A morning with my Yoga Instructor and a Monk

A couple Saturday mornings ago I had the experience of a life time. I've been taking yoga lessons for about 2 months from this amazing Korean woman. At the beginning she only spoke a little English (random words like achilles tendon and fish pose, both of which she learned studying yoga in India). When I joined the class there were 3 foreigners but now there are about 6 of us so she has decided that she wants to learn more English. She is a super fast learner and she can now say all these really important words for yoga like, inhalation, 100 times and my favourite- sphincter up!

She has been wanting to take some of the foreigners out to her hometown or to a temple for a while but no one could find a day that worked. So, I ended up just going on my own and it was absolutely amazing.

I was quite worried about the lack of communication, as I know very little Korean and she knows very little English. However, keeping a conversation going wasn't the problem we somehow talked the entire time and I have to admit probably only understood each other for about 25% of the time! It was pretty funny to the both of us.

I met her super early and we headed out to what I knew at the time as a 'Flower Festival'. Korea has many flower festival and you never really know what your getting into. This one was in honour of the 'Spider Lily'. They are these beautiful red flowers that grow like asparagus straight out of the ground without any leaves. In Korea they are known as the heart ache flower because once they lose their flowers and the top falls off they grow their leaves. I don't really get the logic behind it and I feel as though I've lost a lot of it in translation. Nonetheless they are pretty cool looking!

I knew that we were going to a festival and to have lunch with her friend. But, in fact we went to this festival that was at a Temple and then proceeded to have tea with her friend, a monk! When I say we had tea, I mean we officially had a tea ceremonies. It was amazing. The chief element of the Korean tea ceremony is the ease and naturalness of enjoying tea within an easy formal setting...and that's what we did :)

The monk was beautiful and completely relaxed he just exuded this feeling of Zeness. He was sat in the middle of an open window area of a temple like structure and his back was to the mountains. So as I sat there I could see gorgeous mountains. We sat there with him and they chatted in Korean, every once in awhile looking at me as if I should add something because they were talking about me. I just smiled and kept saying thank you. Then she told him that I had a bad back and he immediately grabbed my hand and told me to breath. I did and I focused really hard and I could feel all this wild energy flowing in and out! After that he got up and went around to my back and did all this stuff, once he was finished I had a sigh of relief it was pretty wild!

After our tea ceremonies we took a walk around and headed back down to where the actual festival was happening to watch some of the drumming performance. We left the festival and it seemed like she wanted to take me to this other festival, or maybe it was part of the same, but there was a huge line of cars. So, instead we drove out to the ocean near her hometown (I think) and for a drive around the countryside. It was so nice to be in a car, it's been 9 months since I've been somewhere in car that hasn't been a taxi.

We then went to eat at this special restaurant with tonnes of side dishes! It was so good! She's such a fantastic lady and is so nice to everyone in our yoga class. I'm so happy to have met her and will definitely miss her classes when I leave.


This picture above is taken on one of my many random field trips. It was so cool!!

On the leaving note...I'm about 45ish sleeps away from departure! So wild! I can't believe my contract and year are up. So in saying that, see you soon everyone :) !!!!!