Thursday, December 15, 2005

Inhale...exhale

Two weekends ago, I went to Tokyo to take part in a yoga workshop featuring Lance Schuler, founder of Inspya Yoga in Byron Bay, Australia. It was pretty hard but good fun. Lance is a long time judo practitioner and his yoga is, well, a bit martial. His approach is light and jovial, but he's definitely driven. The main goal for the weekend was to push us past our usual comfort levels and beyond fear. As a result, I think all of us were able to do poses we'd never done before. I've never done yoga that was so yang.
During one of his talks he mentioned how people who've been through trauma tend to become quite flexible mentally and emotionally. I had this in mind yesterday when I found out that the teacher training I'd planned to attend next month had been pushed back to April. My non-refundable plane ticket sits in my desk. So yet again I'm US-bound, though now without any real goal except to down pints with friends. (I'm beginning to worry that if you searched this blog, you'd find more references to booze than yoga.) This really doesn't bother me. What does bother me is that when I paid for my ticket, I was expected to give a contact address for my first night. I've experienced this during travels to Asia, but never when going to the country of my birth. Are you fucking kidding me?

On the turntable: Tom Waits, "Blood Money"

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