Ashtanga Yoga Noordhoek

Hi everyone.

As we reach the end of this challenging year I would like to say, “thank you” for our meetings, mainly online, which hopefully gave you a sense of support and togetherness.

If the past year has taught us anything, it is to take pleasure in the small, simple things and to be patient. I hope that the yoga classes have helped you to bring some balance, calm and joy into your homes this year.

Wishing you all the very best for 2021 and a peaceful and very happy New Year.

With gratitude, Marion

Hi everyone.

Three more online classes before this year ends.

Wednesday 23rd & 30th: 1700 - 18.30 Moon Sequence

Monday 28th: 7 - 8.30 Primary Series

Microsoft Teams app and link required.

Contact Marion on 083 9555 207

"In the stillness of your presence, you can feel your own formless and timeless reality as the unmanifested life that animates your physical form. You can then feel the same life deep within every other human and every other creature. You look beyond the veil of form and separation. This is the realization of oneness. This is love."

Eckhart Tolle

Hi everyone.

I continue offering online classes on Microsoft Teams in November.

Monday 7 - 8.30am (modified) Half Primary Series

Wednesday 1700 - 18.30 Moon Sequence

Friday 7 - 8.30am Primary Series

Please contact me for further information.

Wishing you a nice day further.

🙌 Marion: 0839555207
E-mail: [email protected]

http://www.elephantjournal.com/2012/01/tapas-the-first-instrument-of-doing-yoga-paul-dallaghan/

Tapas: The First Instrument of Doing Yoga. ~ Paul Dallaghan Tapas: The First Instrument of Doing Yoga. ~ Paul Dallaghan

A few spaces are still left - join us on Easter Monday at the shala in Noordhoek for a yin & yang practice.

Namaste, Marion

Yoga enthusiasts are very welcome to pop into the Shala in Noordhoek for a social gathering this Friday.

Namaste,

Marion

Namaste

Photos from the last workshop at the shala with Michael and Nita. Bend it like Beckham! Ha, ha..

Hi everybody.

I'm pleased to welcome Michael Durand Schabort and Nita Miralles to the shala.

They will be our guest teachers/ practitioners for a week, starting tomorrow. Both of them will bring to us their experience teaching ashtanga yoga the mysore way in Spain, South America and other parts of the world.

Michael is a level II authorized teacher (authorized by Sharath Jois). We'll open the shala 6 days this week and I invite you to make full use of this opportunity.

Michael will lead us through the counted Primary Series this Friday.

Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday
Meditation: 6-6.20am
Practice: 6.20-8.45am

Friday
Meditation: 6.05-6.25am
Led class starts at 6.30am

Sunday
Practice: 7-9am

Beginners, new practitioners are welcome to join. Please call or send a WhatsApp message for any further questions. Cell: 083 955 5207

See you tomorrow.

Namaste, Marion

Full Moon tomorrow, a resting day in the ashtanga traditional. Enjoy the lie-in.

http://aylibrary.blogspot.com/2012/01/moon-days.html?m=1

Why we don't practice on Moon Days From Shri K. Pattabhi Jois at the Ashtanga Yoga Shala: "That day is very difficult day. Two stars one place (conjunction) is ...

INTRO TO MYSORE

With Marion Bartko-McCabe

Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday every week in January 2019 (no practice on Monday 21st January).

Time: 7.30-8.30am

Place: 19 Sea Cottage Drive in Noordhoek

Costs: R250 per week or R600 for the month
Take our week-long introduction and join the Mysore community at the Shala in Noordhoek. Learn the fundamentals of breath, movement and postural form as we help you develop a Mysore practice of your own. Instruction is gentle and sensitive to individual needs. No experience necessary. Beginners are absolutely welcome.

To book please send a message or call/ whatsapp: 083 955 5207.
E-mail: [email protected]

Traditional Ashtanga Classes

Mysore-Style Ashtanga - Beginners to experienced students, 6:20-8.45am, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday.

For beginners, we offer 3 consecutive sessions for R250, valid for one week, to provide an opportunity to acquaint yourself with this method and decide if it's suitable for you.

