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Day 5 - The Lady Yo-Ga Experiment

Day 5

Moon Goddess Meditations

Day 5 Data:

So I woke up this morning and madam moon cycle had commenced so (having learnt from last months attempt at yoga on day 2 of my cycle and spending the rest of the day pronate on the bed, sipping chamomile tea and trying to rebuild energy) no yoga today.  Or rather no asanas.

Morning breathing - spent about 10 minutes doing a breathing meditation and then went off to do an exam at school….

Breakfast: Muesli and fruits

Lunch - Wicked humus and veg bap and peach juice (whilst my dining partner tucked into wine and cigarettes ) cue smugness!

Dinner - Prawn (sorry couldn’t resist) tagliatelle

Boozes: honestly?    One glass of white

Water: enough

Caffeiney/dairy delights - one coffee (regular latte), cheese crackers for snacks.

So have been surprisingly ungrumpy about the back and moon cycles attempts to scupper my usual “push-it” approach to yoga and have still found myself learning immensely from the more tentative approach to the practice.

And it seems to have created some space for some new projects in my life (more on this soon).  I would really like to incorporate some of the stillness and breathing elements to daily life and really want to continue upping my yoga practice cos it makes me feel AMAZEBALLS…..

See you soon my lovelies

Cat x 

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Day 4 - The Lady Yo-Ga Experiment

Day 4

Time for a bit of home grown…

Day 4 Data:

Time of yoga: 10am - 11am on mat at home looking out of balcony

Breakfast: Muesli and fruits

Lunch - salady fun

Dinner - Mushroom Ravioli

Boozes: honestly?    One glass of red

Water: enough

Caffeiney/dairy delights - one coffee (soya latte), creamy sauce on the pasta, parmesan.

Day 4 reflections

Oh its tough without teacher! You don’t realise it but there are like a hundred pieces of information you are given in class that you don’t even realise you are getting so remembering alignment, focus, which poses to do, what those poses do for you and the Breathing (Oh God the Breathing!) is hard on your own….I stopped breathing on several occasions (this is not advised, I fell over!) and then remembered…that breathing is the most important bit.

Despite all of that I managed a 45 minute series of poses mostly unprompted (thanks to Tara Stiles for inspiration 33 minutes in) and a good meditation on clearing the mind before the busy day ahead.  Oh yeah and started with the alternate nostril breathing, flossing the spine and got some breathe of fire in there too.   

Thanks to the neighbours for not complaining during the loud shouty exhales and mellowsome AaaaaUuuuuuuMmmmmmms at the end

See you soon…. Cat x

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Day 3 - The Lady Yo-Ga Experiment

Am thinking this is probably getting less interesting for you to read than it is for me such is the introspective nature of it…. So I’m gonna try and ‘sex’ it up a bit to keep you intrigued.  Think Nigella Lawson ok?

Daily activity

Spent the morning bending and stretching in an artistic setting with ladies and latex (matts)

Whipped up some sexy summer fruits into a frenzy

Hung out with beautiful Maltese maiden making soapy bubbles all afternoon

Got rubbed down in chocolate oil by a musclebound beefcake

Came home to find the italian chef wearing nowt but an apron and waving his spinach leaf at me!

Day 3 Data:

Time of yoga: 9.30am - 11am

Breakfast: Smoothie

Lunch: Boiled egg and dippy bread

Dinner - AMAZING VEGGIE BANQUET prepared by the beau.  what a legend

Boozes: Zero!

Water: enough

Caffeiney/dairy delights - one coffee (soya latte), some cheese

Day 3 Reflections (in maximum of 5 word sentences)

Less hard to get up

Need to go to bed 

(earlier)

Back a bit twingey

But much less hurty 

Twists are getting deeper

Tried to push, it hurt

Need to learn that lesson

Felt calm mostly all day

Boyfriend is a veggie convert

I love my life 

Tomorrows challenge is no teacher/home practice yoga, oh and Leo and I ate all the spinach so the green smoothie plan is on hold.

Till then x

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Day 2 - The Lady Yo-Ga Experiment

Day 2 Intro…

Pretty hard to get up this morning.  Left it to the last minute, didn’t have time for any tea, green, mint or otherwise, ran to yoga…not the most chilled out start to the day…

Day 2 Data:

Time of yoga: 9.30am - 11am

Breakfast: fruit and yoghurt after yoga

Lunch: Salad, fritata, parmesan

Dinner - Green beans and soba noodles, found behind the mountain of pasta in our cupboard.  The other half gets the heebie-jeebies if we drop below 8kg of his favourite carb.  

Boozes: Zero!

Water: not enough

Caffeiney/dairy delights - 3 - had to go to bed before having any more.

