Archive for the ‘review’ Category
Review: Sensual tantra in a safe environment
I was kind of nervous when I found my way to the C-H-A-I Copenhagen and the Melting Monday workshop. As it says in the flyer “non verbal communication and playfulness”. It is true, this evening is really about body language and play. At some moments it is like being in a club expect there are no drugs present. The two guides takes us through a range of exercises which appeals to the more subtle sides of sensuality. It is a nice feeling to rediscover playfulness and I definitely recommend this for couples who want to get some inspiration and for singles who want to feel awake again 
Compared to an evening in town I felt more safe in this environment and all exercises are with clothes on and your integrity is respected.
for practical info http://tantrazone.dk/undervisning-kurser/melting-monday/
breatheology-expand – workshop review
Filed under: freediving, review, Uncategorized, yoga | Tags: Freediving, meditation, pranayama, yoga
Leave a Comment I came to this workshop expecting a lot. Last time I got coaching from Stig Åvall Severinsen was during the Copenhagen Dive Show and it was a personal break through to try apnea/kumbhaka/breath-hold in water (read more about that in the blog post). Since then Stig have appeared in media a few times and he have two new world records , the Guinness ice world record and the Guinness World Record for breath-hold . The workshop was intended for people with previous experience of breathing exercises and most people had some experience with yoga or similar . It started out with warm up exercises very similar to pawanmuktasana if you are familiar with Satyananda yoga. The intensity increased with a culmination at lunch time. I recognised a few of the practices, Headstand Shoulderstand ,Plough etc, from hatha yoga , and on top of that he added a few techniques developed in the freediving world. The focus was as the title suggests on breathing and with quite a few practices to increase the lung capacity it delivered on the premise. I now have some powerful exercises to work with.
What really makes Stig stand out as a teacher is that he have combined the yoga techniques from the east with the latest knowledge in biology. It feels safe to go beyond your mental limitations when you know what effects the practices have on your body. At one point we were instructed to take a deep breath in and walk as far as we could on that single breath. He reported the times at regular intervals. I tried this some months ago and stopped at 1:10 . Now I stopped at 3 minutes and since the last time I have been training some freediving so it is by no mean a magical feat . I got dizzy and disoriented and this is the first time this year where I am close to my physical limit, or at least it feels this way. Stig talks openly from his own experience and even if his track record is very impressive he comes across as very humble.
For me freediving is an excellent way to achieve more knowledge about the human body and I am surprised with myself when it comes to results. I do not see myself as a competitive person but it is really rewarding to add a few seconds to your personal best in static apnea for example.
I would say that this workshop is a must if you like freediving and want to improve your performance ! It is great to learn from the master directly and he patiently answered all of my questions.
I really like the combination of relaxation and challenging tasks. It felt totally safe to go beyond what I thought was my limit.
Many of us broke our personal records during this day and my neighbour added more than 2 minutes to his static apnea time.
Yoga to children the Sivananda way
You can go to the Sivananda centre in Austria for a shorter vacation with your daughter/son but there will be no special lectures for children and there is no special childcare when you are in class. Teaching to young children is different but children have the same kind of experiences as adults and age is not a big factor. Something they stress here, Sivananda Centre Austria, is that we are first of all a student of yoga even when we teach to others. The most important thing is to keep up our own sadhana, practice and study philosophy etc.
First you get experience with yoga as a student and then you get teaching in how to teach it. The last step is to specialise your teaching towards old people, children etc.
One of Sivanandas disciples wrote a good book about yoga:
Yoga Education For Children (Paperback) by Swami Satyananda Saraswati (Author)
Book review: Træk Vejret (Breathe)
Filed under: book, review, yoga | Tags: boost your brain, breath, death, health, meditation, self help, yoga
Leave a Comment I came across a book by Stig Åvall Severinsen which I really think deserves an English translation. If you saw The Big Blue back in the 80′s and still wonder how a person can build up the physique and will power to hold the breath for such a long time YOU SHOULD READ THIS BOOK ! In the Big Blue there are some references to yoga techniques and to my knowledge this is the first attempt ever to go through this in such an scientific way !
Inspired by the Big Blue I decided that pranayama, breathing exercises from yoga was really something I wanted to go deeper with. To my surprise I discovered that retention of the breath came without effort after Nadi Shodan. I followed the ratio given in Prana Pranayama Prana Vidya and slowly over several months I gradually increased the ratio. I simply did not feel the urge to breath as frequently as I do normally. At first I was a bit scared by this fact and I was scared that my brain would get damaged by the lack of Oxygen. As well as counting the nadi shodana I counted the time I performed this natural breath retention afterwards. I did not really believe my counting was accurate because I simply did not think it was possible to hold the breath for such a long time without being an elite athlete. To make sure I was counting on a correct speed I took a loud clock and I counted in my head at the same time as the clock was ticking. After 2 minutes I was excited about how easy this was. I noticed movements within the body but I continued. I passed 6 minutes and now I was really chocked I had the fear that I will actually die from this. Aft
er 7 minutes I stopped and it took quite a long time for my breath to get back to normal.
