Missed the introduction to the Gaiam Yoga Club?  Read it here!

I’ve really enjoyed going “back to basics” in this first week of the Gaiam Yoga Club.  This week focussed on standing poses, working from the feet up and really working on the grounding nature of yoga, the feet, the toes, just standing in Tadasana.  Things that, after many years of yoga, I find myself only thinking about when I’m teaching beginners.  And it should be something I focus on all the time.

Each week starts with a video of all the postures that will be used during the next 5 classes.  Rodney Yee and Colleen Saidman have a practical approach to teaching the poses, filled with love, honestly, humility and (most importantly) humour.  They also teach three different modifications of each pose and really encourage the viewer to do the pose most appropriate to them.

The next four days are made up of four practice sequences, each 30 minutes long and each focussing particularly on 2 standing poses and finishing with Legs up the Wall and final relaxation.  I felt that I had completed a balanced practice each day.

The best part for me though is the sixth day, which comprises a breathing and meditation sequence.  So many yoga practices focus on asana alone and I think it’s fantastic that a day is set aside for something else.  The first week just concentrating on listening to the breath and again it felt good to get back to basics.

I do wonder how someone who is completely unfamiliar with yoga would get on with this, and it is hard to put myself in that position.  I wonder how well a complete beginner would get on with Half Moon Pose, for example  and I do think that everyone should try and get to a real teacher whenever they can (even if it’s only a few times a year) just to check your alignment.  That said, with the added option of a pdf printout of each day’s sequence the Gaiam Yoga Club does cater to all learning techniques.

It did strike me that online yoga courses would come in super useful for people who travel a lot and don’t get to go to regular classes that often.  Because you can listen to the class on your laptop and/or smartphone you really can take your practice anywhere with you.  Like I said before, this is the way of the future yogi(ni)s!

Looking forward to next week’s practice!

The Gaiam Yoga Club is currently running two memberships – US$25 per month or US$65 per quarter (which saves you US$10).  Both packages include a 10 day free trial period.

Until about a year ago I didn’t really have a lot of interest in photography. I just pointed and pressed.  Sometimes the result turned out OK, sometimes it didn’t.  I never really cared because I figured I had all of my memories inside my head anyway.

Whilst I still hold this to be true and I don’t believe any photo can capture the essence of being somewhere, living with someone who adores photography for long enough means that you grow to love it, by osmosis or something.

I had a friend a long time ago who was brilliant at photography.  This was back in the days of film cameras and my friend used to develop all his own photos at the local dark room.  It was all too scientific for me and I got bored, pointed, pressed and took the films into the local pharmacy to be developed.

The advent of digital cameras did change things for me a bit.  I started to be able to see when I’d chopped the top of someone’s head off, or shot something out of focus.  I could delete it and try again.  It made me concentrate more.  It made me start to learn some patience.

Last June for my birthday I got a new camera.  Himself, who used to work in Jessops, chose it for me. It’s just a Canon Powershot A590IS.  Essentially it’s still a point and shoot but it does have a ton of manual features.  And suddenly through Himself’s enthusiasm and through a genuine love for this blog I became interested in making my photos better.  I wanted the blog to have my photos on, not ones I’d taken from Flickr or weheartit.com.  And I wanted them to look OK.

I still have a long way to go.  But I do have a good teacher.   A teacher who insists I cannot under any circumstances have a better camera until I’ve learned how to use the one I’ve got.  Fair enough.

It’s been a holiday weekend here in the UK this weekend and accordingly the weather has been atrocious.  So I’ve been stuck inside.  One thing I’ve been complaining about recently is that a lot of the food photographs that I take inside (I would take more of them outside if it weren’t for the weather), are yellow.  Admittedly, we seem to have a very yellow house, but still.  So this weekend I learned about Custom White Balance, which changes this….

to this….

and this…

to this…

Yeah, I’m a work in progress, but I’m happy!

And I’ve noticed another thing.  Nothing, with the exception of being on my yoga mat, has made me so aware of the present moment as this new found pleasure.  Discovering that taking a photograph is not just about snapping a moment for memory; a building, a group of people, a party, but instead an apple, or a daisy or a cloud.  Just becausee they are there at that moment.

And in my year of mindfulness, that seems somehow serendipitous.

Missed part one? Read it here!

The Guided Busway, the great innovation for Cambridgeshire’s public transport sysstem. Buses that run on specially built tracks to beat the traffic and on special biofuels to beat pollution. Brilliant. They did it in Adelaide. Apparently we cannot manage it here.

(note abandoned bicycle on busway)

The latest news is that there will be up to a further five years of delays (it’s been going for about five hundred years already). It has costs gajillions of pounds. The whole county is up in arms.

Me? I’m not that bothered because the busway has a cyclepath the whole way along it and makes my travels around Cambridge so much safer. Much rather be cycling along here than along the road.

Although it is probably the most expsensive cyclepath in the world….

I don’t post this purely for international readers to have a good laugh at the lunacy that is British bureaucracy (although that is one reason – seriously if this had been built anywhere else in the world it would have been finished years ago), but rather as an everyday lesson in looking on the bright side.

Life serves lemons and curve balls left right and centre.  It throws us off balance.  Our innate human natures, our Egos (capital E), make us want to sit down and have a big old moan, a big old cry, a big old shout about it.  And that’s OK.  Just don’t shout for too long because if you do you might miss the glorious alternative that is right in front of you.

Because who wants to sit on a stinky old bus when you could be cycling along next to this?