I was invited to be the interpretor of a yoga student who is following the training to become a Kundalini Yoga Teacher. The occassion was the Ashran week in Quinta do Rajo, Portugal. This means that the student lives in the yoga community having a yoga lifestyle: awakening early to do Sadhana, morning yoga and meditation, eating a macrobiotic vegetarian diet, no bread or cheese, chanting mantras all together during the Kirtan. It was clear for me, in my mind, that I wouldn’t allow any interference with my job as an interpretor. I would only be the mediator between the teacher and the student. Nevertheless given the fact that I am a yogini myself it is difficult to avoid being conscious of information that you know is useful for your lifestyle as well. I participated at all yoga lessons, the morning yoga, Sadhana, the walk from the hills to the beach and the full moon meditation.

Besides that I have my own daily meditation which I didn’t want to quit. I was happy to find some time in between the training to stay commited to my daily meditation engagement. In this cases it is important to focus on your priorities and keep up. At a certain point the temperature was too high and I couldn’t stay concentrate during my meditation under the sun. Therefore I decided to go for a walk while meditating and somewhere under some trees I found a shadow.

I remember a quote from Yogi Bhajan which was said a couple of times during the week : “There is a way through every block”. Sometimes we might be paralized because things are not flowing as expected. There is indeed a solution in every challenging situation. You just need to take some time out come back to your center, to your inner self, do a ‘pranayama’, a breath in Yoga, and keep going. Take each moment in your life as a challenge to learn something out of it and go on with your life’s path. When we bring the attention to the breathing we stop our mind.

Not only inhale and exhaling consciously is a main subject in our daily lives but we forget to breath using our navel. Make a trial yourself. Breath consciously through your nose without using your navel. Then try it again but this time contracting and relaxing your navel. Inhale through the nose while making a rounded tummy and then exhale contracting your navel and pulling it in towards the spine. You might want to do it 3 times or 3 minutes, whatever time you have.

Besides all the breath techniques the students where learning how to eat consciously and what to eat. Yogi Bhajan also said: “You are what you eat”. What we give to our body is like medicine or poison. Your body can adapt to everything even the worst food but remember that your body is the temple of your spirit and we want to have a long life to accomplish our soul’s destiny.

After such a beautiful yoga week the biggest challenge is to incorporate all this good habits in your life. How do you want to transform your daily life? You are the one who need to commit to yourself. I am glad that I could not only work as interpretor but also could refresh my mind with all the good tips for a yogi lifestyle.