Archive for the ‘yoga’ Category
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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.
From Back Pain To Clarity :: How I Use Yoga In My Everyday Life
Early on in my life I was diagnosed with a back problem. Through different martial arts I discovered the power of stretching. Even though yoga can not change the way my Skeleton is built it can give me great relief. You do not need to sit in a perfect lotus posture to have great clarity about who you are and where you are heading.
Practice you can do at home :: The Power of Breathing
I had this idea in my head for a long time and feels great to get it down in a video. It is totally home made and you are very welcome to comment and rate it on youtube:
Good books when preparing a yoga course
This is the books I use when preparing yoga lectures and they complement each other:
- Sivananda yoga teachers’ manual – Swami Vishnu-Devananda. This book was handed out to us on the Sivananda TTC in Austria and I recommend it for yoga theory and for schedules to intermediate and advanced students.
- Asana Pranayama Mudra Bandha - Swami Satyananda Saraswati. Contains all the asanas you ever need with detailed descriptions. A simple must have for a yoga teacher.
- Yoga, Tantra and Meditation in Daily Life ( Danish: yoga, tantra og meditation i min hverdag) - swami Janakananda. Contains schedules for beginners and intermediate level lectures.
- a systematic course in the ancient tantric techniques of yoga and Kriya - swami satyananda saraswati. Contains yoga classes as well as time estimates on how much time to spend in each asana. contains 30,60, 90 minutes lectures on all levels.
The books I use most frequently when preparing a yoga course
first class – training centre
I was told the class would consist of older people who usually do gymnastics in the training centre. Most of them had no previous experience with yoga. I decided to go very easy in the first lecture.
I started of with a short relaxation followed by pawanmuktasana* practices, practices where you bend and rotate the arms, hands and legs with slow movements. Most of them done in a sitting position with your back straight.
I ended the class with a short relaxation, approximately 10 minutes, as well.
number of students:17
length of class: 1 hour
pawanmuktasana* = group of practices which can be found in the book: Asana Pranayama Mudra Bandha by Satyananda.
another day at the yoga office
audio-CDs, OCR-software, lecture notes, yoga books, google docs and google translate.It was really hard to keep the overview in the beginning 
the last week have been a lot of office work. I am preparing for a beginners lecture in yoga and there were some technologies I wanted to test. In short I wanted to get a complete manuscript for at least 4 beginners lectures in yoga. most of the material is in English and the lecture is going to be held in Danish which is not my first language. My own notes in the yoga book seemed to prove problems for the OCR, optical character recognition and I ended up typing in big parts by hand to Google translate. The resulting text called for a lot of manual editing. To get better at Danish pronunciation I listened to a Yoga CD in Danish and repeated the content out loud. When I was unsure of single words I typed them into an on-line text-to-speech software. The original plan was to use technology only but I got some very valuable notes from another yoga teacher and listening to recorded instructions had some things that the text-to-speech work-flow was missing. For example rhythm and pacing . As expected I spent a lot of time dealing with issues such as preparing text for OCR in Gimp etc.
Here comes a short list of programs/tools that I used in the process:
- Google docs. great place to store files and edit them online. There is a possibility to translate the whole document into several languages
- GTD inbox plugin for G-mail. great for keeping track of the project. I wrote down a list of action points and attached them to different environments. Example Context_IKEA: buy office chair , Context_TOWN: buy yoga CDs
- Fox Lingo plugin for Mozilla Firefox. Contains links to tools for text-to-speech, translation etc.
- Free OCR – on-line service to get a text document from an image file.
- GIMP – image editing program. Used for clean up of scanned pages. Removing underlining etc.
the Real Exam
Filed under: diary, teaching, Uncategorized, yoga | Tags: satyananda, teacher training
Leave a Comment On Tuesday I am going to hold a one hour class in Danish to a group of retired people. This is the first time I teach yoga in Danish and this is the first time I hold a complete lecture in front of a big group. I have the structure for the lecture on paper and I have done some research into the Danish language but still I am really nervous. A little step for humanity but a big one for me. Cross your fingers please !
what is yoga ?
