Anna Hultman Yoga

To be able to have a tea with beautiful friend and meditation teacher Emotional Transformation may be my favorite thing about the reopening. PS. Catch her transformational meditations on Monday’s on her Facebook Live.

WORLD CLASS For the last two months here in Singapore we’ve been, along with China, Hong Kong and a few other Asian countries, living with the concrete threat of Covid-19.

We’ve washed our hands, practiced not touching our faces, avoided crowded, touristy places, filled in travel declarations (no China visits!), had our temperature taken when entering schools, shops, concerts and other public places, and being vigilant in general.

Today, looking at the world, I’m so grateful, and proud, of the way Singapore is handling this: calmly, methodically, responsibly and, compassionately.

Following up every case, enforcing rules to protect the most vulnerable, staying on top of things, focusing on what science says, all to avoid spread.

So far, this extremely densely populated 6 million city (for Swedes, imagine 20 million people living on Gotland) has 200 cases and no fatalities.

And this while normally having 3,5 million annual visitors from China, without closing schools and to a large extent allow us carry on as normal.

We are all one. Stay healthy, stay safe, wherever you are!

🇸🇬

In just a few days I’m hitting the beach, the waves, the surf again and I’m really excited.

Next time I go will be in Match hosting a week of yoga and surf with .active.travel and I can’t wait for that either.

As an extra Christmas present .active.travel is giving everyone a really nice rebate on all their trips, including the Bali retreat.

Check it out - info and booking in the link in my bio.

As a yoga student who often appreciates assists and adjustment and as a yoga teacher who often offers assists and adjustments, I find this ongoing discussion both important and interesting.

Can we talk about this in a nuanced and humble way, allowing ourselves to listen to other opinions and also remain vulnerable to stay open to change our previous notions?

Do You Want to Be Touched? Yoga students and teachers are finally grappling with unwanted touch — and the darker history of yoga.

In less than 4 weeks I’ll be co-hosting a weekend retreat along with .sweden and and I’m happy to say it’s FULLY BOOKED (comment below or DM me for waitlist).
For those who didn’t get a spot, please know that I’ll be teaching at other venues the week before - watch this space for specifics.

Hope to see you in November.

FOR THE FIRST TIME IN A LONG TIME I’m hosting a retreat in Sweden and the setup is just great: In the beautiful Swedish countryside, just 30 minutes outside of Stockholm. With nature, lakes and dense forests when you step out the door. Two full days of yoga classes, talks and ample time for thoughts, questions and openminded discussions. Delicious organic, vegetarian food. Old and new friends. To sign up go to https://www.goactivetravel.se/traningsresor/yoga-retreat-sverige (be careful, you might find other trips that you find enticing!) or check the link in my bio. And hit me below with any questions you might have.

Midsummer came early this year. Celebrating with morning yoga with as the sun was rising, wearing traditional flower wreaths, in the center of Stockholm.
Incredible music thanks to , beautiful assists thanks to and .

Thank you everyone that came to celebrate! @ Bibliotekstan

CHRISTMAS COME EARLY So I have some good news for those of you dreaming of getting away this winter: Go Active Travel has a special deal this week: book one of their yoga retreats, including the one I’m hosting in Bali in March, and you get the the early Christmas gift of a rebate of 800 SEK (about the same in HKD, roughly 100 USD and 120 SGD). Need more info? Comment below, DM me or simply check out https://www.goactivetravel.se/ 📷 by Dasha Almazova

Intervju med mig hos Go Active Travel inför yogaresan till Bali. Sorry, English speaking friends, this interview is only in Swedish.

Träningsresa med yoga och surf Följ med yogagurun Anna Hultman till Bali. drömresan för dig som söker en perfekt mix av yoga, meditation, filosofi klasser, tempelbesök, sol, bad, avkoppling och hälsosam mat.

