Tag Archives: yoga

Every mistake is a gift

September 3, 2023yoga, YogaArtart, drawing, workshop, yogapetersan

Failure does not exist

We were made to fear mistakes and imperfections in our childhood.
I still vividly remember how, at school in the first year of primary school, I suddenly saw a thick, dark blue ink stain fall from the old-fashioned hand pen onto the page … I let the thing dry, albeit too briefly, and then diligently started rubbing and sanding with the rough, blue side of an eraser, hoping the stain would go away. So that no one would see them, least of all the teacher. The result was even more blurry blue smudges AND a gaping hole in the sheet of paper. The teacher then used laundry pins to hang all the students’ calligraphy notebooks on a line for parent contact night. And mine hung open exactly on the page where the hole yawned …

Artists never fail

Artists know that mistakes don’t exist. That they are all necessary steps in the development of their work. Some artists work in the shadows for 20 years, searching and trying, while not being seen and not selling a single work. And then suddenly they change tack. New ideas and insights emerge and they sometimes radically change their style. And suddenly they are doing well artistically and commercially. So were all those earlier works and attempts failures? No, they were necessary to make the next step possible.

The potential of the stain

So in the sixth workshop “Yoga and the Art of Drawing”, we deliberately used the potential of the stain. Each participant was given a sheet of splattered paper, and asked to take the very spots on the blank paper as the starting point for their drawing, in complete freedom. Thus, the blemish on the paper became a component and even an inspiration for the creation. It once again gave rise to the most diverse drawings and collages.

The universe works in utmost perfection

Failures and mistakes are a life lesson. You can work around them or use them as strengths for the next phase. Perhaps I learned as a child in first grade, that the more you try to hide or erase something, the more visible it becomes. In our lives, there are also no mistakes, nor failures. Every event is perfection itself, at the right time and place. Provided you dare to look at them in a different way. Through your own eyes, and not through other people’s judgmental eyes. And then using them to your advantage, as a springboard to the next step.
In yoga philosophy, this corresponds to what is called yama and niyama in the eightfold path to enlightenment: the ability to free yourself from the yoke of:

The (judgmental) gaze of others on yourself
The (judgmental) view of yourself on yourself

Because only then do you create the conditions for true freedom to live your life according to your own unique plan.

How can I participate in a workshop with yoga and drawing myself?

Do you feel interest in yoga and the art of drawing workshops?
Would you like to get started with it?
Via the button below, you can read more about the format of the workshops and book your sessions:

Yoga and Drawing Workshops

Intention is more important than result

September 3, 2023yoga, YogaArtart, drawing, workshop, yogapetersan

Discover the why behind your drawing activity

Intention and yoga

When we practice yoga, the concept of intention is fundamental to our practice. First of all, we need to ask ourselves why we want to practice regularly. Is it initially out of curiosity? Is it because it is trendy? Or is it because deep inside us there is an almost naive and little-recognised belief that yoga is a magic pill or a simple box of magical tools that will – we hope very soon – solve a whole range of discomforts related to our existence?
If we practice yoga regularly, it is true that we concentrate and set in motion a lot of energy. It is a creative act. This energy can be consciously directed towards a more or less precise goal. Here are some examples:

Maintaining, restoring or strengthening our physical body.
To learn to calm our excessive mental activity or soothe our nervous system.
In order to create an expansion of our consciousness.
To adopt a more compassionate and benevolent attitude towards our lives, the other beings with whom we share existence on this planet and the world around us.
Or to grow and develop and allow unsuspected aspects of our potential to blossom.
To support our own healing or someone else’s.
To live a life more grounded in our physical bodies.

Of course, this list is by no means exhaustive.

Just like asking yourself this question at the level of a regular practice, it is a good idea to choose a conscious intention at the beginning of each individual yoga session. To really get a grip on the reason behind your choice to sit on your mat for an hour, or even longer, instead of spending your time on another activity.

Intention and drawing

If you want to start drawing more regularly and consistently, it is also a good idea to ask yourself what you really want to do with this activity. Why am I drawing or creating? And what is my purpose?<:strong>
Is it to fill a void or dispel recurring boredom? Or to find more peace and relaxation in this creative flow of full presence that makes us forget any sense of the passage of time? Do we want to create images to brighten other people’s daily lives. Or do we have an activist goal to awaken people’s minds in the face of injustice, for instance? Is it to create objects of rare beauty? Or to touch deep emotional strings in our fellow humans? To come to terms with our own deeper emotions and feelings? Or to rediscover the joy and innocence of our childhood?
Whatever your reason and motivation, it is your intention – which you should examine carefully and remind yourself of regularly – that will help you sustain your creative activity through drawing in the long run.

