Month: September 2021

Ten years ago Shiva Rea, who revolutionized yoga into a free-style, flowing yoga, gave a talk on Burning Man called:
Tending The Sacred Fire; The origins, repression and revival of free-form movement

Her talk tells the history of dancing, and how it is something babies do instinctively, yet it was almost equally instinctively repressed by the church, because it represented creative power.

And when you read creative power, you could also read sexual power.
Because those are the same thing.

And it wasn’t until the 50s brought us rock n roll, that it ended.
Shiva points out, how you cannot be afraid and dance at the same time. Fear needs you to hold still.  
In the 50s Elvis came, people started to dance freely and the spell of fear and repression was lifted.

This analysis from Shiva Rea touches on something I have been trying to make up my mind about,  as I am wondering how to start, or root, my second career in yoga.
Will I continue to write yoga schedules for my yoga classes and my yoga videos? 
Or not.

The reasons to do so, are absolutely overwhelming.
Methodical teaching will give you a system that will allow you to understand yoga as a whole. You will be able to take classes, wherever you are, and feel like you know the poses and have some kind of reference.
And I ve also quite enjoyed making schedules, usually based on vintage yoga books, on videos from YouTube, courses I took, or on dvds.
I always had one schedule for every class week, which I often made available for the people in class. It gave me a sense of groundedness, as a teacher.

And yet:
In the final years of teaching group classes, I already had the desire to be a teacher without a script.
Just like my blog posts are never planned, but the story comes out as a whole, and without me knowing the end of it;
That is how I want my classes to be!

So from a personal perspective, this really is the perfect time to step up my game and no longer teach something I have planned or written out before. 

Which does not mean I will not make schedules based on dvds and books;
Just that I won’t be teaching or doing them.
I have always liked watching dvds, reading books, and from there to write out yoga schedules. That is a creative process. But to then actually go do that? Then it is no longer creative.

So to satisfy my own creative needs, there really is no better time for me to start coming to the mat without preparing what I am going to do.
Just like when I practice yoga myself: I also do not have a schedule, and sometimes my poses are not “really” yoga poses. 
I ve been wondering how I could teach this free-style. Or, more specifically, I have been realizing I cannot teach it.
That it’s too difficult.
That I have no idea what I am doing, and that I could analyze and name it, but then I end up with a system, and it would be a scheduled practice all over again. And I don’t want that.

The talk from Shiva Rea made me realize that despite being absolutely clueless on how to teach yoga that has no system or no form;
That that is precisely why I want to teach it.

That my personal system of writing down exercises, and doing yoga by what I have on paper, may not be two-thousand years old, but it is over two decades old.
And that’s a long time.

Who knows how many Victorian yoga values I have internalized.
I know I still feel exposed when my yoga top shows cleavage, or when the shirt curls up and you see my belly. 
I get this 50’s Catholic feeling of being too sexual;
So yeah, it is still in me!

Shaming someone, including shaming yourself, for their sexuality is in my opinion evil in its purest form.

I ve internalized values which are directly opposing everything I stand for.
And there is a very high chance the feeling I was a better yoga teacher if I prepared my classes, if I stuck to the known poses and their names, if I rooted my teachings in existing lineages;
Is tied to those same internalized Victorian values which may have worked in 19th century colonial India, or early 50s in The Netherlands;
But they’re not my values.

My yoga, which I already do on my mat to one Bon Jovi album every day;
Is free.

And our Bon Jovi inspired yoga, which I will teach for both my English and Dutch channels;
Is free.

It will not be rooted in those yoga lineages, regardless if they were good or bad or if their leaders  (yes, there’s more plenty more than just one Netflix documentary) have fallen off their pedestals because they have abused their power, and justice caught up with them.

Our yoga will be rooted in freedom.

In rock n roll.

In Bon Jovi.

And let’s give them something to worry about, for the next two-thousand years.

