As long as we are mere humans, we are also prone to self-deception, doubt and pride. This is precisely why we all need a teacher, someone to check in with from time to time. This summer I have been lucky enough to (re-) connect with two wonderful teachers, both people of great integrity and experience. This has hopefully helped me weeding out some of my bad habits and presumptions:

What a summer this has been!

Returning to Norway, I didn’t have many expectations thinking I had probably been off the grid for too long, - as in “too long to have any cred in the Norwegian yoga society.” Moreover, two years of solid back pain, which even two months in Mysore could not heal, had left my practice at “maintainance level” rather than being the fun and empowering practice it used to be! But what the heat of Mysore could not heal, Norway could, and practicing in the steamy heat at Puro Yoga under the guidance of Alexander Medin, having my friends and colleagues around, I slowly regained my practice asana by asana, series by series…

We were just about to finish class, sitting cross-legged and going into yogamudrasana. I thought of saying a few concluding words about gratitude, about the wonder of being alive, about thankfulness - when the ground started to shake and that awful sound of thunder, which as if coming from within the earth itself - filled the room. “oh no!” one of my students exclaimed as we crawled, rushed, staggered, -I don’t know how - exactly, - to the door and sat in the doorframe holding on to each other for the painfully long time it took for the earthquake to finish its thing.

I left Norway on a kind of spiritual quest. I had been teaching and practicing yoga for a decade, and although yoga always felt deeply spiritual to me, -as did dancing, my first career,- it felt as if the body was perfectly prepared through practice but had “nowhere to go.”