#letsyogaleh
More than two hours ago, I was struggling to stay awake while memorizing Sanskrit for asanas test. Fast forward to 2 lovely a. m. right now, I am so awake and I don’t see myself falling asleep when my mind is actively thinking about what is next for me after 200ytt course ends this friday. I have so many ideas on how I can try to start an independent career out of this passion. I wrote down the prices I would charges, how to entice people to engage me, different kinds of occasions I want to teach in and so many more (you see, they are so awesome that’s why I can’t disclose my business plans yet hahaha!) I am so excited. For now. If karma really exists like what many yogis believe in, I believe my destructive karma should be procrastination and lack of determination. Please let this fire to start something so meaningful burn long and slow (like the Indonesia forest fire). Back to reality, I think I’m dead. I have not yet memorized the Sanskrit. I have not memorized some asanas poses. I have not yet gotten the certification. And why the heck am I here thinking ahead?! Have mercy on me dear god. Let me feel energize with less than 4hours of sleep tonight and let me have super good memory today and tomorrow and the day after. Lindy. student
See You Again
现在我们已经进入了第五个礼拜了，快要进入考试的我，更多的是舍不得，在这里我已经习惯了大家的存在，一起学习，相互鼓励，一起开心，互相关心，还有我们的好好老师，教我们，指点我们，鼓励我们，和我们一起谈笑，而且还认真地回答我们各种千奇百怪的问题……在这里我亲身感受到了自己的进步，亲眼看到了大家的进步……也看到了感受到了老师的用心良苦，我觉得自己很幸运来到了IHA yoga！这个礼拜我们可以带自己的朋友来教他们瑜伽，感觉这个idea棒棒哒！给他人一次机会，给自己一次成长……我还是很想说一句：谢谢有你们….瑜伽能让我们的身体更健康，希望我们都能一直坚持下去，帮助他人，别忘记微笑，keep your smile….老师们同学们..其实..遇到你们真好…. liuying student
唇亡齿寒
第四个礼拜结束后….那些理论有点让我头大，但是理论和体势又是缺一不可的….告诉自己，熟读唐诗三百首，不会作诗也会吟！….老师讲的透彻，我也要加油，不要浪费了老师的苦心！感觉老师好像有火眼金睛一样，一眼就能看出我们的错误.我们在练习教课的时候，明明老师的眼睛是看向另一组的，结果我只是将错了两个字，都被老师发现了….厉害！现在老师会让我们自己去排课然后去教课，感觉大家的进步都好快哦！老师告诉我们，要让我们的肚子有内涵，体势做的好，但是不会讲？？？怎样去教你的学生，怎样能得到别人对我吗的信任，我们是老师….说的好！谢谢你们 <blockqu liu ying students
Quitting my job to learn yoga
I was dying for a break, dying to learn a new skill, dying to be more in touch with my mind & feelings, dying to become healthier, dying to get stronger, dying to stop the anxiety of not knowing what’s next for me, dying to stop procrastinating, dying to love people better, dying to feel secure. So, I finally tendered my job of 8 years, without knowing what is ahead for me. Three weeks later, I joined 200 hours Yoga Teachers Training Course. I have always liked yoga very much but I have never thought about studying yoga or becoming a yoga teacher. Deciding to enrich myself and build more stamina & strength in my fast-aging body was the best choice for me. Now, I feel deeply connected to my body and mind, and I’ve definitely become a more mindful person. The final exam for this course will be on thursday and friday, although I cannot balance in many poses, get into some poses, hold most (popular exam) poses nor understand sanskrit, I am already very happy with my current performance and progress. Before this, I have attended yoga lessons irregularly everywhere and I did all my poses with very bad alignments, I hated meditation (om-ing), I didn’t know how to do yoga breathing and I was very impatient with everything yoga. It’s different now, getting into the perfect pose doesn’t hold the same meaning and quiet time during meditation has become a joyful thing. So far, I’ve planned 5 sets of yoga sequences and tried teaching full ‘class’ twice. I wasn’t considering teaching yoga before coming to IHA but I really enjoyed teaching now. I like telling my students to stretch and to try work for better body, I like guiding them to poses that are not as difficult as it looks. Yoga teaching is surprisingly a lot of fun and fulfilment for me. Today I came home and noticed that my living room is actually quite big to put at least 8 mats and for some strange but obvious reason, I felt excited…. Dear Confidence, come and hug me to sleep tonight, tomorrow and especially next week when my course is over pleaseeee? Lindy Student
My Yoga Journey: What I’ve Learned