This is Ashtanga Yoga in its traditional form. Each student is addressed individually. All levels, beginners to advanced, practice together in a supportive community environment. Students work directly with the teacher to gradually memorize, refine and integrate the sequence of poses so that they develop a flowing, consistent and established yoga practice. It doesn’t take long to learn. Beginners start with a shorter practice that evolves into a longer practice as they gain strength and flexibility. Patience and a regular, consistent practice, at least 2-3 times a week to start, is recommended to learn the posture sequence, and to see the many benefits to the mind and body.

Join us and experience the beauty of a Mysore-style class. It is quiet, meditative, supportive – and fun!

Why Mysore-style practice?

Convenience: after your first Mysore class, you can arrive any time as long as you give yourself enough time to complete your practice, and leave when you are done.

Individualized instruction: Even though we’re all working on the same sequences, no two practices or people are alike. Your practice is based on your ability, not the group. The teacher assists everyone individually, as needed. It’s like private yoga, but in a group setting.

Self-Paced: You don’t need to keep up or slow down as for a group class. You follow a pace that is appropriate for your own body.

Let beginners be beginners: In Mysore class, you are never pushed beyond your ability or put into a situation that may not be appropriate for your strength or flexibility – and you don’t get lost in the group.

Doors open 6am for a 20min seated meditation, practice starts from 6.20am with the opening chant. Please plan to be in your finishing poses by 8:20am.

Note: Anyone can observe a Mysore class for free, anytime. Please email [email protected] to arrange a visit.

In addition to the Mysore style, there are Led Ashtanga Full Primary Series classes held on the first and third Friday of every month, 6:30-8am.

This led class moves through the Ashtanga Primary Series. It is for Mysore/Ashtanga practitioners who have some experience, or those with a consistent and strong Vinyasa Yoga practice. This class helps students develop the discipline of following the rhythmic breath count of the traditional led Ashtanga Primary series practice. There is minimal instruction or assistance in this class. Rather, it is a flowing, breathing practice in community with the vinyasa count and the breath of the collective class.

Contact: Marion on 083 9555207 or [email protected]

https://www.google.co.za/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2014/feb/24/mysore-style-yoga-self-practice-group-ashtanga

http://happyfit.net.au/my-first-mysore/

Mysore-style yoga: one-to-one practice in a group setting Mysore self-practice is the traditional way of practising ashtanga yoga, and offers a personalised approach without the cost of a private lesson. Geraldine Beirne explains

Extract from David Garrigues's newsletter:

"I’d like to tell you a story.

There was a devoted man, a self-taught yogi on a deserted island in the middle of the ocean. He had all of these devotional practices that were half based on Hindu rituals and half what he had made up. One day a distinguished master from a prominent lineage came to the island on a boat. He saw this man doing his rituals.

He said, “Sir, you’ve got so many things to work on, so many problems, you're getting it all wrong.”

The man was humble and eager to learn and the master taught him many lessons and corrected his mistakes. At the end of the lessons the master felt satisfied he had straightened him out. Soon it was time for the master to leave.

As the master began to sail away on his boat the man on the island came running across the top of the water yelling, “Sir, I forgot! Do you put this mudra here or there?”

Upon seeing the man running on top of the water the master yelled, “No problem, do whatever you were doing!”

The message of this story is that your choices, efforts, devotion, sacrifices, visions, and dedication are what have the most weight in your practice. Sure the entire list of outer rules play an important role in guiding you safely and effectively along the path but while attempting to follow the rules and be a good student/person never forget to value your own try, your own mind, senses, and body. No matter how others may perceive you or how tiny, halting, unskilled, unorthodox, odd, immature, unusual, different, or outside the norm they might seem.

From the first day you practice, and then onward into the distant future, place deep implicit trust in yourself. Trust in the way that you see, feel, hear, and do things small and large. Make learning and evolving in your practice about being more and more absorbed in whatever grabs ahold of you. Follow what you love with a ferocious passion. Follow your instincts, yearnings, and inner promptings farther and farther and farther within yourself.

Be open to accepting instruction. Aim to be teachable and allow yourself to be taught but also keep in mind that any original perception, insight, or knowing that comes from within your own skin will ultimately be more valuable, accurate, fitting, true, and useful for you. Seen in this light, you can rejoice in the harsh fact that you walk alone through your life from birth to death. You can learn to become more self-reliant and find more ease in walking down the independent, uncharted, unique path that is in store for you. This is the path you must fully own in order to attain the prize of Self-knowledge and be a part of creating the world according to your visions of beauty, peace or justice."

