My 30-day Yoga Challenge.

It all started around a year ago when I attended to one free yoga class in a park in Helsinki. After that yoga has slowly taken bigger and bigger role in my everyday life to the point that yoga is now something my body - and mind - need regularly. The next natural thing to do was to try out the 30-day yoga challenge by Yogobe: to practice yoga every day for 30 days. This post is to share how it went.

See more about the challenge from: http://more.yogobe.com/kesan-30-paivan-joogahaaste/

As a typical Finnish person, who usually keeps her life quite busy, the first thing to come in mind was whether I would have time to practice yoga every day. I didn't want to make the challenge as something I would have to stress about because yoga is everything else but a source of stress to me - actually it is a way of removing the stress gathered in my body. However, practicing yoga doesn't mean that you have to do 90 minutes session every time and sometimes just 10 minutes can be enough to relax your mind and to draw your attention to how your body is feeling at the present moment. So saying that there is no time is nonsense, really. There is always time; the thing is what I decide to do with it.

I moved to my new studio apartment conveniently just when the challenge started and the first thing I did there was a yoga practice. It is not a big home, actually quite tiny, but nevertheless there was one specific item I wanted to leave enough space to: my yoga mat. So I decided to bring as few furniture as possible to leave free space in the main room, and I have came to realize that comfy sofa, small dinner table and beautiful wooden chest is actually everything I need there. My yoga mat is always there in it's own space on the floor, ready and waiting for my next practice. There is no easier way of doing yoga than being able to jump on the mat whenever I'm home. It is like a constant reminder that this is something that is good for me, that I should be doing it more for myself in my everyday life. And it works!


Morning yoga with Yogobe @home.

I'm definitely a morning person: I never snooze my alarm, I'm the most efficient during the morning and early daytime, my thoughts flow better in the morning than evening, and I prefer waking up to going to sleep. However, I have hardly been using this time of the day for doing any sort of workout, stretching, dancing etc. Now that it has been pretty quiet at work because of the summer and I can start working a bit later, I decided to try starting most of my work days with a yoga practice during the challenge. And I can tell you: it is without a question the best way of starting a day. Even if I had a shorter sleep during the night and felt really sleepy when alarm rang, yoga woke up my body nicely and softly, opening up the sleepy muscles and especially my back that always seems to stiffen during the night. Morning is also a perfect timing to let positive thoughts conquer my mind so that they'll follow me the whole day. Always start your day with a smile is a good advice for anyone, don't you agree? Morning yoga quickly became a nice routine to kick off my days and now that I have been skipping it some mornings I already regret it at the time I reach my workplace.

Even though I love doing yoga at home and online yoga is definitely a great tool for that (atm most of my home practices are done with an online instructor), I also love sharing my yoga practices with other yogis. When doing yoga together there is so much more energy to share and that energy definitely makes the practice feel different. There are three yoga studios nearby my home and I checked out two of them during the challenge: both are definitely places that I’m going to visit also later on. Summer is also a great time to find several free outdoor yoga classes around Helsinki and I didn’t let this opportunity to run out of my hands. My favorite yoga practice during the whole challenge was a record-breaking big outdoor yoga event in Sinebrychoff Park where more than 300 yogis shared their practice and energy. That huge amount of energy really made magic happen in my body and soul, wow.

Sharing the energy @Yoga Goes Koffari.

Outdoor yoga @Töölönlahti.

So how did the challenge go? Did I manage to do yoga every day for 30 days? To be honest, no, not every single day, not because I wouldn’t have found time for it but because those days I decided to listen to my body that couldn’t take in a physical practice at that moment. However, that is not the main point. The main point is that I did challenge myself and while doing that found new ways of practicing yoga and created new healthy everyday routines into my life. I fell in love with yoga more deeply. I was able to, through yoga, open op my heart to other things happening in my life. I felt happier, more alive, healthier, more present and aware of myself.

 

  

Thank you Yogobe and Yoga365 for motivating me to challenge myself and, most importantly, making me feel better thoroughly. Keep on spreading the yoga love!

Zouk Devils&Friends Summer Weekend.

Ready to go!

