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Reflections and revelations

We’ve been doing this yoga teaching thang for 9 days now and the learnings are coming thick and fast.

Physically, I’ve had a lot of pointers on how to improve my own asana practice (yoga poses). It turns out I’ve been standing sub-optimally for years. I vaguely recall previous yoga teachers asking the class to “microbend the limbs to unlock the joints” in down dog but I never clicked what that actually meant in practice, or that the advice applied to me personally.

Until our teacher Aeven showed me that I unconsciously lock my knees and elbows – it affects how I stand and it affects my yoga practice by weakening the core and causing strain where there doesn’t need to be strain.

  • Lesson one: listening is different to understanding. I never ‘got’ what a microbend or external joint rotation was til this week, despite hearing yoga teachers refer to these movements for years. So us teachers need to be careful with our wording, or students can get lost in meaningless jargon.
  • Lesson two: awareness is the first step towards change. I spent the past week adjusting my standing posture and easing into asana, ensuring I’m not locking my joints anymore. I already feel stronger, leaner and less achey in my lower back. Our students, however, may choose not to act on things once they are aware of them. That’s ok too. All we can do is shift the awareness and the rest is up to the individual.

We’re not here to do yoga, although we do a lot of it. About 3 hours a day, on average, but that’s beside the point 😉 We’re here to learn how to teach yoga. Important distinction.

  • Lesson three: you don’t need to be a super-bendy-pretzel person who can contort into headstands to be a yoga teacher. Guiding students through an asana is a totally different skillset to guiding yourself through an asana. Sure, if you can do the whizzbang amazing headstand you’ll impress some folks. But it’s only one part of the whole picture.

Yoga is for everyone. Yoga is breath. Yoga is connection of mind, body and spirit. I could fill an entire blog post with these concepts but will save that thought for now…

We all have different​ bodies and every day those bodies move and think differently. Flexibility in every possible sense is so important to yoga. As is being open-minded – being prepared to try new things that may seem bonkers or scary.

How you respond to the challenges on your mat reflects how you respond to the challenges of your life. Worth thinking about next time you can’t get into a pose – does the ego come out to play, bringing its buddies anger or shame? Maybe you laugh and try again. Or listen to your body in the moment and breathe, accept, and move on. Every day, every moment is different.

We are all grateful to be learning this stuff – it’s a lot to take in but will help us be more effective when guiding our own students! I’m getting excited to come back into “the real world” and start putting this all into practice.

Wellington friends, if you’d like some free yoga classes (Level 1, suitable for beginners) between now and end of July, sing out! I will need students to get my hours up over the next six weeks so I can complete the last component of my 200 hour registered yoga teacher qualification 🙂

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What really happens at ‘yoga camp’

Following my previous post about starting my yoga teacher training  journey, here’s a snapshot of what I’m actually doing.

I’ve spent the past 8 weeks doing self-study in preparation for this 14-day immersion in Pohara Beach, Golden Bay.

While no two days are the same, here’s a flavour of a typical day here 🙂

  • 6:30am-8am yoga practice
  • 8:00 -9:30am breakfast and study time
  • 9:30am-1:00pm lessons, teaching practice, discussions on juicy stuff like meditation, philosophy/history of yoga, anatomy studies etc
  • 1:00-3:00 lunch, study time, prep – this is where we either have our introvert alone time in the sauna or spa (on rainy days) or go for beach walks or shopping trips to Takaka together 🙂
  • 3:00-5:30pm lessons, teaching practice – we teach each other and get feedback on how we can improve our instructions, assists, voice, timings, presence etc
  • 5:30-6:30pm dinner break: we eat a delicious vegan meal together outside, rugged up against the elements and under a tarp if it’s raining
  • 6:30-8:30 evening lectures or sometimes fun stuff like singalongs, brainstorming, watching educational yoga films etc
  • 8:30pm til 8am is “quiet time” aka introvert heaven.

The days are quite long and there’s a lot of information to process, which can be hard – as you would expect when absorbing a new topic. I am not complaining though: we are so lucky to be here. A 14-day immersion, while intense, is far easier to fit around work and family commitments than other teacher training options in NZ and abroad.

This Golden Bay course was also a cheaper, simpler option than other studios in Wellington who require their students to go to Bali for three weeks or Australia for a month.

Every day here I’m reminded I made the right choice for me. And it feels good.

Tonight was our eighth day here and we all started to lose the plot a bit after a full day of anatomy training plus too much chocolate late at night. This evening I ‘romanced’ Norm the skeleton (named thus as he is anatomically “normal”) and a few of us wound up cry-laughing and snort-cackling over a tiny ridiculous dog in the yoga movie “Why We Breathe” so it’s fair to say we’re cracking up a bit. In a fun way.