Day 2 Reflections

Apart from the struggle to get up, the desire for dairy, the aching back in the morning, the 20 minute conversation with the other half about how tuna is meat and as I am not eating meat this week a tuna sandwich was probably out of the question and the slightly bad time management (still have about 5 hours work to do and its already 10.30… apart from all that, its been a pretty good day :P

More twisting in class and the back was seemingly not liking the whole morning thing, I had to be even more gentle till half way through when something opened up.   At the end of class we did a day-visualisation which I am sure helped with fitting (almost) everything in.   Surrendering at the end of the class and focusing on our personal vision for the year are two of the philosophical elements to this class that keeps me coming back.  It’s not just about the asanas issit!

Post yoga I had a reflexology client in the awesome therapy room at the Soap Cafe Malta.  It’s a complete delight to work from there, inspiring and relaxing all at the same time.  

Then stopped in home for lunch (cue the tuna isn’t really meat conversation), then 5 hours of massage school and post school massage practice on the other half.  Am very grateful for the core strengthening and breathing exercises to help me through that particular stretching task but I gotta toughen up if I am to do more massages in a day.

As one of the lessons of yoga is not to push, I am reassessing exactly what I intend to fit in this evening and trying to make sure I have some wind down time.  

So….errr…..am off to bed, see you in the morning.

Cat x 

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Day 1 - The Lady Yo-Ga Experiment

As introduced yesterday, I am conducting a series of bodily experiments.  The first one, an intensive journey into detoxing yoga in honour of spring, started today.  See our scientific (!) findings below.

Day 1 Data:

Time of yoga: 9.30am - 11am
Green Tea before yoga
Breakfast: fruit and yoghurt after yoga, homemade soya latte
Lunch: Salad, bread, some cheese.
Dinner - Roast veggie tortilla and salad (dinner out with friend)
Boozes: Zero!
Sugary Creamy Pastry, choco-delights: None

Day 1 Reflections

It’s not the first time I have done a yoga class in the morning and not taken breakfast till after and somewhat surprisingly…. it’s not hell.  I can say this despite only recently admitting a bit of a problem with hunger

We start with some Kundalini Breathing rituals which help shake off any morning sleepiness and during the asanas I have to take it easy cos of some recent lower back pain - more on that later this week - but what fascinates me is that I think this makes it one of the first classes where I haven’t pushed my body at all, just gently taken the poses as they come and you know what? The energy waves, sensations of feeling open and usual post yoga groove-on still happened.

After the class I literally bounce along the road home, stopping by the greengrocer to pick up green smoothie ingredients (see later posts for how this plays out!) and heading home to make breakfast.  I spend about 34 seconds contemplating a caffeine free week before deciding that my boyfriend doesn’t deserve the grumpiness that will ensure from that just yet.  So as a concession I decide on less dairy and whip up a soya latte* (first one made on the stove of wonder at home….quite impressed) and I spend the afternoon working on new and strange things in a calm frame of mind.

I feel like an early night and even manage to opt for the alcohol free option at dinner.  I’m taking my smug ass to bed now.

Till tomorrow x 

* If my brother is reading this…Not a word ok? Not a word.

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The Yo-Yo-Ga-Ga Diary

Welcome ladies and gents to the first in a series of weird-one-woman-experiments (cue trumpety fanfare). 

For my inaugural experiment I am preparing to put my body through a twisty turny bendy wendy upside down inverted pigeon pose fuelled week of daily yoga practice.  This is in an effort to see how my body likes it, to track what it does and to build some stamina for increasing my self practice from 3 times a week to more.

Why?
As a holistic therapist running Butterfly Therapies here in Malta I spend my time dispensing advice on natural approaches to health to my clients and quite often recommend yoga for a myriad reasons.  But I only have personal experience of practicing it 2, 3 or 4 times a week, not on a daily basis and I am interested to see the difference in the benefits of regular vs daily stretching, breathing, flowing and surrendering.

Secondly, I love it so it;s a fun experiment for me and its wildly therapeutic in itself so I get a good looking after :)

Thirdly, it’s detoxing and the best mate and her wine waggon have just left town and detoxing is what I need.

3 reasons is more than enough, so lets crack on….oh, one more thing, as it’s a detoxing series of classes in honour of spring I am going to attempt to keep my alimentary intake nice and healthy…

Wish me luck and see you tomorrow for day one.

Cat x

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Unwiring a Kinesthesia

Awesome technique alert….post contains free info on a free technique to help you out of a stuck place :)

Ok so as promised in the last post, I used an awesome technique recently to unblock some writers block caused in part by attempt to write about something intangible and fluid.  FLOW

I learned the technique I used on a NLP Diploma course I did with these guys in January 2012 and I can’t recommend them or it highly enough. 