In my life there were a lot of things that really took energy and focus and I remember this moments of breath retention as really peaceful and it was like I was recharging my batteries in some way. During this period it was extreme how many things I was able to deal with at the same time. My personal belief is that I would have been totally burned out in this period if it was not for the Nadi Shodan. When I look back at this period I amazed how good timing it was. My father was going through a very though time and I visited him a lot, my girlfriend since 2 years decided to leave me, I had extra responsibilities on top of my study at university etc. Some years earlier just one of these things would have got me totally paralysed. I totally admit that this was a very emotional period and I cried many evenings etc. but it was like I got extra power to go through this from the Pranayama.
Now several years later when I read this book I understand what processes actually happened in my body and the fact that the author is named Stig makes it extra intense since that is also the name of my father. had I read this book at this point I think I would have continued with my practice but back then I had a lot of worries that it was dangerous what I was doing etc.
This book made me interested in taking a seminar with Stig and learn about the special techniques he talk about in the book ! As always I recommend learning yoga and breathing techniques from an experienced teacher.
books mentioned in this article:
Prana Pranayama Prana Vidya by Swami Niranjanananda Saraswati
Træk vejret by Stig Åvall Severinsen
10 Great Reasons to Use a Camcorder in Yoga
Filed under: diary, idea, review, teaching, Uncategorized, video, yoga | Tags: asana, learning, review, yoga
Leave a Comment - Professional athletes have done this for years to improve performance.
- Make it look graceful. You will see all these small movements you do which takes away from the grace. Trust me it will look better and feel better when you do not wiggle your toes in the lotus pose
- You can notice any imbalance in your body and correct it. As long as it is not in the skeleton and than it was good you saw it anyway so you can talk with a doctor
- Having a personal trainer costs a lot of money and camcorders are constantly dropping in price and even a webcam will give you some feedback.
- You have the possibility to upload to sites like Youtube and get comments from all over the world.
- You can very easily go back and see your own progress over time.
- It is a chance to accept yourself on how you look and the way your body is.
- A cheap way to get an out of body experience
- Share your experience with your friends and family
- It is fun
Chiropractic visit and x-rays
kyphosis - an increase in the thoracic curve. photo from x-ray original: johan flod
I went to a chiropractor today and it was very interesting. He made an x-ray of my back and we talked about training, yoga etc. My body have a skeletal construction winch is in a certain way and for example some of the discs in my back are not formed as they should be. The unbalance in my skeleton system makes my muscles work harder to correct for this.
my legs are equally long and the imbalance is in the spine itself. in the chest area the vertebrae are not shaped as they should and I have a tendency to compress my chest area forward. The lower backs first vertebrae is tilted to the left and that makes my lower part of the spine go to the left.
it was a big relief to see the x-rays and see how my spine actually looks in a relaxed posture. I was expecting a lot of sounds from my body when he started the treatment but there was almost none.I was recommended to sit in a chair which have this special rest for the knees and is called a kneeling chair. I am a bit sceptical about the kneeling chair since wikipedia basically says it is a failure.
I recommend people who have problems with their back to get a total check done by a doctor or chiropractor. It is
scoliosis - a lateral curvature , side twist. photo from x-ray original: Johan Flod
also important to understand the difference between relaxation in the muscles and how your skeleton looks. yoga will help your muscles to relax and that is much needed in between physical activity. The perfect examples you see in yoga magazines are people who also had the help from good genetics to start with. No matter how flexible you are the hard parts of the bone will not change.
problem with transition from a standing position to the wheel pose ?
Filed under: kids, review, teaching, video, yoga | Tags: exercise, learning, yoga, yogi
Leave a Comment I felt a lot of fear for backbends. I was a bit surprised when I came across this video. It is a quite young girl who explains this in detail and she gives a lot of alternative ways on practising this !
I have started to practice this regularly and I will get back with some more feedback.