When we aren’t cracking up I also absolutely love the enforced quiet time. As fond as I am of my fellow yogis (who are utter darlings and I adore), I need alone time to recharge. We’re encouraged to not speak to each other between 8:30pm-8am unless necessary and to be honest it’s a revelation. I feel such a relief to have no need for the polite-but-pointless small talk people often use to fill awkward silences when living in close quarters with others.

We have so much to process and so much to do that moving silently around each other is utterly refreshing.

Each evening we retreat into ourselves and move cosily and silently around our shared cabins together. Pottering with books, hot water bottles, pots and pots of tea and our study books as we listen to weka and pukeko calls in the darkness.

Delicious.

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The end of an era

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There’s been a distinct lack of posts on here lately and for that I’ll apologise: life got very busy, very quickly and I’m no longer living in London! My ‘big OE’ is almost over but fortunately there are plenty more travel adventures to be had before I’ll anchor myself on New Zealand’s shores once more.

While leaving London was always on the cards, Russ and I left London in what felt like a bit of a hurry. So it’s been several turbulent months of wonderfulness, craziness, love, laughter, exhaustion and tears. I suspect I’ll mostly remember the good bits – but that’s not to downplay the stress involved with finishing up at work, moving out of our flat, shipping stuff home and booking a few flights through Europe and Asia before we resurface in Aotearoa in a few weeks.

Which is what’s happening right now: we’re in the Europe leg of our long journey homewards, and I’m writing this post on a train from Gdansk to Krakow. We’re 2 hours into a 9-hour train ride so now’s as good a time as any to catch up on things. So that’s pretty exciting. I’m loving the freedom of travelling. Although it hasn’t sunk in yet that I’m unemployed and that this is it for the next few weeks…right now everything just feels like a holiday. And although I know we won’t be going back to London, part of me calls that place home and can’t quite believe that we won’t be back there anytime soon.

The good thing is that before we left London, Russ and I managed to cram in some amazing ‘bucket list’ type experiences that I’m going to blog about retrospectively, whenever we have a free moment in our travels. These experiences were way too fun not to share – but as I’m talking about things that happened back in June, July and August, the timing of the next few posts might feel a wee bit out of whack.

So the blogging is back on – and if you also want to follow our worldly adventures over the next couple of weeks, Russ and I have made a joint travel blog (awww, ain’t nerd love so cute?) which you can check out here: home2.nz. I’ll keep posting my personal ramblings here, as the travel blog isn’t that well suited to my introspective essay-length posts 😉
But I’ll share links to anything fun we post from our adventures.

And in the meantime you should totally check out my girl Claire’s amazing article for thewireless.co.nz, where she reflects on what it’s like coming home after the Big OE. I read this story intently a) because she’s one of my dearest friends and she was my rock for the first 2 years of London living and b) because the girl can fucking write and she deserves massive kudos for this article! It made me happy and sad at the same time, which I suspect is how it’ll feel adjusting to the Kiwi pace of life. Transitioning into London-living wasn’t easy so I expect transitioning back the other way will be a struggle too – but one I’m finally ready for.

More posts to come…

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Peanut Slab’s big day out

Since the dawn of time (well, not really, but for quite a while) New Zealanders have found a way to recognise Waitangi Day in London. Someone, somewhere, decided a few years back that a London-based pub crawl around the Circle Line would be the most respectful method for expats to express their love for a wee island nation. Every year since, enthusiastic Kiwis have dressed up in costumes representing some aspect of the homeland before getting mightily pissed.

And somehow the London police not only tolerate this occasion – they look forward to it! As long as crawl-goers follow the unwritten rule of ‘don’t be a dick’ then the London police force allows us one day a year to drink cans of beer in public and wander merrily, dressed like lunatics. It’s worth noting at this point that Waitangi Day celebrations from within New Zealand are very different. I have never, ever gone on a Waitangi Day pub crawl in New Zealand and nor do I ever expect to. This is a London-only oddity.

This was my fourth year on the crawl and like other years, I dressed up and had a lot of fun. In my first year I was a member of the ‘Crazy Horses’ gang. Year two I wore a newspaper-covered boiler suit adorned with pictures of ‘Fush & Chups’. For the last two crawls my boyfriend and I have pooled our brainpower and creativity towards a hardcore-handmade-matching-costumes-approach: we were L&P cans for 2013 and Whittaker’s Peanut Slabs for 2014.

