Lunch Box - Focaccia with ham, mustard, cheese and gherkin

Main: Focaccia with ham, mustard, cheese and gherkin
Fruit: Fresh pineapple chunks and seedless red grapes
Treat: Brownie

Amazing yoga session this morning. I found some extra space in my back bends that I swear wasn't there before! Why is it that just as I'm getting into the swing of the week it's over? Happens every time. Never mind, I'm looking forward to some good sleep-ins and general lying about.

Have a great weekend everyone!

:)

Yoga Update: Headstands

I've been struggling with the practice this week. I had a couple of days off sick, feeling tired, nauseous, just generally off. My sacroiliac joint has been giving me trouble, seizing up my left hip when I'm sitting at work all day and tightening up my left hamstring. I had the most painful practice of my life on Monday, every part of my body was aching before I even got onto the mat. It's difficult to go back after a practice like that, it scares me into thinking that every practice will be awful. And at 6 o'clock on a dark Thursday morning, I'm looking for any excuse to climb back into bed. So it's a miracle I made it into the studio today. I started out feeling pretty low in energy, until my teacher reminded me to push into the floor with my hands in every forward bend, as if I were going to push up into a handstand (as if!). Although I am years away from pushing up into a handstand, the strength needed to push my hands into the ground produced an energy, it was like a reminder of the relationship between the body and the ground - a relationship that is also explored in contemporary dance. Suddenly the dynamic inherent in the practice became apparent, and I remembered something very simple; to have fun. To explore the boundaries of the body, to draw strength from the ground and try something new, even if you fall on your arse in the process. It was with this energy that I finished with a headstand, a posture which is glorious in it's ridiculousness.

Namaste!

Lunch Box - Mediterranean Lentil Salad

Main: Mediterranean Lentil Salad
Fruit: Tinned berries with Greek Yoghurt
Treat: Doritos!

When I got home from work last night making lunches was the last thing I wanted to do. My daily Ashtanga yoga practice has been particularly intense this week (like a strange and elaborate form of torture, you might say) so when I get home after a 12 hour day all I want to do is lie on the couch groaning in pain, or take a bath, followed by lying on the couch groaning in pain. Somehow I managed to drag myself from the couch to the kitchen, and I'm sure glad I did, because this salad is a winner. I would even go so far to say it's helping me out of my mid-week slump. The sharp garlic and feta combined with the comforting couscous and protein enriched lentils make for a perfect lunch box filler.

I have taken the recipe word for word from Junglefrog-Cooking.com which contains some great recipes and amazing photography! One day I may graduate from my BlackBerry phone to a real camera, but until then my photos will be for documentation purposes only. :)

Mediterranean Lentil Salad

Yield: 4 lunch box servings

1 cup puy lentils
3 tablespoons white wine vinegar
1 1/4 cup water
1 cup Couscous
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/4 cup extra virgin olive oil
1 garlic clove (large, minced and mashed into a paste with 1/4 tsp salt)
1/2 cup fresh mint (finely chopped)
1 bunch arugula (rocket) (stems discarded and leaves washed well, spun dry and chopped)
2 cups vine ripened cherry tomatoes (halved)
1/4lb feta (crumbled)

1) In a small saucepan simmer lentils in water to cover by 2 inches until tender but not falling apart, 15 to 20 minutes, and drainwell. Transfer hot lentils to a bowl and stir in 1 tablespoon vinegar and salt and pepper to taste. Cool lentils completely, stirring occasionally.

2) In a saucepan bring water to a boil and add couscous and salt. Remove pan from heat and let couscous stand, covered, 5 minutes. Fluff couscous with a fork and transfer to a large bowl. Stir in 1 tablespoon oil and cool completely, stirring occasionally.

£) In a small bowl whisk together garlic paste, remaining 2 tablespoons vinegar, remaining 3 tablespoons oil, and salt and pepper to taste. Stir lentils and dressing into couscous. Chill salad, covered, at least 3 hours and up to 24.

4) Just before serving, stir in remaining ingredients and season with salt and pepper.