Review: Teacher Training Course in Rikhia Peeth , India
Filed under: ashram, review, yoga | Tags: ashram, india, satyananda, teacher training
Comments (2) 
One of the students showing more advanced practices that he learnt elsewhere. photo: Michael Howden
Bihar School of Yoga offers an intense 3 weeks workshop for people interested in teaching yoga. To be honest it felt more like a pilgrimage than participating in a course. For 11 years I practised yoga with the help of books containing teaching from Satyananda and I had teachers in Sweden and Denmark who got their teaching directly or indirectly from Satyananda. I had a strong urge to see this man with my own eyes. What really struck me is how different this place is from the ashrams in Sweden. We sit on the floor when we eat, we are surrounded by people from the village when we sing kirtans, we participate in serving food to kids from the village. The school in India is so closely connected to the surrounding. The singing and seminars in the evening is open to anyone and having kids climbing on you when you sit in a meditation pose was a new experience to me. Kids are spontaneous and seeing them dance classical Indian themes on the stage was such a joy. Some of the women on our course were teaching Computer Science and English to the kids from the surrounding area. One evening a young girl told the story of how life was in this area before the yoga school came. My heart melted when I heard about how people used to live for days without food in this area and now they got
Almost every evening we sang together. Here children from the village are performing a classical Indian Dance. photo: Michael Howden
education through the yoga school and they can make a living on the crafts they learned when working for the yoga school. People from the village came into the school during my stay and they worked hard with different tasks in the gardens etc.
I learned from this course that yoga is very closely related to helping your fellow man in every way you can.
I got the chance to talk to Swami Satsangi and Swami Satyananda himself gave a lecture/speech for us one day. Satsangi made the strongest impression on me with her speech about how greed is something we have to accept within ourselves since it is the reason why we are alive. Acceptance and awareness seems to be the keywords in this tradition.
I have to admit that I had a flu during this course which I should have gone to a doctor with much earlier. The climate itself is very different from where I grew up and yoga is not a cure for everything I have to point out. The hygiene in the ashram is very good and I drank the tap water all the way through the course and off course my stomach was unbalanced once in a while and I ate tablets daily to keep the bacteria in shape in the stomach. On the negative side I am not a big fan of polished rice and we got this daily and usually 2-3 times a day.
During the course the very colourfull "holi" festival took place all over India and even inside the ashram people threw colour on each other this day. Photo : Michael Howden
I recommend this course to people who have been practicing yoga for many years and feel the urge to take the next step and begin teaching. I started teaching myself in a small scale straight after the course and I feel this is an important turning point in my life. You get the essentials for teaching on a beginners level and you get to lead 4 lectures in the course.
What i realise now 1,5 months after the course is that an essential part of the yoga teaching course is missing. The missing link is your own Sadhana. I notice a big difference in my own life when I do my schedule consisting of The Plough, the Bridge, the Headstand etc. After 3 weeks of neck movements, shoulder joint rotations etc. I felt a big urge to go back to my own sadhana which there was no space and time for in Rikhia Peeth. When I started to teach in a small scale I realised that when I spend 2 hours preparing a lecture and then 45 minutes on giving the lecture I felt happy that I made it but also very drained from creativity and energy in the evening. The balance between your own practice and your teaching is important and as they say in the aeroplanes ”if you are in a plane together with a small child you first put on the oxygen to yourself in case of an emergency” . You are of no help to others if you are in bad shape !
In the beginning of the course I did my own practice/sadhana in my room and this was not a good place to do asanas I quickly realised. I was lucky enough to have my own room, most people where 2 persons in this space, but even then there was very little space for doing headstand for example. Then the addition of people talking to late in the night and slamming doors etc.
Another thing which irritated me a bit was that there are no requirements for participating on this course. Some people had only done asana and pranayama for a few month and there was no real exam as such. Sure you get a certificate that you are a yoga teacher after this course but it is no way a guarantee that you have a deep knowledge of Yoga. I find this a bit strange since most serious yoga teacher courses with the Satyananda School in Europe run for 2-3 years where you have regular stays in an Ashram. The reason for this is maybe that there already exist a lot of university programs on yoga in India in case you want to go in depth with the asanas and the pranayama.
When i read the books by Satyananda on hatha yoga i got the impression that the Bihar School of Yoga is not connected to a specific religion but this is something I have to reconsider. On the course we read from the Bhagavad Gita and other scriptures and we used mantras. My personal view is that you can find knowledge and wisdom in the Qur’an, the Bible and Norse mythology as well. I am bit fed up with the Superstition around Sanskrit. I say superstition because there is no conclusive evidence that the vibrations from talking sanskrit is really doing anything. Sure it is fine with me if we had at least sung something in English when the course is said to be conducted in English. As the course is now it feels like it is mostly catering towards Indian people.
In general I found it really hard to get knowledge around this course and the price was 4 times more when I actually arrived on site compared to what was said on telephone. I pay 4 times more because i am not an Indian ! This is a problem for several reasons since you have to bring cash to the ashram and it is quite complicated and time consuming to get a permision to go to a cash machine.
I try to write this review as critical as possible and i have to add that I met a lot of wonderful people on this course and there were a lot of fun !