.
~Suzanne
Rock Star Writer
Paypalme

launched soon:
1. YouTube channel #dailybonjoviyoga
2. Yoga (Nederlands) voor Bon Jovi fans ook met Suzanne Beenackers

I Resources for doing yoga: 
yoga on YouTube by me: PRO videos 2015 2016
Yoga with Adriene on YouTube (10 million followers!)
playlist Shiva Rea

II Inspiration for yoga:
Yoga Inspiration: Creative Sequencing | Meghan Currie Yoga

Other
NEW 2021: Art & Popular Culture: World Between Worlds 
NEW 2021: YouTube Rock Your Business

 

In The Next Best Thing (2000) Madonna plays a yoga teacher, completing my vision. In particular the first minutes with the titles against a backdrop of the studio, a scene that is not (fully) on YouTube.

One of the advertisements on Facebook, which was presented to me frequently even after I had bought it, was about a movie (2020) from the book Think And Grow Rich (1937).
In it, Edwin C. Barnes who has “nothing” goes through lengths to come to work for Thomas A. Edison, who was a successful inventor and business owner.

To Edison’s assumption that Barnes stands before him with “nothing”, he replies:
“Desire is not nothing. I have a vision and I believe it will come true one day, and I will stick by that however long and hard the path.”

Barnes has the vision of becoming Edison’s partner.
He accepts a job as a sweeper for the offices of Edison’s company, and after two years steps in when the sales team from Edison is unwilling to sell a dictating machine, the Ediphone.
Barnes presents Edison with his plans for it, and becomes his partner, making the Ediphone a huge success. 

It were his words “A vision, is not nothing” which have made it possible for me to understand why rebooting my yoga practice and yoga career, is not starting with nothing.
Because I have had moments, rational moments where I am looking for outer proof that I’m worthy of my own dreams so to speak, that I have thought:
“But I have nothing, and lost everything.”

Not true.

As illustrated by the Edison and Barnes story;
A vision is not nothing.

I have a vision for yoga where it is my most important, most purposeful work. Where it is the language which everybody understands, way more than writing can ever be.

And yesterday I started studying yoga again, with the courses I wrote about in yesterday’s blogpost “Rock Star Yoga Teacher Training (for a no-brainer price)“, and it struck a chord with me.

This morning I woke up feeling entirely reborn, and eager to start yoga, not just from a business/ connection/YouTube perspective, but really feeling an incredible urge to do it.
A very deep desire to practice and live it.

It was a vision for the doing, of yoga, that I had been waiting for, patiently and sometimes not so patiently.
Because I knew that next to the new and improved vision for the professional side of yoga (all about connection, through YouTube, through seminars, through writing, through touring);
I also wanted to have a vision for my yoga self-practice.
And that’s what I found.

For the first time in years I am so excited to get on my yoga mat, I feel like I’ve found a treasure, my most precious “possession” maybe even;
I refound the yoga vision I lost a long time ago.

Which brings us back to the beginning.
A desire and a vision is not “nothing”.
In all probability, your vision is what will make it a success in worldly terms.
But that is not why I want you to start creating a vision for the areas of your life you want to grow.

The reason a desire and a vision are everything, is that they supply a deep fulfillment in and of themselves.

Edwin Barnes had a desire to work with Thomas Edison, a vision to be his partner, and he placed himself in a relationship with Thomas Edison.
But the reason I was so adamant of my vision for yoga coming to life first, was not because of the movie Think and Grow Rich and Edison and Barnes, but because when I started yoga in 1998, it had started with a vision, also.

Madonna had just brought out her Ray of Light album, and she talked about having started yoga. Yoga had become her main workout, and she had an even more athletic body than she had had the decade before that.
And she was now completely gym free.

In 1998, her yoga gave me the vision of wanting to do yoga.
And it was this vision that ultimately unfolded into a whole yoga career, even more so when in 2000 she played a yoga teacher in the movie The Next Best Thing.
Just like I had adopted her version of what a yoga practitioner was, I took it next level to what a yoga teacher was. Like Abby, the yoga studio owner in The Next Best Thing

I built my vision of yoga, and my career of yoga, on her work.

After three transitional years, where I changed, stopped and started yoga, and then stopped again, and started again, you get the idea;
I understood that yoga was still my passion.
That I would never be able to turn my back on it, because I just loved it too much.
Somewhere underneath, the vision I had started with, was still there.

The execution, the doing it, had not been ideal, in all likeliness that was only because I forgot to run it by my vision first. But that’s all water on the bridge, and not particularly relevant to this story.
Either way;
I did realize at some point, that yoga was still very much alive in me.