Filed under: diary, religion, teaching, yoga | Tags: exercise, running, sivananda yoga, yoga
Leave a Comment When I hear a teachers who talk about the importance of keeping up the yoga tradition I react with mixed emotions. First of all Yoga was mentioned the first time roughly 2500 years ago. In the Katha Upanishad it refers to a state where you gain control over the senses and the mental activity stops. This leads to a supreme state. In the old texts there is no reference on how this is done practically and this is where the confusion starts. A marathon runner can gain control over the senses and by that his mental activity stops. There are many roads leading to yoga. Yoga has come to describe the travel when in fact it was first used to describe the goal/final state. Ha-tha yoga describes union of polarities and this has come to mean a series of physical postures. There is no way with higher value than the other and that is where some “yoga traditions” get into problems. You see ha-tha yoga school who claim that they have secret initiations from the original tradition. In my opinion there is something suspicious about secrecy and I want to practice something that has been proved by scientists. There is nothing secret about ha-tha yoga and it is a tradition in constant change . When you see thin male yogis in India wearing a loincloth and a smiling women in leotards they both claim to follow the original tradition. 200 years ago practically no women did ha-tha yoga at all. Traditionally only men were initiated into this kind of training and Sivananda (roughly 100 years ago) described how he introduced ha-tha yoga to women in India, they had great difficulty doing it in their Sari and some other outfit had to be worn. In India ha-tha Yoga was only taught to a selected few in and this was controlled partly by the caste system. Yoga for women has developed through trial and error in the last 100 years. Here is where my concern about secrecy come to mind again. We must let doctors, physiotherapists and scientists look at Ha-tha Yoga and evaluate it and be open to their findings.
Since most of the ha-tha yoga tradition is based on an oral tradition and it was written down not so long time ago there is big room for change and adaptation.
Ha-tha Yoga spread out of the small circles and became a mainstream activity. Ha-tha Yoga became something that is available through CD, DVD, internet, training in group, personal training etc.
review:Sivananda TTC in Austria
Filed under: ashram, diary, religion, teaching, TTC, yoga | Tags: asana, ashram, sivananda yoga, teacher training, yoga
Leave a Comment Can you really learn yoga in Austria ? During my stays in India I have been terrible ill and that is the reason why I went to the yoga teacher training in Austria. Sleeping on health mattresses and eating food featured in the Michelin guide proved to be a winner. If you are looking for ascetic living and military discipline you have come to the wrong place. What you will find is open minded teachers in a picturesque setting .
staff versus students. According to Swami Atmaramananda football is part of the vedic lifestyle photo: Alessandro Califano
The teachers, swamis are approachable at all times and there is room in the schedule for your personal questions. If this is your first time in an ashram, a religious hermitage you maybe find the theory part of the course abstract and hard to grasp. This is not a course to deepen your Sadhana, personal practice but rather to deepen your knowledge around yoga philosophy. Each day you are to hand in a handwritten summary and by the end of the course there is a 3,5 hour exam.
Different experts in Astrology, Philosophy and Cranial Sacral Massage
Sri Venugopal Goswami reading from the Srimad Bhagavatam. photo: Katalin Kurko
gave guest lectures. The most scientific one was Dr. Annika Waldmann, nutritionist lectures on the health benefits of a vegetarian diet. In the breaks there was a chance to get personal counselling/treatment from, an astrologer, a physiotherapist and a massage
therapist. I got a very good treatment from a physiotherapist specialised in yoga.
One evening there is a movie night and we get to see Swami Vishnu-devananda, “The Flying Guru” and when the swamis talk about him they come alive. They talk about his flight over the Berlin wall and the great preparation that went int
o the project. The essence of the teaching is that we are ambassadors of peace.
The yoga lectures are taught in a way that suits me perfect. The teacher walk around during class and give the students help/corrections to find the right alignment.
The only issue I have with this way of teaching yoga is the chanting in sanskrit in the beginning and at the end of the class. Swedish and Sanskrit are miles apart and it reminds me of the time when the church had all the prayers in Latin. Why not start the yoga lesson with words that an ordinary citizen can understand ? Words in his own language that have the same meaning.
swami Keshavananda is demonstrating Neti - nasal cleansing. photo: Alessandro Califanos
Without people dedicating their life to serve others this education would not exist. The swamis have made the choice that the whole world is their family and when you see what Swami Vishnu-devananda did during his lifetime you get a clear proof what dedication and love can accomplish.
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 ?
