My weekend at the Omega Institute was short but practically perfect. It started with checking in with a woman I met on my connecting flight and with whom I shared a taxi to Omega. In my cabin I met my cabin-mate, a very beautiful (inside and out) and well known journalist. During the opening Friday night, the workshop teachers shared stories about what yoga meant to them. The stories were about how the deeper meaning and philosophy of yoga had affected their lives. It was a very warm opening, ending with a meditation by Kundalini teacher Gurmukh Khalsa, at the end of which she invited everyone to hug everyone else in the room.
In the dining room, the food was vegetarian and simple, but fresh and mostly organic. Being a vegetarian who avoids dairy and wheat, I enjoyed the food and appreciated that the ingredients were listed above each dish. I was able to quickly scan the offerings and decide what I was able to eat. However, I heard varying opinions on the food, as meat-lovers or those accustomed to richer foods were less impressed. There was plenty of herbal tea, and no refined sugar. They had agave nectar and stevia natural sweeteners next to the coffee and tea. I was impressed. I ran into everyone in the dining room. Michelle (fellow yoga teacher and studio owner) from Halifax, Kate my cabin-mate, Nikki my taxi friend, two of the many women who hugged me Friday night, a beautiful 18 year old from Poland who was visiting her father in the US for a week, another woman I met at the airport. It was a beautiful gathering of yogis of all ages and levels.
The bookstore was amazing. As I explained to my children, there is a very little section in the bookstore for me here. The entire Omega bookstore appealed to me. I can go on for hours about it, but I won't bore you :-).
Attending four workshops on Saturday meant 6 hours of yoga with yoga masters Seane Corne, Rodney Yee with Colleen Saidman-Yee, and Shiva Rea. I started and ended with Seane Corne's Empower and Detox Flow workshops. I definitely felt like I was detoxing on Saturday night and all day Sunday :-). Thankfully on Sunday I had booked a discussion workshop. Kelly McConigal started the closing on Sunday with a guided breathing meditation, and Seane Corne ended it with a discussion on how we can use our yoga to contribute to our communities and the world. We filled out Omega postcards with our addresses and with how we planned to commit to making a difference, before dropping them off in a basket.
On the Omega shuttle back to the airport, I bonded with three women as we shared our experiences and observations over the entire weekend, and waited for our delayed flights (thanks to bad Philly weather) all day.
On Monday morning I woke up at home in my own bed feeling like a new person. During Shiva Rea's "Breathe for Change" on Saturday, I had committed to transforming some negative emotions to something positive, and I felt as if I had "emptied my cup" of stress and bad memories. Unfortunately, it has been gradually filling up since then :-).
But that is life. That is why I practice and teach yoga.
Namaste, Kathryn