When I sat down to the airplane going to Barcelona on Friday, I realized that I was traveling to my first dance festival/congress abroad since 1,5 years. I have been to dance events in the country where I have been living at that time, but it really surprised me it has been that long I had a proper dance festival trip. When I started dancing Zouk I traveled to a dance festival or congress every two months during my first year, and it is not unusual to travel for dancing that frequently, at least if I look at my dance friends. So there I was, traveling to Mataro for the 2nd Zouk Devils&Friends Summer Festival. I was accompanied with two pretty dance ladies from Helsinki who I must thank for organizing most of the practicalities - and infecting me with their enthusiasm of the trip! They were also excellent company for the trip from the beginning to the end, thanks girls!

Mataro's festival is quite unique dance festival because the organizers' idea is not to bring in big names for countless of workshops, but to create an environment where dancers can get to know each other both on and outside of the dance floor. The daytime is left mostly free for relaxing, sightseeing and hanging out in the beach, and therefore most of the zoukers headed to Tsunami Beach with their bikinis, sunscreen and, of course, Zouk music (read: beach dancing!). I must say that this made the whole trip feel like a nice holiday compared to tight scheduled workshops+parties combination. Good conversations, relaxed atmosphere, great music, nice dances, awesome weather... bliss! Also Friday night was spent in Mataro's cheerful town festival instead of dancing. Nice idea, though I, being a true dance addict, would have preferred to have a dance party.

 

 

Going to dance abroad after such a long break cruelly revealed that I have been dancing in my comfort zone for too long time. When you only dance inside your own dance scene, you easily get used to the common style dancers have inside the scene. This is exactly what happened to me. In Helsinki most of the Zouk dancers have similar style to dance and that was the case in Brisbane too. Surely these two places have slightly different styles, but both styles are strongly based on the 'pure' Rio style of Zouk. When I went to Brisbane it took a while to adapt to the locals' way of dancing and I needed to go through the same small adaptation phase when I got back home. However, Mataro's festival included multiple styles of Zouk and there were surprisingly few Rio zoukers, which made me struggle a lot more that I expected.

I haven't had a feeling for a long time that I'm a bad dancer. I usually feel really confident when dancing and I also know that I'm far away of being a bad dancer. Still, in Saturday's party I found myself blaming me for being a bad dancer, horrible follower and crappy partner to dance with. I felt like I was in hurry all the time: I didn't have time to finish my moves, do my styling nor even to step. I didn't have time to breath and I couldn't relax at all. No one asked me to dance. Why, I was thinking, why I was feeling like this? Why was I feeling like a bad dancer?

I was dancing out of my comfort zone, that is why. The leaders had a different way of leading that what I had get used to. Different, not wrong. However, I tried to dance the way I had used to, tried to stretch my movements when there was no time to do that, tried to be a light follow when the leader wanted to create counterweight. I simply struggled to adapt. I ended up craving for more embraces, more body movements, lighter leads, slower phase, less crazy head movements and all the other things I usually get. With that attitude it was no wonder I didn't get into any kind of a dance flow. There were few dances when I felt like I was actually dancing, not surviving, but those were not enough to lift me up to a higher dance level. I was not feeling down, mostly because of my dancing conference, but I couldn't say that it was a great dance party for me either.

The next day I was talking with my Finnish friend about my experience and she shared the similar feelings about the party. I then realized that this was actually a great opportunity to learn something new while simply social dancing. I had forgotten that social dancing in the dance parties used to be the time when I learned the most when I was a beginner - now social dancing has turned to be a time to enjoy and do what I already know. So I headed to Sunday's party with a different mind setting: if I feel like struggling, I'll take it as something new to be learned!

 

Many say that it is the last dance party of a dance festival that is the best. Dancers have gone in some kind of festival mood, they are too tired to show off any more, there is more space on the dance floor and you already know with who you liked dancing with in the previous parties. Sunday's party wasn't an exception to this general rule. It had a great start with 30-something minutes flow, I had some awesome time somewhere in the middle, and a beautiful ending. Though I can't report that I had some really exceptional dances, I sure had a great time. Yet another prove that you can yourself decide whether you're going to have a fun night or not!

After the festival we headed to Barcelona for few days to go around the city and also to visit Spiral Dance dance studio and join the festival's after party. A perfect ending for my little dance holiday! The two other dance addicts continued to Berlin's Zouk congress while I was feeling exhausted enough from the six day trip. Don't tell me I'm getting old...!