Too much rock for one hand

Posted by einajs in Yoga on 08 29th, 2009 | 3 responses>

To give you an idea of the amount of arguably wasted synapses that fry themselves nobly to create this blog, I have been vacillating for

TOO MUCH ROCK....FOR ONE HAND

over a week about whether to combine all these different topics into one blog post or to split them up topically and generate a post each. Many a lobe-crunching walk to and from Yaletown has been spent pondering the above, while I eat all my lipgloss off. It’s a universal problem, the eating-your-own-lips-while-thinking thing. I’m going to go ahead and just mash them up, I suppose I can extricate them later if desired, but in the spirit of the Sjanz Life Simulator [PATENT PENDING!] I’ll let you read them in the circumstances that they present themselves to me in my fevered little head.

1. MAH RETREATS, THEY WER AWSUM LET ME SHOW YOU THEM

Update 09/07/09: FINALLY got these suckas up on the gallery. Check them out here and here.

This Summer of ‘09 would have been magnificent even without these moving and delightful teaching experiences. They were the icing rosettes on the Dairy Queen cake. They were the gravy on the Tofurkey. They were the shoulder pads in the blazer. There is nothing like having a dedicated group take time from their busy lives to immerse themselves in the practice; it honours us as teachers, but it lets the teachings go super deep in a way that they can’t always do in a public class. The demands of your life sometimes necessarily mask the openings and process that yoga is designed to evoke [cause otherwise you'd be walking around with all your chakras hanging open].

Yoga camp!

Strathcona Park Lodge presented us with massive mountain views in every direction, and a dual vision of yoga, from Kristen’s vinyasa flow practice to my own. It wasn’t all that “dual”, ultimately, since K and I are best buds and we see eye to third eye most of the time, but our intention was to bring the lineage of our voices to life, and we had a tremendous time rocking out some fierce quad stretches in the SPL “barn” [pictured at left].

My next Bowen retreat will be on October 2-4 so I think it only right to cast our misty, last-week-of-August eyes back over the delight that was the FIRST Bowen retreat. Yogi Uday has been good enough to create the most optimal space for awakening: warm, quiet, nourishing and spacious. At first it almost

Just chillin' like villains

seems too much, like I feel too LINTY to even hang out there cause everything is so clean and beautiful, I keep walking around wiping my hands on my pants before I touch things. After a bit, though, you realize: This is the space I want to be in. This is where opening happens.

We had a lovely tight group and I think everybody got along famously, complete with late-night talks about our childhood nightmares and our visions of a sustainable future. What honoured me about this particular group was how active they are in their communities and their jobs, and if yoga can help them be the dynamic forces they are, then nothing I do is in vain.

2. JOHN FRIEND VISITS VANCOUVER

When the cat’s away, the mice run around like maniacs sending emails to each other and getting ready for when the cat comes back. I guess John was last here like 5 years ago [?], so, let’s see, I was working full time, and I might maybe have started practicing at Yaletown back when it was a Bikram’s studio. My yoga before that was wholly a home practice, and I did stick with it, although this apartment is far from the optimal space! The first time I heard about John was an article in Yoga Journal that he wrote about the death of his mother. I remember reading it and thinking: This guy knows how to live. This guy has used yoga to actually create real life change: no mention of: past lives, esoteric energies, bandhas, handstands or splits: just the relationship between the best of life [ananda] and everything that we hold dear, even as it dies. It was one of the most seminal pieces I’ve ever read.

SO. MANY. PENS!

I didn’t actually put two and two together regarding Anusara and John until after my first workshop with Rainey in 2004. It all seemed self-evident, though, like of COURSE this feels so right and answers all the questions I had about yoga before: it’s THAT GUY! HE knows how this works.

I was bound and determined to honour That Guy’s return to our fair city, and the method that I chose to honour him with was having the greatest number of pens that any head registration volunteer has ever had since the dawn of recorded time. You’re welcome.

3. TOO MUCH ROCK FOR THE SJANZ

Darlings, we knew this day would come. We never spoke of it, because…sssh…don’t speak…let us just keep rocking out, Friday after Friday, until the big room at Yaletown reaches radioactive levels of heat and the class can basically be seen from space.

Big Rock Fridays are no more, at least for a while. I realized at the last class that I wasn’t able to express what I really wanted to express in this context…ironically that’s the exact reason why I STARTED them, I wanted to make sure that people knew yoga was fun and connected to their real life in real ways. I’m pretty sure we all know that now, and now we have the opportunity to bring even more nuance and sophistication to our practice and our community…and maybe we’ll want to play loud music and throw things again in 6 months, and if that happens you can bet your sweet Lycra’d butt that BRF will be back in full effect. If you are a fan of BRF and this news saddens you, remember: they came about because I teach to what I see, and what I see is that we are ready to go deeper!

M and I are off for a week of holidays and if I still remember how to type after camping for 6 nights I’ll be back to check in on this ginormous post. Email me or comment with any, um, comments. May flights of angels sing Summer 2009 to its sunny rest.

3 Comments »

August 30th, 2009 Leanne Says:

It was a crazy summer with lots of deep change going on but in some ways the change was just a natural evolution of the past few years- n’est pas? The evolution took on revolutionary momentum and now we are all being entrained into your amazing depth. gee~ you are you ( GURU) and U are f*%#king unreal.
Go kick back and enjoy for a while before the crazy train pulls out of the station mid sept…
Love L