So about the retreat I hinted about, I am happy to announce a collaboration with Go Active Travel to go to my beloved island of Bali, in March.
Indepth yoga classes, including meditation and pranayama every day s well as sessions on yoga philosophy and how to apply it in our daily lives. We're staying at the The Chillhouse - Bali Surf and Yoga Retreats, surfing at Echo Beach with local instructors, take aday trip to Ubud, eat honest, good, local organic vegetarian food.
This is my dream retreat!

https://www.goactivetravel.se/traningsresor/yoga-surfresa-till-bali

Yoga & surfresa till Bali – GoActiveTravel I en vecka i mars, precis när vi är som mest sugna på värme och sol, åker vi tillsammans med Anna Hultman, till Canggu på Bali. Den lilla surfbyn är den perfekta platsen för en yoga och surfresa, med sina yogastudios, många hinduiska tempel och stora utbud av fantastisk vegetarisk mat och g...

GET PACKING

So I have a retreat coming up this spring. Lets just say it involves a lot of yoga, surf, beaches, great food, a cute, hip hotel and lush greenery, all at one of my favorite islands in the world. Any guesses where we’re going?

📷

YOGA CONFERENCING

There is only one thing I like better than teaching at yoga conferences and that’s to attend yoga conferences. Events like these is such a rare and wonderful opportunity to experience yoga in new ways:
🖤 Try new teachers and styles - not one, not two but maybe five or six over the course of a weekend. (For example, I practiced with Sarah Powers and discovered Yin Yoga at a yoga conference in Miami 15 years ago and it changed my perspective of yoga as a whole forever.)
🖤Meet new people with whom you share a big love - whether it’s a special teacher, style or simply yoga. So many sople tell me they have met new friends through yoga, and could there be a better place than where hundreds of yogis have gathered. 🖤 Reconnect with fellow yogis you haven’t seen in a while - and this may be my favorite.

The photo above is from last year’s In Stockholm and the sentiment of the picture, gratitude, is present, when I say that I’m teaching this year too and sharing the teacher’s seat with amazing, knowledgeable and inspiring individuals such as and many more.

Today is the last day to get the Early Bird price so please get yourself over to the account and GET A TICKET!!! See you in Stockholm in less than two weeks!

WE ARE FAMILY Gratitude Challenge Day 6: One of my favourite quotes ever, from spiritual teacher Ram Das, states: “If you think you’re enlightened, go and spend a week with your family”. I mean, I love my family more than anything, but few people, and I don’t think I’m alone here, have such an ability to push my buttons (yes, that’s you dad!). After a few days under the same roof, you’d think I never took a yoga class in my life.

Around Christmas, many of us will have the pleasure, and then maybe pain, of spending time with near and dear ones and today’s challenge is all about making this holiday season as harmonious as possible.

Because as another yoga teacher once told me: “Who are we to judge our world leaders for fighting, if we can’t make peace with our family?” Peace indeed begins at home.
So in that spirit, today’s challenge is towrite a gratitude letter to someone in your family describing in specific terms what they mean to you. Explain why you’re grateful, how they affected your life. Be as concrete as possible, but most important, be authentic.

Describe how you are doing now and how they influenced you positively on your path, and how you remember their efforts.
Don’t get too lengthy - it should not take more than 15 minutes to write.

If you have the opportunity, share it with them, preferably in person. It might be hard, it might be awkward but it’ll be worth it.

RECEIVING WITH GRACE The holiday season is upon us and with it, the season of giving.

We give to make the receiver happy, but also to connect as giving creates a relationship, a way to participate in each others’ lives.

For most of us, giving is easy. Service is an ideal, especially in the yoga community. For many of us, receiving is hard.
When we give - a gift, a compliment, an offer to help - we can feel generous, connected, empowered and even in control. Receiving can make us feel the opposite.
We say, “Please don’t get me anything... I don’t need anything”, while that may be true, we are essentially shutting that person out, denying them the chance to practice love. Generosity, both in giving and receiving, opens hearts and hence we must learn to accept gratefully.

Also, when we receive, we may feel we need to give back. We ask: how soon can I repay them? What have I done to deserve it? We all do this, so learning to receive with grace is crucial.

We can look at life as if we’re here to learn about the giving and receiving of love. Giving and receiving of support, appreciation, affection, compliments, gifts are beautiful opportunities to practice just that.
I recently read this which describes it beautifully: “Just as we take in breath with no conscious effort, then breathe out again, we should learn to receive and give back with no explanation needed.” To practice this’s, instead of seeing it as receiving something, see it as giving someone else joy, the joy of giving.
And, when you receive, don’t rush! Instead, pause, let the gift, the praise, sink in. Think about what the person said or did. Thank them.