Red envelope

As American designer Cat Bennett suggests in her book “Making Art a Practice – 30 Ways to Paint a Pipe”, you can write your intention on a sheet of paper, put it in a red envelope and tuck it under your bed’s mattress. In this way, we symbolically reinforce this written-down intention by keeping it in our body’s energy field during the night.
And it is a good idea to re-evaluate this original intention from time to time, because there may well be an evolution taking place that requires you to rephrase or clarify it. Nothing in this world is permanent except change.

How can I participate in a workshop with yoga and drawing myself?

Do you feel interest in yoga and the art of drawing workshops?
Would you like to get started with it?
Via the button below, you can read more about the format of the workshops and book your sessions:

Yoga and Drawing Workshops

Awaken the observer in yourself

September 3, 2023yoga, YogaArtart, drawing, workshop, yogapetersan

Neutral observation of reality

Both yoga and drawing push us towards better observation of reality. There are wonderful parallels between both these activities.

Yoga and objectivity

Yoga practice trains us to more easily assume the position of the observer in the world and in our daily lives.
And thus:

We are less easily misled by our own thoughts, emotions, beliefs and judgements about the things around us.

Moreover, we are able to perceive situations more neutrally. We recognise that different viewpoints and perspectives on the same phenomenon are possible.

We soon understand that ours are almost always coloured. As if we are looking through tinted or smudged glasses.

This is often a big challenge.

Objectivity in artistic creation

Very often a drawing course starts with observational drawing.
In observational drawing, we also look for the most neutral representation of the subject of our drawing. The aim is to learn to see and reproduce it in an accurate and objective way. And this has several fascinating implications:

it is amazing to see how different and distorted our representation of the model is compared to reality!

We learn to adjust our gaze and make it more objective.

We train the coordination of our vision and the motor skills of our hands.

Soon, we discover our desire, often impatient, to proceed directly to a personal interpretation of the subject. And that is very different from a simple objective reproduction.

In any case, the drawing phase of observation is a useful phase that serves us well. Because it can improve the quality, intensity, thoroughness and depth of our gaze and our vision of things.

Much more than the ability to produce truly flawless classical drawings, it is these discoveries, about the relativity of our vision, that constitute the true, rich harvest of this kind of drawing activity.

How can I participate in a workshop with yoga and drawing myself?

Do you feel interest in yoga and the art of drawing workshops?
Would you like to get started with it?
Via the button below, you can read more about the format of the workshops and book your sessions:

Yoga and Drawing Workshops

Why 108?

December 28, 2022yoga108, sun salutation, yogapetersan

The fascinating magic of number 108

On the 22th of December 2022, which coincided with the winter solstice, I held a charity action in favour of the NPO Ever’y Cat, which is a Brussels-based NPO whose volunteer staff catches stray cats and gives them a better life in 4 Brussels municipalities, specifically: 1140 Evere, 1030 Schaarbeek, 1130 Haren and 1000 Brussels.
You can get a clear picture of exactly how they work on their webpage.

The action itself consisted of consecutively performing 108 sun salutations. Therefore it was akin to a “yoga marathon”, as crooked as that sounds. The action could be followed via social media platform Facebook and also attended via Zoom.

Why the sun salutation?

The sun salutation is pre-eminently a dynamic yoga exercise that puts a lot of energy in motion, energy that you can then spiritually direct towards a particular goal, in this case: the solidarity action with Ever’y Cat. The material precipitation of that energy is ultimately the money we collected, which is donated to the ASBL.
People also asked why exactly I did 108 sun salutations and not any other number.

What is the symbolic meaning of 108 ?