I recently saw a clip of Dana Delany being interviewed on the Steve Harvey show the day before she turned 60. She looks two decade younger than she is. Thankfully, Steve Harvey asked her what her secret was. Her response? She’s never been married, never had kids, does yoga everyday, and drinks lots of wine. While I’m hoping points 1 and 2 will not be part of my life plan as I do want to get married and have kids, I am definitely on board to support points 3 and 4. I always enjoyed yoga and wanted to be a better practitioner but YTT has helped me understand the philosophy of yoga and how it affects us, both on a physical and physiological plane. I’m much more passionate about yoga now that I can better understand it and know how much of a mental and spiritual journey it is, in addition to the physical. On a daily basis, I learn more and more benefits that regular yoga practice can bring. I am now a believer that everyone needs to embrace yoga as part of their life. Yoga can increase your lung capacity, help those with asthma, help those with hypertension, or even release phlegm when you are sick depending on the pranayama you choose to practice. Yoga can help you have enviable abs and toned arms as a strong core and arms are the bedrock foundation to get into many advanced asanas and arm balancing postures. Yoga can also help you increase your fertility, have better skin, and balance your metabolism. There are no shortages of articles about why yoga is so ridiculously great, but here are five I’d like to highlight. Helps you manage stressful situations: Breathing techniques or pranayamas is one of the eight limbs of yoga. One pranayama known as Ujjayi breathing is recommended throughout your yoga practice to help you maintain slow and steady breathing and to help deepen into the final variations of the asanas. Thus, if you can apply this same mental aptitude to stressful situations at work or during life, you may feel better equipped to handle things instead of just panicking. During our daily meditation with breathing exercises, we learn to focus on our breath and forget about outside stimulants and noise pollution. So, if you can strengthen your mind to find calm and quiet during meditation and use ujjayi during your daily practice to help you sink, lengthen, or fold into your asanas, you can surely apply this to other difficult (read: stress inducing) issues you come across in life. The practice of yoga is also about bringing yourself into the present moment. So when you encounter a stressful situation, yoga helps you distinguish between what is within your control and what is beyond it. Yoga allows you to understand and focus on what you can control and let go of what you cannot control. Helps you manage anxiety: Sweating, increased heart rate, racing mind, high blood pressure, dilated pupils – these are all symptoms of being in a sympathetic or stressed state. If your body stays in this state of fight or flight for a prolonged time, it can cause your body to get sick. In addition to pranayamas and meditation to help you manage anxiety, there are also asanas that can help induce the parasympathetic or relaxed state. I can slip into the sympathetic state quite quickly because I am easily scared and have a long list of fears. Thus, it is important for someone like me to be conscious of when I start to panic and use yoga to help mitigate it. Fear can be debilitating and it’s important to know ways to self help and calm yourself down. Anxiety is a fear of something that hasn’t happened yet or regarding things in the future. Since yoga brings you to the present moment, it helps you to let go of worrying about things in the future and conversely, dwelling about things in the past. Helps you have better sleep: Since YTT, I am usually sleepy and ready for bed by 9 pm, a far cry from when I was working long hours and wouldn’t make it to bed until way past midnight. You can argue this isn’t really from yoga itself but a side effect from simply being exhausted from my daily hours of practice and theory, but you’d be wrong! Yoga teaches you the balance between the three gunas: sattvic for brightness and positive energy, rajasic for energy, change, and movement, and tamasic for sleepiness and rest. You begin to understand the impact of how to regulate your sleep patterns, how to schedule your daily activities, and how the foods you eat all help your body and mind to stay balanced which allows you to slow down