Tucson Immersion Day One

Well, we got off to a rockin' start today. We have 23 people here this week. 11 of them have travelled from outside the Tucson area for the Immersion. We have folks from Calgary, Idaho, California, Flagstaff, Ohio, Colorado and other such exotic locales with varying degrees of Anusara Yoga experience but all with a similar love for learning, practice and personal exploration. It is really a great group.

Darren and I talked a lot about our main goals for the training and both of us felt strongly that the purpose of Day One is community building. It is really a "getting to know you" kind of day. AS teachers we need to assess what the group's baseline knowledge is and their capacity to receive and implement instructions. The students are having to jive with us and get in sync with us as teachers, with the other members of the group and with this learning format. No matter what you plan, you have to be willing to scrap it on a moment's notice because you have planned for the "etheric group" and there is is always the meeting of the actual group!

Anyway, we used Community as our theme for the day. We spent about an hour on introductions this morning and then I taught the opening asana class. It was the kind of asana class I must be getting famous for by now- hard work in the basics-- lots of energy, lots of work, basic details repeated over and over again with unflagging passion and zeal! We did lots of work in chataranga, lots of shoulder principles, some standing poses and foray into bhujangasana , setu bandhasana and ustrasana.

At lunch Darren and I debriefed the morning, refined our plan for the afternoon and practiced. Each of us spent a lot of time in sarvangasana which was great because we worked a lot on shoulder stand this afternoon. After lunch we talked about community as it relates to studentship and as that relates to the 5 elements. Then was a long foray into the fundamentals of shoulder stand and we finished up with some pranayama.

Darren and I went out for some great vegetarian food at Govinda's, the local Hare Krishna restaurant. That is a fun scene of sorts. It reminded me of India although that is weird to say because Govinda's is clean and calm so in some ways very unlike India but there was lots of Indian things to buy and so forth. And the whole Hare Krishna thing must be part of the connection.

Anyhow, it was a real pleasure to co-teach and since Darren is one of my favorite people, teaching with him was particularly fun for me. He is really easy to work with and I felt like we were really able to bounce ideas and insights off each other and really serve the students. I felt really charged up from the day. All in all, it is was quite easeful.

All right then, now I am tired and must get myself to bed.