Yoga Update

Photo from the Ashtanga Yoga Palace

First off, a confession: this photo isn't me. But I like to imagine it is. The sturdy legs strongly resemble my own, and when I look at this photo I can feel the burning in the fronts of the thighs and the opening in the chest which combines pain with elation. I could look at this photo all day, so powerful is it's visceral quality. I makes me reflect on my own practice, which has come along, sometimes in leaps and bounds and sometimes in painful hobbling steps since I started daily practice in September last year. I have learnt more then I could have possibly imagined, and have challenged the limits of my body and my willpower (the first test is getting up at 6am every morning - my willpower definitely gets a work out then!). Along with the breakthroughs (of which there have been many, even in such a short space of time) I have re-awakened an old sacroiliac-joint injury from dance school. Strangely it never flared up when I was practising Bikram (possibly because of the heat, or due to Bikram being more focused on the spine rather than the hip opening) but about a month into my Ashtanga practice it made it's presence felt. I learnt to be mindful when working with my left hip or leg, to go extra slow and sometimes only go halfway into the posture, hold and gently release. It's as much about being aware as it is about changing your body. Speaking of injury in yoga is quite topical; it's been in the news a lot this year. It's part of the general trend of yoga becoming more and more ingrained into Western culture. In my office of 45 people there are 3 of us who practice regularly, and several others who have tried a class. It's no longer viewed as a hippy/cultist thing to do, although it's not yet as common as going to the gym. However with this expansion comes criticism, as demonstrated in the article "How Yoga Can Wreck Your Body" published in the Times. It suggests that one of the reasons of yoga causing injury can be found in the following:

Indian practitioners of yoga typically squatted and sat cross-legged in daily life, and yoga poses, or asanas, were an outgrowth of these postures. Now urbanites who sit in chairs all day walk into a studio a couple of times a week and strain to twist themselves into ever-more-difficult postures despite their lack of flexibility and other physical problems. 

I agree that in many ways it is incongruous to take postures and anatomical ideas which were conceived of in India hundreds of years ago and apply them to our life today. Not only are we different physically and as a society, but our climate is vastly different, and it's important to remember this on a cold winters morning; the conditions are far from ideal. The article also talks about the danger of having ego in yoga practice, and I think this is the crux of the issue.

Today many schools of yoga are just about pushing people,” Black said. “You can’t believe what’s going on — teachers jumping on people, pushing and pulling and saying, ‘You should be able to do this by now.’ It has to do with their egos.” 

As much as I idolise yoga pros such as Kino MacGregor, I do understand that the practice is always highly personal. At it's core it's about the unison of the mind, body and spirit, and not about looking like a gymnast. That's why I favour self-practice, or mysore style classes rather then led classes, as they allow you to go at your own pace and learn the series for yourself, rather than following a teacher's lead. Each day your body is different, just as every day your mood or the weather changes. It's important to notice these changes and honour them in your practice, only pushing your body when you feel ready, and taking it easy and fostering your inward focus when this is more appropriate. For now I feel that I am living in a split body - my right side is very flexible and pliant, and my left hip and leg are so stiff and sore that I can feel the pain of a first time yoga trainee - the feeling that my body won't do what it's meant to and never will. But I know through experience (10 years!) that this is not the case, it will change, just very slowly! Luckily I'm in no rush.

Lunch Box - Brown Rice Salad

Main: Brown rice with tuna, sweet corn, diced tomatoes and capsicums
Fruit: Tinned peaches
Treat: Carrot and apple muffin

Not a very fancy offering today I'm afraid, but filling and tasty all the same. If the man had his way, we'd be eating this every week. It is quite satisfying, and very simple to make mid-week when your brain is frazzled. I usually add tinned chilli beans for a Mexican flavour, or jalapeños are great too. In fact, you could add anything to this - tofu, chicken, boiled egg or avocado would all be fantastic and give a protein boost.

I've just started with a new yoga teacher this week, as a result I have been pushing myself quite hard (doing the full Series 1 each day), so I feel quite spaced out today. It's incredible how a new teacher can give you that extra push you need to get your body into a new place.

On another note, I've noticed that the lunches have been very repetitive lately, with the same treats every day. This has been due to having a whole freezer full of baking, which we have steadily eaten our way through and now our freezer is nearly empty! So I need to find some good lunch-box sized snacks to bake this weekend. As it's going to be snowing and minus 5 degrees I expect I'll be very happy to spend a day in the kitchen with the oven on and Fleetwood Mac blaring. Just need to check Tastespotting for some good recipes! 

I'm not a runner but....

...today I ran 5kms around Hyde Park. I know, I'm even more shocked than you are. This has nothing to do with New Years resolutions (of which I made none), really it was just an excuse to get out of the office for an hour and challenge my body to do something new. A girl from my office goes running at lunchtime so she took me along for the ride, despite my many warnings that I would be slower than a snail with a sore foot.

Strangely enough, considering my family and upbringing (my dad is a mountaineer, my uncle is a former squash champion and gym owner, and my grandparents were fitness fanatics who thought a 5 hour walk was "just a stroll") I always came last in the dreaded long-distance running races at school. I've always looked athletic so it was particularly mortifying when even the chubby kids would run past and leave me panting and hobbling behind. Man, I absolutely hated it! So it was with some trepidation that I put on my Reeboks and headed out into the blustery, cold London day for my first run in probably 15 years.

