February is just over and I feel so unbelieving... in only 28 days so many things happened and brought so many changes! February is a magic month, like every year...
We started the month with probably the lowest temperatures I could remember in Berlin since 2009. Nice white carpets and iced lakes made some of my lunch breaks and weekends really enjoyable. I never experienced before the free walking on the iced lake, and it's something I will never forget. It was such an amazing day and not a coincidence was even San Valentin's day... So much love around and
inside me indeed!
The 1st of the month I started a new job, I found myself suddenly catapulted in a lot of different topics, lots of responsibilities in a high interesting sector, made of solar energy and e-mobility. Here the gerarchie is pretty flat and I like how they put the fully trust in my capabilities and competences. I realized for the first time in my life that I am an experienced marketing Manager and I'm really finding personal satisfaction in doing it. Really exciting :)
The bad part of the story is that I am working a lot, jumping from my desk chair on my yoga mat behind, allowing me to enjoy some yoga breaks during my lunch break. I have a new yoga teacher now, Sandra, who is giving me new movement inputs to work on in my own yoga and teaching practice. As consequence of that I had to reschedule a bit my days, learning to work hard to obtain results and to become a Tetris queen again, by filling the free time I have with the rest of tasks I daily want to fulfill, like:
- making yoga
- teaching yoga
- reading yoga
- consolidating my yoga skills
- discovering new yoga fields
- trying out new yoga asanas
- cooking vegetarian dishes
- housekeeping/ coping with housewife tasks, which are more challenging by living with 2 men in the same apartment..
- organizing a great farewell present for a very good friend, one of my oldest friend, one of my best friends, that despite all the differences I love a lot and will leave Berlin in few days.
- organizing other birthday presents for some little "fishes", close friends of mine.
- finding new ways to celebrate my friends even with the Covid restrictions.
Especially with the last point I was lucky enough to see the weather dramatically changing from -10 degrees celsius of Sunday 14th to +18 of Sunday 21st. Crazy planet!
And thanks to my friend Sunny Love Yoga I had the great honor of participating in a special event, called Sunday Soul Bath.
Rebecca and Jess, my two teachers of Hariharalaya, created this 2 hours online community gathering, where we chanted Ganesha mantra, the Remover of all obstacles, we made a short yoga session to breath, stretch muscles and love ourself, we let the pen goes on a paper for the creative writing part, reflecting on 3 fundamental points:
What are the recurrences in your life?
What do you do when you feel tapped into your wisdom?
What distracts you from you? What separates your mind from your body?
We moved our bodies in an esthetic dance, where I gave a bit of vent to my emotions and feelings in order to come back to stillness, followed by mantra and mediation. It was a great experience, reinforced by the fact that it was my anniversary from the Hariharalaya retreat in Cambodia, one of the most significant week of my sabbatical trip, that I had the pleasure to share with my friend Rebecca, as one of organiser/teacher, my friend Claudia, as co-participant and roommate and a lot of new special people.
This magic Soul Bath, exactly one year after my Hariharalaya retreat, pushed me back in Cambodia for a moment. Closing my eyes and listening to Jess's and Rebecca's calming and happy voices put me in a state of relax and happiness, I was not feeling for a while. The final entrance of Gaetan, my boyfriend, in my room with the candles and essential oil diffusor, hugging me, both seated on the yoga mat and swinging from right to left and from left to right, chanting the Ganesha mantra, made me feel so blessed, strong and beloved.
Ganesha Hindu Chant: Om Gam Ganapataye Namaha
Thank you Rebecca and Jess, I'm so looking forward to partecipate to the second edition of the Soul Bath on the 7th of March!
Meanwhile in this short February a lot of changes in the world captured my attention too:
1. Myanmar, Aung San Suu Kyi was arrested by the Burmese army. The Nobel price for peace, the woman that revolutionized a country in only 10 years, opening it up to the world, creating infrastructures, educational system and creating the fundamental base of a democratic country.
In order to keep her freedom to attuate her project, she had to hide a huge problem of inhumanity, an ongoing genocide of the Rohingya population. It's not my role to judge, as nobody knows how much difficult was for her to run a government in such part of the world, under these hard conditions, coordinating all political interests toward a democratic civil path, with the military pressure on her shoulders! And indeed the army took her now, by pushing the country in another dark period of Burmese history.
