'Könntest du mir bitte die Yoga-Bibel geben?'

Here I am sitting in our room in Medellín, this turbulent and exciting city. In the background, guitar sounds and slightly off-key singing can be heard, 'Wish you were here,' that's Margot and Paul. Margot is a lively and refreshingly direct American who loves astrology and chocolate brownies. Here's a little quote from her, in the middle of a yoga class, at a rather inappropriate moment: 'Andrea (our teacher), you have a beautiful crystal necklace, I just had to tell you that before I stare at it the whole time!' Together with her and three other women, we are doing a month-long yoga teacher training intensive (200-Hours Teacher Training) and diving into the yogi life amidst the modern and yet crazy Colombian city bustle.

After just over a week and a half, our bodies have forgotten about Colombian rice and all the 'deep fried' pastries, and the slow-paced coastal life with its vastness and the smell of the sea is already far behind us. We are diving into the exciting world of yoga - even though we couldn't be further away from Asia. We start the day with a joint meditation at eight o'clock in the morning, followed by a one and a half hour yoga session that gets us sweating. During the day, we dedicate ourselves to various interesting topics, including learning about 90 asanas (yoga positions), anatomy lessons, yoga philosophy, Ayurveda introduction and joint Ayurvedic cooking, chakras, pranayama, chants, working with essential oils, teacher skills, and much more. We are lucky with this training, as there are only 6 of us and the content of these trainings varies greatly depending on the teachers. The Yoga Alliance, which certifies this training, only provides very rough guidelines. We couldn't have found better people than Andrew and Andrea, who lead the training and have put together these exciting contents. However, the two couldn't be more different... Andrew is from Britain and is more of the anxious, very precise, and conscientious type. His classes start and end on time to the minute. He used to teach Ancient Greek and Latin at university, so he knows better than anyone else how to keep the listeners engaged. His anatomy and asana classes are very well researched, and he pays meticulous attention to making sure that we don't overextend ourselves to strike some fancy Instagram pose, but rather respect and protect our very different bodies. In the meditation and philosophy classes, he also lets us participate in his personal journey, and somehow we have already come to appreciate and love his professional yet very human way. Paul is also over the moon, finally being able to put the anatomical knowledge he acquired during his studies into practice and no longer pushing himself to the limit in workouts, but enjoying conscious movements and stretches. The back of our thigh muscles is particularly shortened, so both of us always have to use different straps and blocks, while our other participants effortlessly slide into splits or do other contortions. But this is also a good exercise that is important here and in yoga in general: not comparing oneself, but doing something good for one's own body and not overexerting oneself.

But back to Andrea, Andrew's counterpart: she is a fiery Colombian who likes to come late, always goes over time, and spontaneously changes the daily schedule. Often her classes take place in some nice café and we spend the first fifteen minutes talking about our weekend or the last Ayurvedic dinner. With her, beautiful discussions arise and everything is a bit more spontaneous and relaxed.

Besides Margot, there are a few other participants in our training and our yoga flat, which is directly located in the 'Flying Tree Yoga' studio. Rebecca, also a psychology student from Germany, who now lives in Zurich and shockingly doesn't like cake. Audrey, a very sweet and very flexible French woman who used to dance but gave it up because she wasn't flexible enough (!). During her time here, she has made the decision to quit her job in the cosmetics industry and manage restaurants in Paris with her brother. Nicole from New Zealand also quit her job before coming to Colombia, she worked in the fashion industry, and is currently finding a new direction. Nico is Andrew's assistant, covered in tattoos (mostly wisdom in Sanskrit), he eats a vegan diet without industrial sugar and salt, and does the craziest yoga contortions. After we had a one and a half hour power Ashtanga yoga session this morning and enjoyed our well-deserved breakfast, he went even further and did his exercises for another hour before finishing off with a few final pull-ups. Apart from this somewhat superhuman yoga load, he is super nice, always tilts his head to the side, and laughs very funny.

In some moments, it does feel strange to be sitting here in such a diverse country as Colombia, immersing ourselves in yoga for a whole month, when we could also be exploring this exciting country. Perhaps it should be said that this journey was always meant to be a mix of traveling and getting involved locally. Actually, we wanted to do volunteer work somewhere in Colombia, just like we did volunteer work in the children's village. Since we started doing yoga in the mornings on our journey and realized how good it is for us, we were looking for yoga retreats where we could work, but couldn't find anything that really suited us. I was planning to do a yoga teacher training in Germany in the fall anyway, so just out of curiosity, we looked to see if there was something like that in Colombia. And voilà, this training jumped at us: perfectly timed (it ends 2 days before our flight home), very very very small group size, and only a fraction of the cost of the German training. So here we are and we are very happy!

At this point, I'll already slip in a little commercial break: When we are back, I will offer one or two open yoga classes on a donation basis in Marburg! I'm really looking forward to it and I'm curious... Maybe Paul and I will also give weekend classes together and we are already coming up with various ideas about what else we could do with this training: for example, doing water yoga on boards in the Lahn or traveling around in our van and offering yoga on the beach... Let's see what life has in store for us!

But now it's time to go to bed. Paul just told me from the bathroom that he has started to like his chest hair. My body is calling for sleep, my sore muscles and hyperflexible knees need to relax now.

Namaste!

Greetings from Sinsana and Paschwana