I thought running in London would be horrible with all the pedestrians and traffic, but we are lucky enough to work near(ish) to Hyde Park. We planned on running from our office in Sloane Square through the back streets, into Hyde Park, around the Serpentine and back again. The Serpentine is a long snakelike lake in the middle of Hyde Park which has swans in it, and in the summer there are deckchairs and those little boats with pedals. In winter you can go there and laugh at the tourists who look so cold and miserable as they tick it off their list of things to see (tip: don't visit London in the winter).

Okay, admittedly I only ran about 3/4 of the way. On the way back we half walked/half ran. I was hampered by a stitch, and later blisters. But I found it interesting to observe the way the body repeats this habitual motion. Unlike yoga, which is learnt and to a large extant quite unnatural (for Western bodies at least), running is automatic and instinctive. I played around with placing my attention in different parts of my body - the soles of the feet, the torso or the knee joints and seeing what affect it had on my stride. I guess the ultimate feeling to aim for is weightlessness - to run with a bounce or spring. It's very hard to keep it up! And then there is just the mental attitude, keeping going when you just want to stop. At the beginning of the run, my friend turned to me and said "Your body is capable of this, so do it" and I kept repeating this to myself whenever I wanted to stop (about 35 times a minute!).

I'm back in the office now, and I feel more alert than I normally would at 3pm. Also it was great to break up the monotony of the day - 9 hours in artificial lighting staring at a screen can really get to you. I'm not saying I'll do it again for sure, but I won't rule it out just yet.

How to make a yoga bag

I've been practising daily Ashtanga yoga now for 4 months, and I am truly addicted. Until now I have been using the studio mats for my practice, just trying to ignore the fact that other people have practised, and sweated, on the same mat. After a particularly sweaty and slippery practice I decided that I needed to invest in a good yoga mat of my own. After talking to a few teachers and looking around on-line and in the shops, I settled on a PurEarth II Eco Travel Mat. At just 3mm it's quite thin, but this means it's light enough for me to take wherever I go. Also, for extra padding I can layer it with a studio mat, while still getting better grip and hygiene than the studio mats can offer. At £40 it's more than I would normally pay, but given I will spend 5 days a week on it, I think it's a worthwhile investment. However, the accompanying yoga bag for £35? I don't think so! To me that's just throwing money away. So when I got home I looked through some scraps of material I had and made my own. It took about an hour from start to finish, looks great, and best of all I will never get it mixed up with anyone else's yoga bag at the studio!

To make your own yoga bag you will need:

4 x rectangles of fabric 75cm x 14cm - A medium to heavy non-stretch cotton would be best

1 x square of fabric 14cm x 14cm 

1 x rectangle of fabric 100cm x 9cm 

1 x draw-string cord

Method:

1. Sew together your 4 rectangles of fabric lengthways, (good sides together) leaving a 1.5cm seam allowance at the side and also at both ends. You will end up with a tube with two openings, one at each end. Keep the seams on the outside whilst following the next step.

2. Take the end that will be the base of the bag and fold it open so that each side panel is visible, as above. 

3. Take the square of fabric and pin it onto the edges of the opening.

4. Carefully sew around the edges, leaving 1.5cm seam allowance, making sure you do not catch any of the rest of the fabric. 

5. You should now have a tube with one end closed. You can now pull the tube "inside out" so that the seams are now inside.

6. To create the drawstring closure, fold the remaining open end 4cm inside the tube. Sew around the circumference, making sure to leave a 2.5cm gap for your cord strip. If you want to make button holes to secure your cord string, do this before sewing the circumference. I didn't bother with button holes, so after sewing the circumference I simply cut two small holes on the outside and threaded the cord-string through with a safety pin.

7. To finish, sew your final rectangle into a shoulder strap. Fold in three lengthways and sew to secure. Sew one end close to (but not through) your drawstring closure, and the other end to the base of the bag.

And there you have it! Your very own yoga bag, and made for just a few pounds. 

