Friday found us yet again at our finale of another Pop Up for Charity. This week has been all about Forces of Nature which brought to mind one of the most powerful experiences I have had - the day we went out on an ethereally beautiful grey, misty morning on a little boat off Vancouver Island and this happened......
Apologies for the dodgy camera work, my hands were shaking from the adrenalin of seeing these wonderful creatures just a few yards away! We counted 21 Orcas! Nature at its most glorious, the magnificent scenery powerful enough on its own, but the serenity and immense strength in the whales' fluid movements was completely mesmeric.......
We don't need to see Forces of Nature though to feel their power. Whether a textbook Force like Gravity or that most powerful of emotional forces, Love, first of all we have to open ourselves to 'feeling' them. Yoga with its gross and subtle ways of practicing and 'being in our bodies' is a fantastic tool for this - think of it as a ring pull, where you decide how quickly you open the can to let things out......
We worked this week with various forces; the Force of Gravity (I bowed in the end to Stephen Hawking's knowledge!), the natural forces in Weather, the forceful pull of the Moon, Windmills & Walls ( - see earlier post for explanation) and the hardest one to overcome, Force of Habit! One Yoga class alone will not be enough to find a complete solution for the latter, but shaking things up a little hopefully gave us space to focus on some things we feel the need to change, both in practice and maybe in reactions to life in general.
Yoga itself though should never become just a habit. Here at our Pop Ups, I've been so pleased to see how dedicated to practice everyone becomes, turning up to as many classes as life allows and using the recordings to catch up if necessary. There is a certain amount of routine, which we human beings do find comforting, knowing that every morning at 7.30am the day starts on our mat. However everyone turns up a little earlier in the waiting room now to catch up on the chat, have a few giggles, check in and check up on how everyone else is doing. This I believe is down to another particularly strong force, the power of interaction with others. We all need that now more than ever and whichever way you find it, whether on Zoom at a Mont Blanc Yoga class or walking with friends with coffee in hand, the magnetic force of connection and the powerful flood of happy endorphins it brings is a habit none of us should want to break!
Our April Pop Up donated over £600 to The British Red Cross Ukrainian Appeal, greatly needed there at the moment. By coming to class, we projected this sense of community we now have to all those people we can help through this donation, spreading that most powerful of emotional forces to the other side of the world...... Thank you all our MBY Yogis, you are FAB!
I want to share the end of the Pop Up with all our readers to say thank you too and if you would like to be part of it, our next May Pop Up, again donating to the Ukrainian Appeal, starts this Bank Holiday Monday 2nd May at the slightly later time of 8am. The details and booking can be found at www.Montblancyoga.com on the Charity Pop Up page. We'd love to see you join our Force on the mat!
Namaste X