Wholistic Fitness

“Trust no wisdom that was not born from sweat.” – steve ilg

Sweat Puddle, Los Angeles…after another Coach’s HP Yoga Master Class.

this and the other great photos by student Ron Jones.

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Coach,
Karen who took your High Performance Yoga Master Class in LA last month wrote this poem about her experience. Interesting coming from someone who just “dropped in.”
Namaste,
NWSM

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I thought Ilg’s class was what Native people would call “wakan” (sacred, holy), so I wrote about it…

As Ilg was praying to Brahma, I had this lightning thought: Ilg’s class would have had me in deep trouble with my Irish Catholic grandmother, who quietly against me moving to California because I’d crack and join some cult. Gram’s complaint became a family joke every Christmas…

Sheer white curtains sift the afternoon sun
Til it’s a warm twilight in a room empty
Of everything except reflections of ourselves
And the lies, fears, and hopes sliding
In and out of the shadows behind our eyes.
In this womb we meditate, lulled by the prayers
A yogi in the service of foreign gods–
Divine bulls that snort and groan–
Until my feet tingle and snap asleep
And my head floats away like a red balloon
Freed from an impatient child’s wrist.
I am a long way from home, I think,
And I miss my people, like dry earth misses rain.
Then I bend, pose after pose, into impossible
Angles and planes of existence.
The air tastes like the moment before
Lightning makes the thunderclouds come.

Hardly aware of anything but the sound
Of the yogi’s bull breath and my sweat,
Salty tears raining as my whole body cries
From the labor of being reborn
Into LaLaLand the city of waking dreams
where no thunderbirds wheel
and glide through sunset clouds.

– Karen Girard
written after taking coach’s HP Yoga Master Class in Studio City, CA during April 2008