Part I: July 15 – 21, 2018
Part II: July 22– 28, 2018
Instructors: Alessandra Policreti, Nataly Nitsche and Maxim Leshchenko
by Marta Cappelli
Last day of the first session
It’s the end of June and I have the whole summer ahead of me. I would like to do some Yantra Yoga in the next few months and return to my personal practice. In the last few years my work has taken me away and I haven’t been able to integrate the practice in my daily routine. I open the Yantra Yoga website and I see that at the moment there are no courses scheduled in any Gar. What a shame, I think!!!
Two days later on my private e-mail I receive the message of a friend who is sharing the program of the Yantra retreat that would be taking place in Tenerife. (Yantra Yoga Tenerife is the Facebook Page)
I couldn’t believe it??!!!
I welcomed this message with joy and I started planning my departure.
The following Tuesday I meet my friend and as we speak I tell her that soon I will be leaving for a Yoga retreat. She asks me some details and excitedly she says, “Marta, it’s just what I need. I am coming too!!! I have never taken some time for myself in my life. The time has come!” My friend has just found out that she has a ten centimeter fibroid growth in her uterus.
We leave, we arrive in Tenerife and our Dzamling Gar adventure begins.
There are eleven people plus the three instructors. It is an open course. Only the three instructors and I are students of Chögyal Namkhai Norbu. The others are there for the Yantra Yoga.
Right from the first lesson, we all remember that we have a body and that we have the potentiality to breathe. Alessandra, Nataly and Maxim, each with a unique talent, guide us in learning and deepening this precious teaching through harmonizing the three aspects of voice, body and mind and becoming aware of our breathing.
During each break the group forms itself. Our openness to an exchange of views becomes more and more fluid. Each student has a different story to tell. Someone follows a Lama, someone doesn’t follow any teaching, and someone else is there to know this style of yoga they have heard so much about.
Day after day we learn more and more. The body becomes more relaxed and the mind follows. We see this and we observe it. If in the first days of the retreat we felt the need for definitions, separations and comparisons, we slowly develop an increasing presence of the present moment. The silence, that in the last few days we are able to share in the practice when each one of us is finally more present within him/herself and more capable of refining the harmony of the mind, the voice and the body, it is inside of us now. We take it with us when we go walking in the forest, we take it on the boat trip when we go to meet the dolphins and the whales and we take it with us to the Spa when we enjoy a moment of relaxation all together.
On the last day we all say goodbye with a hug and a smile. It is interesting to see that within these people the relaxation has nourished the desire to deepen the knowledge of Yantra Yoga. Everybody bought texts in which Chögyal Namkhai Norbu explains this teaching, or texts in which experts of Yantra Yoga and Tibetan medicine explain its benefits.
Dzamling Gar has this incredible potential; to open, to help discover, and to not separate. The simplicity, clarity, expressiveness and competence of those who guided us during these two weeks was an important element and perhaps the most visible fruit of this teaching’s great potentiality.
Thank you Master for showing us this precious path!