I spent one month in Myanmar between December 2019 and January 2020 and I'm feeling emotionally connected with them, as I loved that country a lot and especially their people so much. I just want to add this now: "Lokah Samastah Sukhino Bhavantu" - "May all beings everywhere be happy and free, and may the thoughts, words, and actions of my own life contribute in some way to that happiness and to that freedom for all."
Perseverance landed on Mars. A big step for the global science. It's emotional to see the NASA video, but at the same time I'm pushed to think "That's amazing, I love scientific discovering. But please, don't forget that we are living on our planet Earth and we want to stay here, so we should accelerate our efforts to find solutions to save our planet from the catastrophic consequences of climate change.
Another fact happened in February regards my own country, Italy. The country where I was born, grown up and where my entire family and lots of old and close friends are still living. The country that is not able to keep a government together for more than one year! The Presidents of the Council of Ministers of the Italian Republic, from its proclamation in 1946 until today, have been 30 and have presided over a total of 67 governments. Do you know any other democratic country changing its political figures so often? I don't think so and it's so ridiculous and worrying what is currently happening: Due to one of our political representatives, putting his individual interests and opinions over the collective interests, we ended in a break up of the fragile parliamentary balance. A lot of our political representatives are still thinking for individual interests over collective interests. This is my country. This makes me deeply sad and disappointed. We should all leave away our individual grudges and work together to reach the collective well-being.
That is what we pray for during the closing mantra of the Ashtanga Primary Series. But unfortunately, we selfish human beings are often not able to make the right choices. So in Italy they had to ask the ex president of the ECB to help the country to make a government and approve the recovery fund, vital for our post-covid-crisis survival, because our political exponents were not able to do it, due to internal divergences. But this time Draghi was asked to create a political government, which mustn't be pure technical, like Monti government. And guess who we have now as under-secretary of defense? A woman, who once liked a post of an user, saying that emigrants should go to die in gas chambers. And who do we have as under-secretary of culture? A woman who twitted in 2016 that it's more than 2 years she didn't read a book! These are two women of right wing parties. And the other women? Well, we have only 8 in total as ministers in the new government, reducing more and more the important role of women in politics, letting the Italian public opinion continuing thinking that women are not able to make politics, women must stay home and let men make business and politics. That is unfortunately my country, where equality is very far away. What happened to feminism? We need to give power back to us, women, creators of this world!
And last but not least, another project I started in February is Prenatal Yoga, to give power to our inner creative force. Everything started because one of my students/friends stopped my Ashtanga classes of Wednesday because she is pregnant. Another friend of mine is pregnant too. They are both at the second pregnancy and they are both such great women. I knew I had no time, as I'm working 45 hours and having 2 yoga group evening classes and one weekly private class every Tuesday. Nevertheless I wanted to try this new thing out. And when I'm motivated in doing something, I always find ways to fit the Tetris pieces together. So I used every free moments I had to curve out spaces to learn yoga for pregnant women. With my teaching base it's not hard, and it requires only a bit of intuition, a lot of Pranayama techniques and hips opening postures, such as Baddha Konasana or yogi squat. So in few days, I developed my first pregnancy yoga gently flow.
There is no bigger happiness in seeing people you love being happy. Because their happiness makes our happiness. If our beloved ones are sad, we are sad too. It's called empathy. A human gift, a feeling, not always easy to feel. For me it's a feeling I am still struggling with indeed, as I tend to be pretty selfish and egocentric sometimes, so only my happiness is important apparently. Now I'm realizing more and more how much not being empathic is dangerous and negative, because we are all intrinsically connected in this world. So I cannot be totally happy, if someone else is not. If you see somebody sad or angry, don't say "I don't care". It's not the indifference helping him/her to stay better, but the interest in his problems. Maybe he doesn't want to tell you anything in that moment, because he is not ready yet or he/she is afraid of being judged. Ok, perfectly fine, but at least show him/her that you are there, always ready to listen and give a shoulder if needed. This is called friendship, this is called love.
February is finished, so short, so full of emotions, so full of mental changes. Tomorrow is one year I'm back from my sabbatical... one year ago I was on my way to Bangkok to take the flight back home. People at the airport measured my temperature... why? I was asking myself, completely disenchanted and unaware of the pandemic that was about to erupt. Today I'm so grateful to have been able to see so much of our world before my backpack enthusiasm was shut down by covid19. Now we can only wish us that this vaccine campaign is going to work and let us physically get together again for a better life.
Om shanti shanti shanti
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