Diary of a Yogi

I've had an incredible year, for a lot of reasons. I've had a lot of realisations about how I want to live my life. Made some life-changing decisions. The things that will shape my future - those seeds have been planted. But the most immediate and extraordinary thing which has happened is my re-discovery of Ashtanga yoga. I did my first sun salute 10 years ago, at the age of 16. I was attending a contemporary dance class taught by the late, great Sheryl Robinson, one of the most influential dance teachers in Christchurch, New Zealand. Her warm-up sequence borrowed heavily from the Ashtanga sun salute sequence B. She also loved Navasana (Boat pose) and would make us hold it until we were literally shaking. The yoga became my favorite part of the dance practice. I loved the depth of stretch, and the profound strength and challenge which came from the postures. One year later I found myself at contemporary dance school where we were lucky enough to be taught by two incredible yoga teachers. Every week we would study Iyengar with Felicity Malloy, and Ashtanga with Andre from the Ashtanga  Yoga Centre in Auckland.Both teachers were like gods to me. They could do things with their bodies that I could hardly understand, let alone emulate. They both traveled to India regularly for ongoing training. In many ways they convinced me that I could never be good at yoga - not that they would have said it, they were both encouraging and brilliant teachers. But from watching them, I felt so out of my depth, and most of all doubted that I would ever have the mental strength to do what they did. I admired and feared the resolution necessary for daily practice. In 2006 I attended my first ever Bikram class, in Wellington. It was challenging and eye-opening. The competitiveness of it was addictive, and it spurred me on. From then on I attended the occasional class whilst I was living in both Sydney and London. The great thing about Bikram is that it's like a MacDonalds, Starbucks or Pret; it's the same everywhere you go. And there's a great comfort in that. Even when I was far away from home I could turn up to a Bikram class and know exactly where I was. Once I even did the 30 day challenge - 30 classes in 30 days. The practice became as automatic as taking a shower. I noticed a lot of change in my practice, and the strength I gained through Bikram is still with me today. I would recommend anyone to try a Bikram class; it's certainly better than doing no yoga at all. But I always knew, deep down, that Bikram didn't sit well with me. For one thing it sucked all the energy out of me and left me useless afterwards. This is specific to me, as I have friends who find it very energizing. Also, the blatent commercialization, competitiveness and profiteering by Bikram himself seems a very long way from the essence of yoga, to me. I wanted to find a different yoga class, but the search was fruitless so I gave up for awhile and focused on contemporary dance. And then....
My boyfriend and I went on a surf and yoga holiday in Morocco. He likes surfing, I like yoga. Simple. I thought it would be a bit of fun, more active than your usual holiday, we'd get a tan and go home. I wasn't expecting it to change my life. But it did. We had two fantastic teachers, Emma and Louise. They taught a broad range of styles with Ashtanga and Bikram influences. They were warm, funny and genuine. They were also a bit like me. Late 20's, well traveled, always active but dabbling in a lot of different careers. Happy drifters. So they were similar to me, but they taught yoga for a living. And I though "Oh my god, I could do that". Suddenly, it didn't seem so out of reach at all. And I realised that my 10 years of on-and-off practice, a bit here and a bit there, had solidified into a well-rounded knowledge, and a body that knew what it was doing (or at least knew what it was trying to do). And on the day we left, Emma asked me "So, will you do your teacher training now?" and I said "Yeah, I think so!". It was a complete revelation to me, that something which had seemed so far was suddenly so near, like a game of creep-up I didn't know I was participating in. I came back to London and within a week had found a yoga centre which offered daily Ashtanga practice and signed myself up. I made a deal with myself that if I could practice Ashtanga every day for a year I would be ready to do a teacher training course. I'm now four months in, and my teacher just told me I could be ready to do the teacher training course tomorrow, if I wanted to, which is an incredible validation. But it's not just about the training course. Daily Ashtanga practice is now the focus of my life. It's the first thing I do when I get up in the morning. It's what I measure myself by. It's a great antidote to my 9-6 desk job, because it makes me feel whole again.

Yoga means "union". It creates a union between the mind, body and spirit. I think I'm realising what this means more and more every day. 

Merry Detox

I've been meaning to do a detox for about a year. I saw this detox plan in GOOP last year and really wanted to try it. The only trouble was it looked a bit fiddly and I didn't have a blender to make all the smoothies. So I thought I'd do my own version, focusing on cutting out dairy and sugar (my two best friends), and replacing my usual toast, cereal, cookies and cakes with fruit, nuts and vegetables. This is my meal plan for the week:

9am: Hot water with lemon
10am: Snack - Banana
11am: Snack- Nuts and dried fruit
12pm: Lunch - Either a healthy wrap filled with falafel and salad, or a quinoa, salmon and parsley salad.
3pm: Snack - Apple slices
7pm: Dinner - Miso soup with chilli, ginger, chopped vegetables and seaweed.

This is specifically tailored to my needs - for example I can't eat before 9am as I do yoga before work. Also, I need more snacks in the morning as that's when I'm hungriest. It's day two now and I'm feeling better than anticipated. I'll let you know how I get on!

PS: Sorry, no hair photos. I tried, but 15 minutes watching Youtube does not a hairdresser make. I'll keep working on my technique for the Christmas office party - 2 weeks and counting!