For a more detailed understanding and a concise summary of the symbolism and mystery of 108, I got clear information from professional astrologer and yoga therapist Susan Hopkinson. And this is what it boils down to:
The number 108 consists of three digits, each of which already has a special meaning in number science or numerology and in many esoteric philosophies of East and West:

the 1 represents the all or “completeness”

the 0 represents nothingness or the absence of energy, matter or existence: the “void”

and the 8 in turn represents infinity

If you add 1 + 0 + 8 together, you arrive at the number 9.
Now, if you divide 108 by two, and then add the digits of the fraction again, you get 9 again.
Some examples:

108/2 = 54 and 5 + 4 = 9

108/4 = 27 and 2 + 7 = 9

or: 108/8 = 13.5 and 1 + 3 + 5 = 9

etcetera

Writers devoted entire volumes to the number 108.
9 Is considered a mysterious number in numerology, and it is said to “contain all teachings”.

Wherein lies the peculiarity of the number 9 ?

An example:
If you add to 9 another digit, you obtain a new number.
Now, if you add all the digits of that new number again, you get back the original digit. As if the 9 is capable of performing a great disappearing act.
Some examples here too:

9 + 5 = 14 and 1 + 4 = 5

9 + 8 = 17 and 1 + 7 = 8

or : 9 + 1 = 10 and 1 + 0 = 1

How much did the action bring in?

Believe it or not, the action for Ever’y Cat raised 216.00 euros. That = 2 x 108. So each sun salutation raised 2.00 euros!

The money has been transferred in full to Ever’y Cat.
Many thanks to everyone who made a donation.

Read more about yoga and yoga classes in Schaerbeek:

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Stability when circumstances change

September 9, 2022yogaschaerbeek, yoga, yoga classespetersan

For the month of September, I chose the Revolved Praying Hero posture. In the more fitness oriented postural yoga, this one is also known as Revolved Lunge. The technical or Sanskrit name of this posture is Parivritta Namaskara Virasana. I deliberately do not use sanskrit terminology during yoga classes, because that is like giving a Catholic mass in Latin. And that is no longer of this time.
Sanskrit is good for the technical classification of postures or if you are studying or retraining in the Indian tradition.

Why does this posture fit so well with the month of September?

This posture fits well in this transitional season between summer and autumn. It is a yoga posture with a strong “grounding” character. Still, it is also “fiery”. It is a posture in which the earth element comes to the fore and the fire energy of summer can still be felt. It invites you to stand firm and stay in balance. That is exactly what we have to do now.
In the transitional periods between the four seasons, we are invited to make adjustments to our daily habits in order to keep our health in balance through the change of seasons.
This posture can be a good part of a sun salutation sequence.

Yoga influences and supports our well-being on all possible levels: physical, energetic, emotional, mental, spiritual.
See here how this posture affects all these levels:

Physical benefits

.

Strengthening of the back, arms, ankles, legs, glutes

Stabilizing and strengthening of the hip joints

Opening and widening of the chest area

Building and maintaining strength in the abdominal area

Improving the mobility of the shoulders, shoulder blades and upper back

Energetic effects

Activating and warming

Stretching the kidney and liver meridians in the straightened rear leg, and of the gall bladder meridian in the side of the body

Grounding of the feet and legs

Stability and firmness in the lower chakras, space and release in the upper chakras

Emotional well-being

Intensity

Balance

Staying calm in your own centre, even if conditions are challenging

Stability

Opening of the heart from a firm and balanced foundation

Mental attitude

The ability to take several actions at once while staying focused

Concentrated, clear and alert thinking

Maintaining the balance between opposites

Spiritual growth

A firm connection with the earth as a basis for development and liberation

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Prana Yoga Flow

A full description of the basic postures of Prana Yoga Flow can be found in the book: “Prana Yoga Flow – Activate your life force, open your heart and live freely”, by Alberto Paganini. (Available in both dutch and english).
Alberto Paganini was one of my very first yoga teachers. You can find his website (in Dutch) here.

Sitting still

November 4, 2020meditation, yogabreathing, yogapetersan

You may be wondering what that picture of a somewhat neglected, winding road, half gravel, half earth, through a forest, has to do with sitting still.
Well, life sometimes makes strange twists and turns.
I ended up in the middle of Norway in 2009 after a peculiar coincidence. At the invitation of an organic farmer who had emigrated from Belgium, I stayed and worked there for a week. In the afternoons I left for long walks in the rather wild forest landscape.

