How I live and what I think
Gratitude: The quality of being thankful; readiness to show appreciation for and to return kindness. (The Oxford Dictionary) Gratitude has become a bit of a buzz word over the last few years. Walk into any self-respecting stationary shop and you will find at least one (if not ten) Gratitude Journals on its shelves. On Instagram, under the tag #grateful you find a whopping 27.8 million (and counting) posts,…
Christmas is coming, as you have surely realised by now. It is a season of high expectations, self-inflicted pressure, being surround by more than usual amounts of stuff everywhere and various parties. Unfortunately for many this is also the season of feeling ill or run down, the symptoms varying from being slightly sniffy to a full blown fever and several days of bed time. So how to survive…
Last weekend the 2nd edition of the Balance Festival took place at The Old Truman Brewery in East London, just off Brick Lane. Last year it attracted 8000 visitors over 3 days and the organisers said the targer for this year was to double that. I cannot tell if that target was met but what I can tell you it was massive, super well organised, a bit overwhelming…
I had a chat about yoga books with a friend yesterday and this old post of mine came to mind. As nothing has changed since I first published this text, here you go again, for those who did not see this the first time around. Yoga books are nothing new. The first systematic presentation of yoga in a written form, the Yoga Sutras by Patjanhali is said to…
Whilst we are free to make small and big resolutions any time of the year – or day, for that matter – The New Year is very much seen as THE time to make a change or few in one’s life. Just look at the amount of people you see at the gym during the first two weeks of January or alternatively, how pubs and bars seem emptier,…
The below text is from yesterday morning, something I wrote straight after the yoga class I had taken. It was one of those moments when the right words to express what had until then been just a slightly uncomfortable feeling came to me and demanded to be written down straight away. So I sat down and typed everything on my phone, in the fear that I would lose…
By now most of us have well and truly realised December has arrived. Not necessarily from the weather (as this day and age this time of the year can just as well be white, green or gray) but from the slightly frantic energy in the air. The Christmas ads are on full gear, invitations to various festive parties are coming from all directions, and the general anticipation of…
Last Monday I attended a teacher’s symposium on the topic “The Diversity Problem in Yoga” at TriYoga’s Camden studio. The premises of the talk was to find out (as much as possible) why yoga in the Western world, today being more popular and mainstream than ever, seems to practiced by a very homogenous set of people, often identified as a white, able-bodied, middle-class women. Why is it that…
As long as I can remember I have had an interest in environmental issues and holistic living, long before yoga came to my life. Coming from Finland environment is something we are surrounded by all the time and things like not littering, paying for plastic bags in supermarkets and recycling were things that were well established in every aspect of the society already in the 1980s and even…
Some of you might already have seen the video starring the international yoga teacher Briohny Smith did for the US fitness chain Equinox some six years ago. At the time the clip caused quite an uproar (mainly in the US, not sure if anybody in Europe cared…) as some considered it to be portraying yoga in an overtly sexual way, not representing the “true spirit” of the practise…