And that I had to start showing up for the relationship with it, even when that meant I had to sweep floors for my yoga like the two years like Barnes swept floors for Edison.

And I did.
I started to show up.

This step back, this deliberate step back, from the doing; In favor of the very flaky, very not-concrete “being in the space with yoga”?
In favor of the “being in the relationship with yoga”?
Like what I wrote you yesterday, about me getting back to taking courses on Udemy?

That has brought me more vision, dreams and clarity, than all the times I seduced myself into doing yoga or teaching yoga.
Even though those were fun, and I enjoyed them very much! 
But on a deeper level they were not grounded.
I had to start from scratch every time I wanted to do yoga, by finding or by creating motivation.
And that was definitely not the case in those first years where I just flew to my mat!
Because in those early years all I had to go on was my vision, and I didn’t even have the knowledge  yet of how to seduce myself into doing yoga.

So I’m not saying that you need to have a vision for yoga, before you start.

But if you want it to last for twenty years, and then still being able to find each other after three years of turmoil?

Then yeah.
You do.

.
~Suzanne
Rock Star Writer
Paypalme

Places to start your yoga vision quest:
yoga on YouTube by me: PRO videos 2015 2016
Yoga with Adriene on YouTube (10 million followers!)
my personal favorite: Yoga Inspiration: Creative Sequencing | Meghan Currie Yoga

launched soon:

YouTube channel #dailybonjoviyoga

Other
NEW 2021: Art & Popular Culture: World Between Worlds 
NEW 2021: YouTube Rock Your Business

I’m getting back on the yoga teacher wagon, yoga do-er wagon , or really any wagon that involves doing something with my body, because man!
I really have been cutting corners here….

Every free hour, I have been publishing my books.
It is work that I had been waiting for, praying for, and that in my experience can almost only be done with, I don’t know “the Universe on your side” would be a good way of putting it.
And after years of the Universe not supporting, the flood came.

The past 6 weeks, I have only pulled myself away from the screen, when I absolutely had to go, or had to sleep, and even that was sacrificed occasionally.
By now I can make healthy meals in a minimum of time, and I ve learned to live in a house that crosses the line to being closer to a stable.
And then before going to bed, sometimes as late as 3 AM, I quickly do the dishes and sort my house out, so that the next day it begins on the other side of that stable-line.
But with enough sand and kitty litter everywhere to make every visitor run away screaming.

For the first time in a year, I ve had weeks when I had more days when I didn’t cycle or walk for an hour or more, than days that I did.

I’ve dropped on the spectrum of taking care of my house and body, and I don’t think I did yoga once.

And yet I always knew that I would get back on the wagon, and pick-up my own yoga practice #dailybonjoviyoga;
Start making Bon Jovi yoga videos for YouTube;
Reinvent my yoga and put myself back in business, as a yoga teacher.
I knew that.
And I am.

My publishing is now contained, and it is no longer allowed to consume my life.
So I knew that this Monday I would cycle, see some daylight, and also pick up my yoga.

And here we are, you and me.

Because the thing I came up with to inspire myself, was so good that I immediately wanted to share it;
The original Rock Star Yoga.

In 2015, when I was still a yoga teacher and studio owner, I came onto the path of Sadie Nardini, who was then sharing her work on the site “Udemy”, of which you may have heard.
Nowadays Sadie Nardini has her own community, runs her own membership programs, and her courses, and she has stopped uploading to Udemy long ago.
But her older work is still there.

Meanwhile the prices for these amazing courses have dropped significantly, and sometimes (as is the case today) they’re even on special and you pay even less.
It is an absolutely crazy low no-brainer offer, in particular if you have yoga experience and want something meaty to sink your teeth in.

But there are also courses for beginners.

So if you are looking for inspiration for your yoga practice, I strongly recommend you check out the Udemy page with Sadie Nardini’s courses:
https://www.udemy.com/user/sadienardini/

And then we can all get back on the wagon.

.
~Suzanne
Rock Star Writer
Paypalme

launched soon:

YouTube channel #dailybonjoviyoga

Other
NEW 2021: Art & Popular Culture: World Between Worlds 
NEW 2021: YouTube Rock Your Business

Sadie Nardini is also on YouTube: