An unfamiliar home
How did you all cope with the heat these last few weeks? It's been the first time ever that we've opened the windows in the shala during the classes because of the heat (although we did open them a little when we reopened after the covid lockdowns). It's been nice to be really hot during practice but also have fresh air circulating.
I have to say that, the older I get, the more I appreciate the regular Irish 15 degrees, cloudy, with a gentle breeze. Just warm enough to wear shorts without being freezing. That's my sweet spot. Anything about 23 or 24 degrees and I struggle to find the motivation to do anything outdoors. I'd say a lot of you who come from warmer climates will find that hilarious but I've made peace with who I am and I'm embracing my Irish heritage.
The nice thing about all-day-long warm temperatures is that I always find my body to be a lot more supple and stretchy. You can practice yoga in a very hot room in the morning time but if the temperature outside is cold you'll always feel that bit stiffer than when you're warm all day. Whenever we were practising in Mysore we always noticed that there were fewer aches and pains and fewer restrictions during practice.
We spent a lovely couple of weeks on holiday in Wexford with our daughters (now aged 6 and 9). Suzanne's auntie has a holiday home there which she, very generously, allows us to inhabit for a couple of weeks every summer. There's a lovely house, a beautiful big private garden with incredible old trees a trampoline and a passageway from the garden to the beach.
My favourite thing to do there is get up early, before Suzanne and the girls are awake and bring my cup of coffee out to the garden to watch and listen to the birds. There are swallows, starlings, house martens, sand martens, wood pigeons, collared doves, hooded crows, and magpies. Dragonflies, frogs and an occasional fox also make an appearance. It's a little Eden in those early hours.
The beach there has to be seen to be believed. 22km of sandy beach and even during the height of summer (with the exception of about 400 metres on either side of the main entrance) is almost deserted most of the time. One of the days, when I brought the dog for a long walk, a pod of whales appeared just a couple of hundred yards off the beach, breaching the water and swimming in twos and threes. They were in line with us all the way back up the beach for about 45 minutes or so. What a treat!!
I always love coming home after a trip away. You see your own home with fresh eyes. Things you give no thought to for the rest of the year, like the light switches, taps and doorknobs, all seem a little unfamiliar. I find it a strange but enjoyable little experience. My daughter, Anna (6), was obviously feeling the same. She was going around saying things like "Oh my God, a white door!" (the doors are brown in the house in Wexford and white at home).
It made me think a little bit about our perceptions of familiar things, including ashtanga yoga. A lot of us who practise ashtanga yoga regularly can become habituated to the feeling of the practice. We can go through long periods, months or years even, where nothing really changes. Practice can become routine and even a bit stagnant. It's easy, sometimes, especially if you're practising without a teacher, to stop giving your complete attention to what you're doing but, rather, to kind of go through the motions.
Sometimes though, without even thinking about it, we'll do some small thing in just a slightly different way. We'll move the angle of our foot, the direction in which our arms move, or the way in which we balance our weight in a certain pose and suddenly realise that it works much better that way. A bit like how evolution works through the copying of genes with occasional mistakes, our own 'mistake' happens to work in a more efficient way.
My experience of coming home from holiday also made me think about those of you who may have taken a break from ashtanga yoga, either by choice or because you let it slip for whatever reason. You will notice, if you decide to get back on your mat and start to practise, that the primary series, with which you had become so familiar, will feel new to you. You'll notice things about it that you never noticed before. You might wonder why you did something a particular way and may come up with a new and better approach to some small thing. Most of all, though, I suppose you'll wonder why you ever stopped in the first place. Almost everyone I've known over the years who has let their practice go and then come back to it has said to me that they forgot how much they loved it. It was only when they started back that they really realised what got them hooked on ashtanga yoga in the first place.
I've had my ups and downs with practice over the years, as most of you know by now, but it really is a beautiful practice. The combination of the breath and the movements give so much energy, so much vitality and bring us into such a healthy headspace. And like many things, sometimes we only realise it after we've returned from a break.
If you're thinking of restarting your yoga practice, get in touch. There'll be a warm welcome for you at the shala.