The best way to see it in action is to see it in action :) So if you are coming for a treatment or workshop with Butterfly Therapies anytime soon, ask me to explain it to you.  In my experience, it works better if someone takes you through it but it can be done alone so for the impatient among you, if you are alone and want to try it out you follow these steps

a) Identify the problem you are trying to solve
b) Create a visual image of that problem and hold that image in your mind
c) Sit in front of a large wall still holding the image in your mind
d) Remove spectacles if you are wearing them
e) Look as far up and left as you can without turning/moving your head and concentrate on the image
f) after 30 seconds or so bring you eyes back to centre and look up and right as far as you can holding again for around 30 seconds and concentrating on the image
g) Return to centre and repeat the action of moving the eyes, holding and focusing on the image directly right, then down and right, down and left and directly left so have you worked  in a whole circuit.  Each time bring your eyes back to centre.  At the end of 1 circuit ask yourself what has changed. 
h)Then repeat the circuit and ask the same question. 
i) If you want to, repeat it again but each time see how you feel about the image, the problem, yourself and stop if you feel a headache or any pain.

What can you expect?
Well everyone is different but what the technique should hopefully do is loosen up how you are viewing the problem by getting you to view it from different areas of your brain, which in turn may eventually help you find an alternative solution for your problem.  It may not be immediately obvious what you should do but sometimes the solution comes later as you are just creating space for it to blossom.

Any questions….drop me a message here or come over to the website and get in touch. 

See you next week for a daily diary posts on a series of experiments with my body!

Cat x

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Don’t push it…

In an effort to be as paperless as possible, I have a little text file on my ancient PowerBook.  The little text file is entitled “Blog Ideas” and it’s a proverbial pin board for the topics I think it would be interesting to share ideas on. 

Some of the items have been on there since 2010 and some are a little newer, some ideas are captured in a sentence or a quote and some are a little shorter.  But the last one that made it onto the list was the shortest word of them all and has somehow stopped anything new being posted on the pin board.   Why?  Because whilst I really want to write this one, since it made it on the list I have had some kind of writers block about the subject.  Which wouldn’t be so funny if the subject wasn’t….

FLOW

You know? Going with the flow, rolling and smiling, not pushing, not even pulling, but being so in the moment that you can surf the wave and take in the beauty around you.  So since I wanted to try and capture the essence of flow in a blog post, everything got stuck.  Which cracks me up :) and makes me realise that flow is not to be captured, caged and controlled nor really understood or explained but rather experienced, appreciated and allowed infinite freedom to come and go as it pleases.

Not one to be put off by the block, I unwired my kinesthesia (see the next post I post for this magic NLP technique) and opted to share with you 3 things I have learnt from our friend FLOW.  I hope you enjoy the tales and see you soon for more musings.

Worry not
I stopped scrutinising my to do list (which was full) and bank balance (which was unpredictable) and took a conscious decision not to worry about the things I hadn’t yet done or the target I hadn’t yet reached yet.  I took my attention to the thing I was doing at that moment and the achievements I had made that month and whilst that changed nothing on my to do list or bank balance, it changed everything about how I felt, which in turn started to influence the to do list and bank balance and the opportunities I have my eyes open for.  Check out the website for the expanding ideas that are coming out of worrying less.

Do less
I have been doing a lot of yoga since I arrived in Malta, partly because I have more control over the times I work now, partly because it has become more important to me in the interests of having a good work / life balance and partly because there are some great yoga teachers on the island that inspire me to do more.  But in recent weeks I have started to push a little less and breathe a little more and am amazed at how asanas that boggled my brain before are becoming attainable now and how single seconds of mind-silence in meditation are turning into tangible tranches of timeless time.

Embracing easy
A smart woman recently reminded me that easy can also mean right.  This is an expression of flow but sometimes contradicts our commonly held belief that you gotta slog away, nose to the grindstone, 24-7 to get where you want to go.  Hard work, focus, intention and action are important but flogging dead horses or fighting something with every ounce of your being only to find you are moving backwards is not such a good use of our precious energy.  An example of this is the Art of Reflexology Workshop idea which has been in incubation since August 2011 but which I seemed to struggle with organising last year.  This year, a single conversation immediately identified a date, venue and way of spreading the word and before you could say 4 ounzes the 1st workshop was fully booked and the waiting list for the second one (happening on 1st April) was filling up too. Marvelling at (and being grateful for) the ease with which this happened reminded me that flow and me, love the obstacle-free adventures into the new.

See you soon and if you want to find out more drop me a message or get in touch here

Cat x