Beyond the border

This was also the case on that day in October. The season was on the border of autumn and winter, with the occasional wet snow shower. The road in the picture finally took me past the border of civilisation, somewhere on a high plateau.
There, sitting on a boulder amongst the vegetation tending to all possible shades and hues of colour, suddenly a silence fell.
But a silence like I had never experienced before. I was eating a sandwich I had brought with me and was awakened … by the sound of my grinding jaws. I had never heard that before. I was perplexed and stopped eating.
Then it dawned on me that there was nothing, absolutely nothing to be heard there.
It was the first time in that moment that I caught a glimpse of absolute silence.

Perhaps life would have led me there, in the run-up to the discovery, more than 10 years later, that I am actually hyper-sensitive to sound from an early age. My brain can only select between the many separate sound signals in a “soundscape” with the greatest difficulty and at the cost of a lot of energy.

Meditation

Yoga is a complete system conceived to prepare oneself for meditation.
Meditation has to do with crossing borders as well as confronting silence.
There are countless meditation traditions. All of them offer methods to “silence the mind”. To bring consciousness beyond the noise.
Because apart from the fact that our contemporary world with all its traffic, machines and other incessant human activity, must seem like a deafening hell for our ancestors until about two centuries ago, there is another sound that never seems to stop.
And that is the incessant “chat” of the thoughts that pass through our brain.

The current that controls us

Those thoughts make up for an automatic, endless flow. A mess, in which interesting ideas, ingenious insights or whisper-smooth intuitions drown in an excess of automatic, coarser chatter. The latter consists largely of fantasies about the past or the present. Most of these we are not even aware of.
But that flow does control us. And is responsible for our emotions and our state of mind, day in, day out.

In Indian philosophy the world was created by sound. That is a beautiful metaphor for what modern science has understood in the meantime. Because first there is vibration, or energy, and the matter of what we call the real world is no more or no less than coarse, “condensed” energy.
So you create your own world from the energetic vibration your thoughts constantly create.
All that exists in your world is the materialisation of your own thoughts. If there is chaos around you, then that is a projection of the chaos that probably exists within you and that you fuel by means of your thought stream.

Tips for a first step

Without attending a particular meditation school, you can already take a first step in meditation at home.
What do you need?

A place where you will likely not be disturbed

Use a chair or meditation cushion to sit on that allows you to relax with your back upright

A clock or meditation timer with an alarm function

How do you go about it?

Book 5 to 10 minutes at a fixed time in your day. Early in the morning or in the evening before bed are good moments

Set your clock or meditation timer

Sit with your back straight and eyes closed

Breathe in and out slowly and regularly

Stay quiet

And become aware of your own thoughts.
Observe them one by one. Every time a thought comes up, take note of it, and then let go of it. Bring your awareness back to your breathing.

Do you want more control over your daily life? Then start by listening to the sound of your inner thoughts and get to know them.
Start with five to ten minutes a day. And let it gradually become longer.

What we experience on a global scale this year 2020 can be nothing more or nothing less than a clear and compelling invitation from a higher consciousness to stop our insanely exaggerated outer activities. And to stay at home – at least for a good while – and learn to sit still with ourselves.

What does it mean to sit with a straight back?

Our backs are not straight by nature. The spine is clearly S-shaped.
Sitting with a straight back means: keep your spine in its natural, upright shape.
It means that you do not allow yourself to “sag”.

How do you bring your back into its natural curvature?

Go sit on a chair or on a meditation cushion on the floor

Tilt your pelvis forward, as if you were pushing your navel to the front

Mark how your lower back becomes slightly hollow at the back

Open your chest by bringing your sternum a little forward and relax your shoulders

Finally, place your head and neck straight and balanced rignt above your shoulder girdle.

How do I know if I hold my lower back in the right position ?

Put your hand behind your back and touch the middle of your lower back

If you feel a cleft, like a little valley between your lumbar muscles, that’s when you know you’re good

On the other hand, if you feel the protrusions of your lumbar vertebrae sticking out, you are sagging. Adjust your posture by tilting your pelvis forward until you no longer feel the protrusions.

