bend.

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.

Handstands and Beginner's Mind

Today's morning session included handstands, which is a great way to boost self-confidence and awaken the eagerness to expand and grow. We used the railings of our yoga platform to support ourselves in L-shaped handstands, and we assisted each other to get the body working in good alignment.

Here's my uncle Jonas doing an unsupported handstand by the pool.

 

Can I learn to do the same thing? Today, the prerequisites of learning was in focus, and one important concept is the beginner's mind. It's about being humble and curious, and admitting that there is always something to learn.

Thinking about it, I remember a few times when I had the attitude that I already knew what was being taught. For instance, I took a tango class where Gustavo Naveira was teaching musicality. He used a classical approach, where the four beats of a bar are represented with chairs, and different rhythms are shown visually by objects on the chairs. It's a nice way of illustrating the music, used by many tango teachers. I was bored, though, since over 20 years of trumpet playing of course has taught me lots of rhythms far more complicated than what is possible to show with those chairs. I hoped that he would be done with that part of the class and go on towards something else that was new to me (he didn't). I thought it was a shame that a lesson with one of the world's most appreciated teachers would be wasted on repeating too simple stuff.

Later, I realized that a different mindset would have made me learn much more at the lesson. Perhaps it is true that Gustavo does not have much to teach me about different rhythms, but closing in on that attitude made me probably learn less at a more subtle level. Why does Gustavo, who is a dancer rather than a musician, choose to demonstrate certain rhythmical patterns and not others? Why did I like some of his example steps and not others? I'm asking these questions now, and the answers will not be as clear as they would have if I were open to learn at the lesson. A beginner's mind is always best for learning.

Air Plane Yoga

What can you do to make your body endure a ten hour flight, where you're supposed to sit down most of the time?

 

 
I tried the following on my 10-hour flight to Thailand:

Before take-off

• I didn't sit down by the gate, but let my body enjoy its last minutes of freedom.
• I tried to be one of the last persons boarding the flight.
• I found a corner with less people, and took the opportunity to do a few well-chosen postures. The lunge pose is excellent since it stretches the hip-benders that get shorter when sitting down for a long time.

During the flight

• I took off my shoes as soon as possible, so that I could sit down in more diverse ways, sometimes with one foot on the seat. Besides, feet don't like shoes anyway.
• A simple twist is easy to do while sitting in your seat. The neigbour that you turn your upper body towwards might wonder whether you have something to say, but just say that it's yoga.
• Unfortunately, I sat by the window, which meant that two persons would have to get out of the way whenever I wanted to stretch my legs. When I got up, I therefore stayed up a little longer, and actually took a little stroll along the aisles.
• While there was still daylight and most asanas would have made me stand out a lot from the crowd, I chose smaller postures, like shoulder stretches.
• When darkness had conquered the cabin, I dared a few other postures, like the triangle pose and squatting down.

By the way, this air plane yoga gave me a few ideas for office yoga. Any of my colleagues at Nordea reading this? Rejoice - within the month you'll most certainly be involved in my office yoga plans!

Copenhagen vs. Chiang Mai

The weather in Copenhagen changed completely over night, from snow inferno to blue sky! I must admit that I had planned to make a blog entry comparing pictures of Copenhagen in snowstorm with a Chaing Mai bathing in sunlight. To be fair and square, I'll still make the comparison.
Scandinavia is represented by a half-frozen canal in Christianshavn. The picture was taken on my way from the office to the airport.

 

A beautiful winter's day!

Thailand is represented by the swimming pool at Kaomai Lanna Resort, where I'll be staying for the first two weeks.

Beautiful! Add 50 yogis, and you'll have a fair picture of what the place will be like.

Copenhagen vs. Chiang Mai? I would have to call it a draw.