Last week I came back from Spain, Costa del Sol. The weather was just amazing, every day blue skies and the temperature averaging out +25C. I did my yoga practice with a bunch of Spanish ladies on the beach. It was lovely, as you can imagine. One morning started off cloudy, however it was still 20 degrees. Actually quite perfect conditions for the practice to my mind. The ladies started to suggest a later starting time as “it is a bad weather”. I was like “whaaaaat?!”.
Even though born as a Finn, after living in Asia for 12 years I did become very well climatized to quite extreme heat and humidity. I do love to feel the sun penetrating through my bones. I am sensitive to cold. So I do understand people living in countries with more sunny days than not, that a cloudy day with 20 degrees might feel a bit, well “chilly”.
Meanwhile back in Finland our outdoor park yoga sessions still carry on. This covid-19 summer I started to share yoga for my local community outdoors by our village coffee roastery. People being scared doing sports or practising yoga indoors, it was the perfect set up – on a green lawn moving and breathing together inhaling all the fresh air. Easy to keep the social distancing too.
When we started the parkyoga in June we enjoyed almost Mediterranean weather conditions; blue skies, temperatures being high 20’s, we were sweating away under the sweltering sun. As the summer started to fade away so did the higher temperatures. We decided to keep on going as long as it’s not raining. I thought we’ll manage to carry on probably till the end of September at it’s best however now it is NOVEMBER and yesterday when we had our parkyoga session it was a pretty grey, gloomy day with 4C (yes, +4 celsius) degrees. Ten yogis still rolled out their mats on the moist and damp grass. A tip – place an old towel under your yoga mat. That way the towel takes the dampness instead of your mat – it works wonders! Now tested a few times in the real autumn outdoor conditions.
So what’s the learning of this little story? It’s so relative what is, say good/bad/warm/cold weather. Like everything in our life, right/wrong/beautiful/ugly – it depends what kind of glasses we are wearing – through what kind of lenses we are observing things.
We all come up every now and then with little excuses of not doing our yoga practice (or postponing it) or whatever else in our life. What’s your latest excuse? If I think back all these years, I’ve had a few – those moments I’ve tricked myself on the mat by saying, “ok, today I’ll do just a 15min quick fix”, usually the practice ends up going pretty much always much longer though, as soon as I’ve passed the initial moment of wanting to do something else instead.
The ancient yoga texts like The Bhagavad Gita and The Yoga Sutras by Patanjali are teaching us; it’s all about the mind control.
OM Shanti ~ Peace,
Sanna
