Well my fourth weekend of Yoga Teacher Training (a.k.a Yogaversity) is here and gone.  I can’t believe it’s already March!  Time is flying by as I predicted it would.  It’s just another reminder to myself to live in the present moment.  Not to wish away the weekdays, or weeks in between training.  Not to wonder what it will be like when we get to the weekend 7 or 8.  Just to take it all in.

These words have seemed to stick with me recently… 

“It was one of the best days of my life, a day during which I lived my life and didn’t think about my life at all.” Jonathan Safran Foer

We had an awesome weekend learning about…

• Backbends
• Lakshmi, the goddess of good fortune, wealth, and inner and outer abundance
• History of Patanjali’s Classical Yoga and beyond
• Nomadic Poses
• Sanskrit!

It was such a heart opening weekend (I’m seeing a common trend here).  Because there is so much information I learn during these weekends, I’ll stick to the trend of keeping it short and sweet.  

Here are a few things I learned this weekend.

Thank you to Alley Maher, our official Yogaversity photographer.  How beautiful are her pictures?!  

Earlier yoga (around the 1970’s) consisted primarily of seated poses.  Backbends have become more prevalent in just the past 10-15 years.

When we (humans) move backwards we tend to move into the low back too fast.  The lower back is not strong enough because we don’t use it enough.  This is why it is so important to move from your upper back and make that the priority in backbends.

Thigh stretches (no the above picture is not one of thigh stretches – just doing some casual cartwheels) can be placed anywhere in a yoga class sequence and prepare the body for both backbends and forward bends.

There are dozens of goddesses in the Hindu pantheon.  They each represent or even invoke different psychological energies in ourselves. This is all very new for me, but it’s been really interesting and fun to read about.  I’ve learned that you can uncover energies that you feel day to day that you may never have thought to even take notice of. (Paraphrased from Awakening Shakti by Sally Kempton)

Sanskrit consists of sets of syllables that can be spoken out loud.  Most of the time when people pronounce Sanskrit wrong, it’s because they are putting the stress on the wrong syllable.  I was going to try to give an example but just realized it’s really hard to type out, especially because we don’t have the correct symbols to put over certain letters.  So just trust me on that one!

Until next time!