Books I really recommend for the serious sadhaka are Asana Pranayama Mudra Bandha , Prana Pranayama Prana Vidya, Kundalini Tantra, A Systematic Course in the Ancient Tantric Techniques of Yoga and Kriya
yoga teacher training in Rikhia peeth , India – Part 1
Filed under: ashram, diary, meditation, review, Uncategorized, yoga | Tags: ashram, india, satyananda, teacher training, yoga
Leave a Comment alternative title: amazing weight loss method made me loose 8 kilos in 4 weeks
I arrive in Delhi and thought I was going to be prepared since this is my second visit. Imediately I have a taxi driver grabbing my arm and trying to sell me a ride. I offer some advice to a doctor student from Kenya who is in Delhi for his first time and we decide to share a prepaid taxi. I remember thinking ” what am I doing here ?” during the intense and totally unsafe ride into town. Now I remember Indian traffic. Honking , honking and then some more honking. I decide to scout the New Delhi train station to see how it is organised. I am really close to fall for a scam at my arrival and I dodge it by taking aim at a military guy in uniform and insisting on talking with him. In the tourist office I talk to a guy from United States and I am so happy having another westerner to talk to right now. We decide to have lunch together and decide to go to a place called The banana Leaf. almost every Indian person who wants to talk to us on the street is offering us help on finding the tourist office. From Lonely Planet I know this is a common scam to get you to visit a travel agent where “the street seller” get commission. An Indian guy gets really confused when I offer to show him the nearest tourist office
the information boards is not updating in the train station and I have to walk around quite a bit with my big back pack to get on the right train. Well on board I am so happy that I bough a first class ticket and I really enjoy the silence and polite atmosphere. The train journey is smooth and one of the passengers which I talked to the previous day starts to do yoga in the morning. I think he does it to show me since he yesterday referred to himself as a master of yoga.
I arrive in Deoghar and the athmosphere is different here and people are not so aggresive in selling you things. Several times I notice that they do not even take any extra money because you are a westerner. But a thing that makes it a bit more complicated is that very few people know a little bit of english and I am the only westerner werever I go. The whole lesson in trust is completed when I arrive at the ashram and there is no sign in English. I have arrived at the right place and everybody is friendly. I arrive early and a man named “Pragia” is showing me my room. He is from Denmark and have been in the ashram for 8 years. The room is basic and clean. there are blankets and pillows availible so bringing a sleeping bag was not really nescessary.
Review: Yoga Teacher training in the North of Sweden
Filed under: ashram, meditation, review, Uncategorized, yoga | Tags: 2007, ashram, review, sivananda yoga, teacher training, yoga
Leave a Comment Satyananda Yoga Sweden offers a 2 years yoga teaching training course. First i think it is misleading to say it is a 2 years course since the amount of teaching is just 2 months roughly.
The price is 80.8 Euro each day you stay in the Ashram ant the total for the course is 4672,364 Euro (58 days at the ashram). Just for the fun of it I made the comparison between the prices in India and in Sweden
Course in Yogic Studies – Four Months in Bihar Yoga Bharati, Munger, India is 1,200 Euro
4 Months at the Satyananda Ashram in Sweden would cost roughly 9720 Euro ( 120 days times 80.8 euro ).
The teacher training started with a week of introduction and we all got together in this big house in Bollnas, Sweden and cooked food together and off course did yoga. We had discussions as part of the schedule and the teaching training was only on theoretical level during this week. No hands on classes where you hold lectures to each other. They were clear to point out that the teaching was not supposed to be curing illness but rather to give relaxation and relieve stress. I felt in general that i was doing postures which would be great if I was 80 years old and had sever problems with my back. I was sitting in the padmasana posture one day and our main teacher told me that this posture is not good for the knees. This was a big suprise to me since I know people in India sit in this posture for months in a row. In general i did not feel that I was learning anything new regarding yoga and regarding the actual teaching part I was very alarmed that we did not actually held any lectures to each other. All of this was a bit alarming since I was paying 484 Euro for this week and I actually lost income because I was away from work. Maybe I am bit hard here but if it is an introduction week you should at least get a taste on how it is to teach to a group of people. We got copies from the Asana, Pranayama, Mudra , Bandha book and in general they were referring to different books by Satyananda. During this week I felt that I was doing practices that maybe are good if you are a total beginner but I for sure missed my daily program which I usually do at home.
The staff were friendly and the course was held in a very nice old swedish building. A lot of friendly people in the group and in general it was a very nice atmosphere in this place.
To sum up I think this is a great course for beginner since they can learn from the classes and they are happy with the level. If you want to go deep with your personal sadhana or want to become a full blown yoga teacher on all levels I think there are much better courses availible.
I do not write a full review of it because I only took part in the introduction week and I never enlisted for the full teaching course.
more info: satyananda yoga sweden (text in Swedish)
At an early age I got interested in Buddhism and the prince who left his kingdom in the search for truth. How can I apply this story to my own life ? to be able to sit I took up the study of yoga. Is there a contradiction between yoga and science ? Sure we can get a theoretical understanding through books, but without the experience we are stuck. Why is it so hard to practice non-violence when the mosquito is landing on my neck ?