Neti nose flush

August 28, 2020healthbreathing, neti, yogapetersan

The yoga path is a path of personal development, striving to experience what is called “the divine essence”.
This is a state in which all the superfluous, all illusions, all ballast, whether mental, emotional, physical or energetic, has been released.
So it presupposes a cleansing on all levels. This “cleansing”, and especially the maintenance of a state of purity, is a prerequisite for good meditation, in order to be able to perceive the most subtle movements of consciousness and energy in the body.
In fact, there is a lot of truth in that. An emotional layer that is torn by violent emotions, a mind that is misty or overly excited by inappropriate, or excessively stimulating nutrition, or a body that suffers from a high degree of obesity or too many toxins is not conducive to lucid concentration or serene meditation.

Purity

Old yoga texts therefore contain relatively many instructions on purity and hygiene. Purity of the body, purity of food, purity of one’s relationship to oneself, to others and to the world.
The sanskrit term for purity is saucha.
The purity of the body was taken very literally. The daily purification of all body orifices is part of this. The aim was to remove all kinds of unruly dirt that jhad gotten incrusted in the body.
Rinsing the large intestine (colon cleansing), or swallowing a long stretch of fabrie which is then slowly pulled out again. Or drinking a large quantity of lukewarm salted water and then vomiting up the entire contents of the stomach. It was all part of the process and sometimes looked more like self-flagellation.

Nasal rinse

However, some of these practices are easily achievable and of great benefit to modern people. One of them is the daily rinsing of the nose with lukewarm salted water.
I learned it in the days when I was still practising Kundalini yoga. In the meantime I have abandoned that particular type of yoga. But I am still into the neti-nose rinse almost on a daily basis.
Together with ditching milk products, the neti-nose rinse is also one of the key reasons why I have almost never suffered from nasal colds for more than 7 years now.

What do you need

Very little, in fact!

A little jug for nasal rinsing

A solution of sea salt or himalaya salt in water

A kettle or water heater

5 minutes of discipline every morning

The saline solution

Sea salt and himalaya salt are closest to the salt found in nature. After all, in addition to the ordinary sodium chloride, they contain countless other salts and minerals.
How concentrated should it be?
When I first heard about neti-nose rinsing, there was no clarity or clear information at all about it in the Kundalini world. People just went along, and it sometimes seemed like a form of competition to show who was the toughest: the more salt, the better. The more it gave a burning sensation in the nose, the better.
But today we are going to use our common sense and above all, treat our body with love and respect. That is why it is good to have a look at the natural internal salt concentration of the body, and take that as a starting point for an efficient and pleasant mixture. In a ratio that purifies the nose well and only causes a slight, rather pleasant activation of the mucous membranes.
The natural salt concentration of our body is approximately 8.5 to 9 grams of salt per litre.

A bottle with stock solution

Preparing the salted water and storing it in a bottle is a very practical way of working. It provides you with good rinsing water at an appropriate temperature every day:

Take a 1 litre glass bottle, with a resealable ceramic stopper

Weigh about 20 to 25 grams of salt

Bring the salt into the bottle, and then fill the bottle almost completely with warm tap water

Shake the mixture until the salt is completely dissolved

Fill further with cold water until the bottle is full.

You now have a bottle with a saline solution of 20 to 25 grams per litre. That is twice as concentrated as what you need.

The daily rinse

Now proceed as follows in the morning:

Take a glass with about the same content as your neti jug

Fill half the glass with the salt solution from the storage bottle

Fill the other half with hot, boiled water

Pour the mixture into your neti jug

Go stand with your head tilted to one side above a washbasin or sink

Insert the spout of the jug into your upper nostril and pour the liquid into it

Let the water drain through your internal nasal cavity and through the lower nostril into the sink

You can, if so desired, breathe in the saline rinsing liquid a bit. Hold your head tilted slightly backwards in order to “gargle”

Repeat the cleansing procedure with your head the other way around until the jug is empty

Finally, snout forcefully to empty each nostril in order to remove any remaining impurities.

For maintenance, just rinse the jug with water after use.

Free breathing

By cleaning your nose in this way at the beginning of every day, you ensure a clean nasal cavity in which dirt does not get a chance to linger. After all, it is precisely in these waste products that bacteria and viruses can nestle in advance, after which they easily find their way up into the nasal cavity. They can be at the origin of colds or flu.

Moreover, after rinsing, you will experience the pleasant feeling of free and unhindered breathing, which also benefits your morning yoga practice.

The white porcelain neti jugs of German manufacture are available in the yoga studio.
They cost 22,00 euros a piece.
If you want to make a reservation for one, please send me an e-mail.