and rest at the end of the day. Also, at the end of every yoga class, savasana or yoga nidra is an excellent technique for relaxation through mind-body therapy as your body goes to sleep, but your mind does not. Yoga nidra in particular, is a systematic form of guided relaxation that is as restorative as sleep, or perhaps even better! I often find myself drifting off during savasanas and it is not rare to hear fellow classmates snoring when yoga nidra is being practiced. Helps keep your body mobile as you age: I like to think of this as, if you don’t use it, you lose it! Have you seen older people have trouble bending down or reaching up to get something? It is common to lose flexibility as you age. For people with office jobs, it may be partly because your body doesn’t move as you sit in a chair every day for 8 hours. That is not natural, folks! As you become more familiar with asana practice, you will begin to understand all the different joints and muscles that are used and you will practice opening up your hips, retracting back your shoulder blades, or loosening
乐在其中
在IHA yoga学校学习的第四个礼拜快要结束了，突然觉得时间过得好快，真的是很舍不的！已经开始接触教课了，刚开始会对自己感觉不信任，会对自己说：你能行吗？这个时候老师告诉我们说：你们要相信自己，你们是可以的，每个人都有第一次，加油.在这里总是会有很多正能量的话来激励我们，渐渐地即使没有勇气我也会拿出一点点的勇气向前走！因为老师说了我们每个人都是可以的！就说明我们每个人都有希望…信任与鼓励…..付出与关心….希望我们每个人都能在快乐中成长！IHA yoga good。 刘影 学生
勤
第三个礼拜…..结束了….理论时而使我清晰，时而让我模糊，后来才发现，老师把她们所知道的东西都教给了我们，是我们自己在这里花的时间太少了，所以在表达体势的时候，我的大脑像是在冬天清晨的雾里一样，知道这条路该怎么走，但就是看不清楚！一分耕耘 一分收获.上理论的时候很愉快，上课的时候感觉总是离不开幽默，也许老师就是要我们在愉快中学习，结合幽默的教学方式美美哒，现在都有点想念了……在这里，老师是给我们指路的人，谢谢…我们要好好加油
Lesson — 4 Paths Of Yoga
Flipping through my notes this evening and found my messy scribbles on an exercise regarding 4 ‘main’ paths of Yoga. So which yoga path do I see myself heading? Here’s what I wrote: 1 Seek peace in my mind, body and surrounding. 2 To be mindful of my words, my actions, my behaviour and my intentions. 3 Learn to be empathetic (compassionate).
第三个礼拜结束了..我正在练习排课
Dying in Savasana (Literally)
Normally, people can’t wait for Savasana during yoga classes. Well, I am not one of them. I do not have one of those cool reasons like wanting to work out more or wanting to practise more poses. My reason is sad, I feel shoulder, chest and backache (usually upper back) during Savasana. Do not get me wrong, I love lying down and sleeping, I am that kind of disgusting person who goes to bed right after lunch or dinner to rest my body. But after an hour or so of yoga, I can’t do Savasana without feeling discomfort. Sometimes, the discomfort (or pain) lasts about 1-2minutes, sometimes it lasts the whole 5-7min of Savasana. I tried putting towel on my upper back, lower back, knees and ass, but it just relief the discomfort by a little bit. Last Friday, Nicole made us practised yoga alignments and a lot of back bending asanas. Throughout the practise, I kept telling myself not to try too hard, or do my best, because I really do not want another injury to add to my aging bones. Plus, Nicole was supporting my body weight with her baby belly… there are just 101 reasons why I should take it easy and not do anything risky. But Nicole being Nicole, whenever I accidentally give her an eye contact, she will just ask me to try the back bend, until I did it… It wasn’t mission impossible, but it would be impossible without her support. Back to my pain during Savasana, after that back bending and other asanas session, Wendy led us in Savasana that day. It was funny, her Savasana script was good and not funny, but it’s always funny when it’s Wendy, so I had to control my smiles which occasionally breaks into laughter, when it comes to things about Wendy. I lied down on the mat, close my eyes, feet apart, palms facing up, inhaling and exhaling, and relaxing from toes, ankles, calves, knees, hips and then it occurred to me, HEY! NO PAIN ON MY CHEST, OR MY LOUSY BACK! Rejoice! I told the girls about the great news once we Namaste for break about the no pain savasana, and the fabulous girls being fabulous, were very happy for me 🙂 Grateful for backbending and heart opening exercises. DEAR ANAHATA, I’ll give you more TLC from today onwards <3 Lindy, Student PS: Wendy said "I think my savasana cured your back" hahahahahahhaaa…. I told you everything about this girl is very funny