David Garrigues talks beautifully about "The Subtleties Of Breath":

Marek Łaskawiec: My son saw me once practicing yoga. After the practice he came to me and said: “I understand the flexibility and strength stuff but why do you have to breathe so loudly?” What would be your answer?

David Garrigues: There are different ways of answering this question. Yoga is meditation. It is about creating awareness, being in the present moment. It seems like such a basic thing. However, when you start to explore consciousness, you realize that it is a rare event to be in the present moment and that you are always distracted. So you have to use what is available to you in order to jog yourself into the moment, and breath is an amazing tool. You do it 21,600 times in 24 hours. Breathing is something that is constantly going on. It is always there. It is a manifestation of life. It is like the ocean with its ebb tides and flow, its waves. and on these waves you find a jellyfish, which is also undulating. Everything has this pulse and rhythm, the whole universe, and the breath is this most basic rhythm of life and its happening right in your chest. That is why it is such a great tool for coming to the present moment. That is why you grab on to it. You make sound with the breath because this rhythm is hiding – you do it to overcome the breathe's atrophy. When we are distracted and when we are not in the moment, we do not breath well. We only use a small portion of our lung capacity. When we are breathing properly there is this muscular churn, the breath does a piston like action but for most people this has atrophied. People barely breathe in and out. When we breathe consciously, when we make a sound, we automatically use more of the breath capacity. The sound makes you breathe out more and breathe in more. But this sound also makes your kid say “What is that?”

Marek Łaskawiec: Why do we combine asanas with breath? Wouldn’t it be enough to do asanas separately and then just sit down and do some breathing?

DG: Our breath is inhibited, we've lost touch with it, so you have to coax it out of hiding and it is asana that helps you do it. It is that simple. What is particularly important is vinyasa. Nowadays it is practically impossible to think about asana that is static, that does not have movement associated with it. Be it this or that kind of yoga, they are all based on what Pattabhi Jois started. Before that it was different. When you took a class in the 70's or 80's, you wouldn’t have moved with the breath. Vinyasa follows the breathing pattern. The inbreath is an expansion, the outbreath is a contraction. The movements are imitating that and helping you to bring the breathe out of hiding. So when you lift the chest in upward facing dog that helps you to breath in and when you fold forward that helps you breath out. But this is only one reason why you do it. What you also want to do is to learn from that. You want to learn how to separate breath and movement so that eventually you can gain the skill to breathe and not move, to be still. You allow your asana practice to teach you about breathing. There is also an energetic aspect to it. One can talk about breath very scientifically, mechanically or anatomically – i.e. that it is respiration, exchange of oxygen and CO2, or that your diaphragm contracts and releases with the breath. But in yoga, breath is also an energetic event. The purpose of yoga is to stop distracting mind activities and one of the ways to do it is by the movement of prana, or life force, with the breath. The breath contains prana. Part of the job of connecting asana with breathing is to churn, to generate prana, to wake it up. When we are not breathing well we are distracted and prana is inhibited. We do asana with breathing to wake the energy inside the body.

Marek Łaskawiec: Let’s talk about the intensity of breath. During the workshop you said that if we wanted to energize ourselves on a bad day, we should breathe more energetically. On the other hand, when someone is too fired-up, it may be a good idea to breathe slower. What would be an idea tempo, intensity, loudness of breathing? Or is it just individual and we should follow our own’s intuition?

