Ashram Life - Sarah Shannon — **Yoga teacher training and skinny dipping in Mallorca**

I've been here at the yoga ashram, Green Yoga in Mallorca, for one week and haven’t left it’s walls. It’s run by our Indian teacher and his Spanish wife in the middle of nowhere on the island.

I’m sleeping in a tent for the three weeks. Think Silk Road style camping at Electric Picnic as opposed to Jimi Hendrix campsite. We shower (not together) in the outdoor showers, wash our clothes in buckets and walk everywhere bare foot.

I get up at 6.30am to watch the sunrise in the morning on the rooftop of the main house. And shower in the night under the moon and stars. Jah Bless. We have meditation and chanting in the morning, followed by yoga classes, teaching practice, and learning about anatomy and philosophy. Light out at 10.30pm. But on Saturday night we pushed this out to 11pm for a wildly impromptu late night meditation.

We’re a group of 25 chicas and 2 brave chicos, spending every waking moment together. So you get to know each other pretty intimately. Keeping mute on some aspects like the fact that I’m not a vegetarian and I had a pint in the airport in Palma before coming to the ashram.

The first day was a meet and greet day and we all headed to the nearby beach. Which turned out to be a nudist beach. Naturally, as yogis, most were happy enough about this and I was too. I’ve always liked the idea of a nudist beach. Even in Dublin I’ve always admired, well no admired is the wrong word so maybe held in a certain regard, the naked men down in Vico Road bathing in the nip. It’s a liberating, natural thing that I think also shines a bit of a light on the unreal, modified image we have of the natural human body these days.

I sensed from the European gang I was with that we might be adhering to the beach dress code. But would it be full length nude or cocktail party topless? As I pondered, off a few of the gang went, full black tie into the crystal clear waters in all their naked glory.

There’s a quote that I always think of when I’m deciding whether to go for something or not. It goes “If you get the chance to sit it out or dance, I hope you dance”. Well I popped on this outlook and went for it, nude with strangers in the middle of the day, on day one of my yoga teacher training. So that was the life lesson that day “If you get the chance to swim or swim naked, I hope you swim naked". Option to spend the afternoon in the nip with said strangers sunbathing, reading and listening to music.

So week one of three complete. I’m learning a lot and loving the experience. On day one, our teacher told us to have no expectations for this course. It sounds easy but I always find it hard not to have some kind of image of what something will be like. I’ve sometimes ruined simple experiences by having expectations. Expectations of what a place will be like, how a person will be or how things in life should pan out. If it didn’t live up to my expectations, I felt let down that things didn’t go as I wanted them to.

Lower my expectations, or better, don’t have any expectations at all. Experience life just as it is instead of the preconceived way I think it should be. I’m applying this ground breaking concept to the search for my new career. Letting go of all expectations and going with the flow of life without trying to shape or control it. Trust in the process and see what it throws my way and as my Rastas would say “Every little thing gonna be alright..”.

Ashram Life

Yoga teacher training and skinny dipping in Mallorca

Yoga To Me

Being Jah Bless