It’s a present, so be present! Honor the gift with a smile and eye contact— an external, physical reflection of the exchange.

GRATITUDE CHALLENGE DAY 4: SANTOSHA AND SMILES

In the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, the ancient text in how to find peace of mind, “santosha”, or contentment, is described as the ultimate source for true happiness and joy. And really, if we don’t feel we’re lacking anything, how can we not be happy?

Santosha is achieved by feeling that this moment is perfect. And this is backed by science too: instead of taking up time and energy complaining about what’s wrong, we act “as if” all is good and thereby freeing up mental space to solve the actual problem (if any!).

One way to act “as if” is to simply smile. So much science supports the physical, mental and emotional benefits of smiling: lower stress levels, better sleep, due to release of, among other things, endorphins and the body’s own antidepressants, serotonin.

Smiling makes us feel good about ourselves and it also makes the people we smile at feel good about themselves - again, supported by research.
So today in our gratitude challenge one of the exercises is to smile.
Smile as often as you can, more than you usually do, at unexpected moments, at strangers. Smile at yourself for being great, smile when you make a mistake, smile because you want to smile!

At the end of your day, please take out your journal and just in a few sentences, reflect upon what smiling did for you today and of course, let me know what happened.

GRATITUDE CHALLENGE DAY 3: FROM GUILT TO GRACE

Full disclosure: I’m often running late. Not by much, sometimes not at all, but honestly I’m rarely early.

This can of course be both disrespectful to those I’m meeting, and stressful for me. It also means that I’m often “sorry”, looking to reconcile with both myself and the person I’m running late for.

Thus, it was transformational when I read how you should not apologize for being late, but instead THANK the person you’re late for, for being patient, for waiting.

And it works for other areas too: there are many opportunities to shift from guilt to grace.

A simple exercise is to think about a specific situation in your life where you often find yourself apologizing. Make the shift by finding how to turn your thought around and find gratitude. Make sure the grace is natural and authentic, and find yourself and your relationships transform.

CHALLENGE DAY 2 Moved, and grateful, by the response to the idea of focusing on gratitude for 10 days.

Today’s challenge is about recognizing areas which might lack gratitude. Things in our lives that are really important but we may sometimes take for granted.
The idea is to think about anything that bothers or irritates us and then see how we would be without the source of that irritation. That is, if you hate your crowded morning commute, imagine your everyday, without the subway system. If your partner have a habit you detest, imagine life without them.
What we want to do is identify things we don’t realize we’d miss, until we don’t have them. Examples may be health, special people in our lives, money... Meanwhile we also clearly establish the areas where real change actually is needed.

Today I am grateful for my husband and my family. It’s so easy to take our partner for granted (been there!) which is why I aim to see the good, give thanks every day that he is here and for all that he is.

THANKFUL10 CHALLENGE DAY 1

Today is the first day of my “Gratitude Challenge” - 10 days of focusing on the things we’re most grateful for. During the 10 days I’ll also share scientific studies, exercises to enhance gratitude and more.

Since a caption is limited, I only share parts here. If you want more please DM me your email address and you’ll get daily inspiration and assignments to your Inbox.

So why gratitude? For many reasons but let’s start with the brain. It seems that gratitude not only activates the brain’s reward center but areas associated with handling emotions, bonding, moral judgment, as well as our ability to put ourselves in other people’s shoes, also fire up. So practicing gratitude not only feels good, it also appears to helps us make better decisions, get an improved moral compass and closer relationships.

So how to do it? In fact, it’s easy - this will only take 2-3 minutes.
Close your eyes and begin to think of something that you are grateful for. It can be family, health, where you live... More important is that it comes naturally and is not contrived. See your subject in front of you. How do you feel? Do you get a smile on your face? Feel grateful? Happy? Touched? Take a moment to take it all in.

Then, get concrete: WHAT is it you appreciate? Be specific: “she brings me coffee in bed”, “being healthy means I’m home with my kids instead of at the hospital”. List as many things as you can. Let it come naturally.

When you feel you’re done, again see your subject in front of you and silently repeat “thank you” as many times as you like. Feel yourself filling up with gratitude and when you’re done, open your eyes and just go on with your day.

Feel free to share your experience below in the comments or on your own page and see you tomorrow for more!