DG: Yes and no. It is partly individual and we can partly rely on our intuition but you want to stay within a certain range. It is like with any kind of artist. Take for instance musicians. They can generate all kinds of subtleties and softness but suddenly they can go to the other spectrum - there is this explosion of sound, almost total chaos and this is also true with a breathing yogi. You can subtle and with total power. You can do it slowly or you can do it fast without any conflict. There is a yoga sutra that says: “tato dvandva-an-abhighatah” (2:48), i.e. when you are doing asana, you are not constrained by the opposites. That also applies to breathing. A yogi wants to be versatile and responsive with the breath, tuned into it and fully savy with the technology. Breathing is one of main techniques of hatha yoga. But what often happens is that we lock ourselves out being able to use the technology. For example, when you breathe too forcefully, how can you listen to your breath? Some people do it and it is not even nice to practice next to them. They lose their awareness but they think: “I’ve got it going, I’m churning!”. On the other hand, you can also be very timid and hardly breathe at all, which is also bad. So you want to maintain that range and utilize it skillfully. Everything that you can apprehend with the senses is always changing and the human being hates this change. Its vexing and scary to us. It requires discipline to be constantly confronted with change. But this is the way it is, you have to negotiate it and your breath will reflect that. You want the breath to go from one side of the range to the other, and intuitively you follow it. It is a part of becoming skillful. You are like an instrument, you learn to play it and express yourself with it."

http://yogashala.ie/2017/07/22/ashtanga-yogas-bad-rep/

Ashtanga Yoga’s Bad Rep I see it as part of my role as a teacher of ashtanga yoga to change the reputation it has gained of being ‘the hard yoga’. We get so many students that arrive into the shala (who have d…

Hi everybody.

Good to be back and to see you practicing so beautifully.

This week: Wednesday and Friday mysore practice 6.15-8.45am.

From next week the schedule will change slightly as I would like to start a regular meditation session from 6-6.20am. Meditation is as you know one of the limbs of ashtanga yoga. My recent experience in Berlin confirmed to me how important this aspect is when practiced regularly.

Asana practice from 6.20-8.45.

If you can attend the meditation part please arrive just before 6am. Anybody who is just coming for the asana practice may arrive after 6.20am. I would like to introduce 20min of just sitting before you start moving. Please don't interrupt during this time.

Otherwise just keep showing up and enjoy the process, discovering the possibilities..

Have a wonderful day further,

namaste,

Marion

Many thanks for joining me this morning to move through 108 salutes to the sun, to celebrate the UN International Yoga Day and the winter solstice. Some of you couldn't attend but you were all there in spirit. It's great when the shala is "cooking". When we can show gratitude, burn what needs to be released, what doesn't serve us anymore. Ready to start from the beginning, a new chapter on a blanc canvas...

As T.S. Eliot wrote: "We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time."

Namaste, Marion

"As we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same."

Nelson Mandela

http://ashtangayogaproject.com/how-to-make-your-yoga-practice-easier/

How To Make your Yoga Practice Easier - Ashtanga Yoga Project How to make your yoga practice easier

“So whether you do your first downward dog at 14 or 44, it’s not your history but your presence on your mat that counts."

Pattabhi Jois

Practice, Practice, Practice - Ashtanga Yoga Project I saw a post today where someone was going through a very emotional experience and wondered “how the limbs of yoga could help them now?” I will use an analogy. Soldiers don’t wait for the battle to start preparing for it. They train beforehand so that, when they are in battle, their responses ...

“I see Ashtanga as a map and not a mandate. If we view Ashtanga as equaling first and second series and think we have to do the entire series in order to consider it a good day of practice, we are bound to suffer. We will have days and times in our lives when we need to do less. I see the Mysore room as a place for students to learn how to practice yoga as well as learn how to practice what is good for them. Yoga should support our life and not be another demand that we put on ourselves. Our practice should cultivate inquiry, sensitivity, and kindness to ourselves. If we force ourselves to stick to the series no matter what is happening in our body and mind, we have missed the whole point of yoga. Some days we might be better off going for a walk in nature.
Let’s also keep in mind that not everyone should or can do all the poses in first series. As teachers, no matter what yoga style we teach, we should know how and when to modify for our students needs. What better place than the Mysore room, where everyone can go at their own pace? It is a wonderful way to learn to listen to your body and to your needs. The practice can always be modified so that Ashtanga can support you”
Maty Ezraty

New to Yoga | Mysore Yoga CPH Strong body. Calm mind. Improved sense of humor. Astanga yoga for beginners in Frederiksberg, near Copenhagen city centre.

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2014/feb/24/mysore-style-yoga-self-practice-group-ashtanga?CMP=share_btn_fb

Mysore-style yoga: one-to-one practice in a group setting Mysore self-practice is the traditional way of practising ashtanga yoga, and offers a personalised approach without the cost of a private lesson. Geraldine Beirne explains