While the novelty of drinking a beer in public has has worn off over the years, the best part of the crawl is chatting to other insane Kiwis. A good costume is guaranteed to get ‘mad props’. We were the only Peanut Slabs I saw on the crawl so were pretty popular for photo-ops. The only downside was that we were also magnets for obnoxious drunk people. I don’t know what it is about wearing a giant cardboard box but I may as well have worn a sign saying ‘punch me really hard’ because that’s exactly what kept happening…Needless to say I started to get pretty annoyed and started telling people in a patronising fashion: “If you punch me I will not be nice to you OR pose for a photo with you, because you were rude. Yes I am serious. Go away.”

Rant over. For the most part people were fun and friendly.

So, I reckon we single-handedly boosted online orders of Whittaker’s chocolate this weekend…wonder what that’s worth to a hungry homesick Kiwi? 😉

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A love letter to Christchurch

It’s been a busy few weeks. Since my last post there has been a whirlwind European bus tour, Christmas, New Year’s Eve and some very long flights from London to China to New Zealand and back again. So there’s a lot to catch up on. Phew.

First and foremost though, I want to talk about Christchurch, one of New Zealand’s largest cities. In February 2011 the city was devastated by a large earthquake which took 185 lives and caused mass destruction. We visited Christchurch nearly three years after the quake and it was a moving experience to see the city’s slow recovery. Some areas have been repaired or rebuilt but huge areas of the city, particularly in the red zone, have been replaced by grey rubble. These fenced-off areas could look like a war zone but the people of Christchurch have turned their city into somewhere really special. They’ve brought colour, life, creativity and spirit to their city. It’s inspiring to see.

Where there were office buildings and shops there are now art installations, street murals, pop-up businesses and a shopping mall built entirely of colourful shipping containers stacked on top of each other. In the city’s nooks, crannies and open spaces you will find delightful surprises such as the coin-operated ‘dance-o-mat’, a space for people to play music and dance as they please. You’ll find oversized outdoor furniture, giant chess boards, life-sized snakes and ladders, rainbow-coloured benches to rest your weary feet, 1960’s inspired psychedelic flowers painted on the footpath and many more surprises.

The food and drink! Oh, the food and drink

Many of Christchurch’s beloved cafes have reinvented themselves following the quake. I highly recommend visiting C4 coffee shop and C1 espresso. The fresh juice stall within Cashel St’s Re:START mall made me a mouth-wateringly good carrot, apple and ginger juice.

I enjoyed some of the best food I’ve had in years during our visit to Christchurch. I had been reliably informed that the garlic naans at Riccarton’s Arjee Bhajee were ‘off the hook’ – and they were. So much, in fact, that we ate there twice. Once in the evening (the venison and portobello mushroom curry is amazing, as is the lamb saag) and once on their fixed-price weekday lunch menu (get the lamb bhutuwa, you won’t regret it). Average cost: $10 per person for lunch, $30-35 per person for dinner including naan and beer.

Dinner that evening was at Spice Paragon, a new-build Thai restaurant in Riccarton. Four of us shared the melting beef cheek, the tempura fish with mango salad and the mussaman lamb curry. Add scallop starters, creme-brulee desserts and a bottle of the Mt Difficulty riesling to the mix and I was in food heaven. Bliss. Average cost: $50 per person for a heavenly three-course feed.

And the beer! We had a great time sampling beers at new pop-up speakeasy Volstead, before heading to Harlequin Public House, an amazing new restaurant and cocktail bar/speakeasy in Ironside House, opposite Victoria St’s Diamond Jubilee Clock Tower. The clock tower is an eery memorial to the 2011 quake: it is half the height it used to be and its hands are stopped at 12:52, the time of the quake.

Street art

Wandering around Christchurch you’ll spot many a painted mural – many of them with evocative messaging or memorials to the quake. It feels very East-London-meets-Berlin which meant, of course, that I LOVED IT as those are two of my favourite places in the world.

I first visited Christchurch as a small child in 1991, then again as a boozy student in 2005. I spent a few days in the backpacker’s hostel just opposite the now-ruined cathedral and this trip gave me chills to see what the quake had done to that building. This was my third visit and I have to say: I always loved Christchurch. Now I love it even more fiercely, and differently: there’s respect, sorrow and inspiration in the mix now. I can’t wait to see what the future holds.

Check out Christchurch, chur

A guide to the city’s thriving pop-ups

A guide to the ‘gap filler’ art installations and other fun surprises

The Re:START mall

Neat Places, a great guide to what’s new and fun in Christchurch