What do Roxane Gay, Brené Brown and Louise Hay have in common apart from all being female, American and bestselling authors?

Well, probably a lot and very little, but for now they have all inspired me to create the Gratitude Challenge.

Starting tomorrow, December 1, I will post something that I am truly grateful for every day, along with facts and snippets about gratitude I picked up along the way.

If you want to participate in the challenge you will get a message with research on gratitude, inspiration, tips on further reading and much more, every day for the ten days. You are also encouraged to share any thing you’re grateful for with others, either here, on other social platforms, in the group and/or with people close to you.
I’m doing this hoping both to inspire others and for myself to see how this will affect me going into the holiday season, for many, an intense time of the year.

By focusing on all the goodness I already have I hope to be able to share and give more authentically and generously this holiday season.

If you want to try what gratitude can do for us (according to research: a lot!) and participate in the challenge please let me know in the comments below or DM me your email address.

Happy and honored to once again be a part of Yoga Games in Stockholm, Sweden, in February. It’s such a great conference with a wide range of yoga styles.

Today is the last day for the Super Early Bird price so go the site www.yogagames.org and mention code AnnaHultman and you’ll get a lot of yoga bang for your buck.

Hope to see you there!

What IS yoga anyway??!! Discuss with me in this WS at pretty Brahmayoga on Sunday! Hope to see you there!

Vad Är Yoga? med Anna Hultman - 24/9 – Brahmayoga 350 kr Early Bird pris t o m 31/8, därefter 390 kr Yoga kan vara så många olika saker; en flera tusen år gammal tradition, en träningsform; en effektiv metod att bli mer fokuserad. Yoga är även att sätt att … Continued

Stockholm, how lovely to be back! This is the fun teaching schedule for the next weeks:

Monday September 11 Dome of Visions SE at 17.30
Wednesday September 13 Altromondoyoga Sweden at 18.30
Thursday September 14 at Gather Morning Program at Downtown Camper at 07.00
Friday September 15 at Altromondo Yoga at 12.00
Saturday September 16 retreat with Malin Sävstam Ahlstrand at Cal Reiet - Holistic Retreat in Palma De Mallorca, Spain
Tuesday September 19, second retreat at Cal Reiet - Holistic Retreat
Sunday September 24 at Brahmayoga at 10.00

Hope to see you!

Stockholm friends!

I am looking for recommendations: who is your favourite yoga teacher in Stockholm? The most experienced and knowledgeable? The funniest? The one with that keen ability to see all students. That lives yoga even off the mat.

I would like to get in touch with these teachers whether they share Ashtanga, Kundalini, Vinyasa or Jivamukti. Yin, Restorative, Power and more for a SUPER FUN project.

Let me know in the comments below or drop me an email! AND please let me know if you're interested yourself!

Thank you and lots of love,
Anna Hultman

NEVER DONE

The beautiful thing with yoga is that we’re never done. There’s always another dimension of ourselves to explore, a new pose to try or yet another thought to calm in meditation.

Sometimes though, I feel stuck and want some inspiration, be challenged and some help to grow.

If you ever felt the same way and want to take your practice to the next level concerning asana, meditation and philosophy I’m happy to announce that I’m teaching a class I call “LEVEL UP” at, Studio Levels (where else?!) in Stockholm on September 10 at 12.00.

It will include both asana, meditation and some yoga philosophy for all of us to take the next step on our journey.
Please contact them or simply comment below to find out more or simply save spot.

Yoga friends, please take a minute to read the insightful article below. Some it really resonated and is so much along the lines of my own thoughts, although I'm not nearly as eloquent expressing them.

So, pease read - its worth your time - and let me know what you think.

Yoga: Beyond the BS | Carol Horton, Ph.D. Back when there wasn’t much critical writing about yoga available, I tried to read as many blogs and articles that addressed some problematic aspect of yoga culture as I could. But that was then. In years, it wasn’t such a long time ago. In felt time, though, it feels like a distant memory.

TARASANA Here's a favorite asana to cool and calm down in the heat: Tarasana or Star pose.

A forward bend that's softer than a full Pascimottanasana and a hip opener that's more gentle than Badha Konasana.

I find it's both relaxing and rejuvenating (and some mornings it stretches me like nothing else: upper back, outer leg and knee, shoulders). Photo: