Sunday

Well, here I am in Costa Rica. It has been a few days since I wrote and now I am bit tired so I am not sure how brilliant the post will be. Probably not so much. It was a pretty long and uneventful day of travel to get here. I left home around 5:30am and got to the retreat center around 4:00 and had time to check in, unpack and do a practice before I ate dinner. So all that was great.

We have a very small group here this week and so we combined groups to make each teacher have a lighter work load which was a very elegant solution in my book. As it stands I will teach some asana every afternoon and have the mornings free to rest, write and practice- just like I, myself, am on a retreat! After my afternoon class, Martin will teach anatomy which I am really looking forward to. So in a lot of ways, this is a great gig- I get to have some personal down time, I get to teach some lovely people, AND I get to learn more about anatomy while I am at it. All in all, a good deal.

I mentioned I will have time to do some writing. John and I finally decided that the timing is not right for Anusara Yoga to publish the book I wrote and so I will be making some changes to the content so that it can go to the editor at Hohm Press- who published my first book and who did some editing on this project and is excited about working together on completing the project, which I am really excited about. I am ready to bring it to completion as it is exactly 2 years since I first gave the manuscript to John. So on the plane over here I did a round of edits on hard copy and I need to enter them into my computer and then I will have to re-read it and see what else I need to change. I need to do some work on the bibliography now that I am shifting the content a bit but I can certainly do that while Regina is reading/editing/reviewing it.

The basic gist of the book is how to take yogic principles off the mat in order to build what I call a Temple of the Body. I am very pleased with the writing.In fact, I hadn't read the manuscript in so long, I actually found my own thoughts inspiring! Really the other part of the premise is that practice- asana, mantra, meditation, diet, etc. is really all about love. Discipline does not have to be some set of self-imposed restrictions that we do to be "good yogi's" but instead could simply be a way that we align ourselves with our heart and so whatever gestures we make are really self-affirming, self-loving acts. Obviously, not a new theme for me, but it hangs together quite nicely, I think. I tie it into a story about a great Indian Saint named Yogi Ramsuratkumar.

So- it is nice, as I am working on the book about practice beyond asana to have some time this week to dive into them and focus on them. So that is a plus- Then on Saturday I start an Immersion in town which will be a whole different gig.

Well, that's a rap for now. Gotta make a sequence for this afternoon.