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I’ll be honest and say that I’m not completely new to yoga. But it’s been a while. A very long while. Like 17 years while.

My parents were really into yoga when I was a kid. And it wasn’t just your regular exercise. It was a full-blown cult. With a “real” guru, who was an old Indian guy claiming to be god and building a whole cult around this belief. We had received our yoga names and our on mantras in sanskrit. Receiving them was a whole ritual. My first trip abroad was to ashrams in Czechia and Slovakia to meet the guru.

It wasn’t all bad. It was a nice community of people who tried to do good in the world and lead a healthy lifestyle. It was fascinating. Travelling abroad was a huge deal for me. It was a lot like the Eat Pray Love when Julia Robert’s character goes to India. I have fond memories about those times. If you ignore all the brainwashing it was really nice.

Eventually my parents left yoga. It turns out the cult leader wasn’t a divine pure soul. As it usually happens with many cult leaders, sexual assault allegations started to arise. I don’t know much about that but I googled it recently and the cult still exists and there is an anonymous website with some scary confessions.

So yeah, you can imagine that I was not super exited about doing yoga for the last 17 years. I did go to a few gym group classes that didn’t push religious stuff onto me and only did the exercise. But I didn’t find the right class for me and didn’t enjoy them at all. Everything annoyed me. Because it wasn’t the right tempo, the right atmosphere. It wasn’t how I remembered it from my childhood.

I did try BodyBalance by Les Mills which is a mix of yoga, pilates and tai chi. And I loved it! My favorite part was of course yoga and I always knew in the back of my mind that I want to find the right yoga class eventually.

I recently went to get a massage and felt so much pain! I even thought the masseuse doesn’t like me at first because it was so painful. My body obviously needed movement. So I decided maybe it’s time to find some workout that I truly enjoy and can do on a regular basis and not for superficial reasons. That combination is truly hard to find. I used to do pilates but it was mostly for superficial reasons. There are tons of workouts on Youtube but most of trainers yell at you to “burn those calories” or “get that beach body” which is really strange to hear when you are at a place when you truly love your body as is. I want to enjoy those movements and do it for my health and well-being.

Now I’m a grown up and not that easily brainwashed (or so I’d like to think). Maybe it’s finally time to find the right yoga for me?

Spoiler alert: I think I found it! I started doing Yoga with Adriene and it felt so right from day one. I’m doing her January Center journey. It’s been 17 days so far (I’m a bit late to the party) and I am pretty sure I’ll continue even after 30 days of the journey. There is no brainwashing (I know, seems obvious, but that’s a big plus for me), Adriene has a calm voice, right tempo, she doesn’t want you to push through and get quick results, she encourages you to find what feels genuinely good in the movements. Her videos fit like a glove.

I’ll update when there is more to tell. For now I really like being in the moment and enjoying how my body feels. And it feels awesome for the mental health too.

So here comes one more recommendation from Curios About Everything newsletter. 12 minutes in and I already have goosebumps. It’s a podcast by Kate Bowler with Elizabeth Gilbert Why Your Creativity Matters.

Here is a great list of 8 techniques for evaluating people’s character. Some of them I knew intuitively but some were new for me. The funny thing is that when I ignored my intuition and tried to be “open minded” about certain things from this list and tried giving people the benefit of the doubt, it was then I got the most disappointments. Turns out the signs were there all along.

Considering doing a Depth Year. Maybe not hardcore, but just to keep it in mind. Found out about this idea from Alastair Johnston

The more great stuff I read, the less I want to write.

I feel like I don’t deserve to write.

Like what I write is not good enough to share.

But I know myself. If I go down that rabbit hole, I will never feel like I’m good enough.

No amount of therapy will fix that.

It is not the opinion of others I’m worried about.

It is all me. My own biggest critic.

Seth Godin says that there will never come a time when you will be satisfied with yourself.

Your inner voice will never praise you.

You need to learn to dance with it.

And Seth writes great blog posts every single day for god knows how many years.

Time to take some dance classes.

Binge watching a Yale course by Timothy Snyder “The Making of Modern Ukraine“.

The course is available for free on Youtube. What a time we live in! I highly recommend this course if you want to deepen your history knowledge of Ukraine or even if you do not know much about Ukraine at all. It is not shameful not to know something and at this time and age you have all the resources available to you for free from the world’s top universities.

There are tons of gaps in my knowledge of Ukrainian history and I want to be able to speak on the subject with ease using facts. Right now I find it hard to speak and educate people about Ukraine when asked. I get easily emotional and lack the language, especially in Swedish.

I tried Lynda Barry’s Four-Square journaling method. It works wonders when you can’t be bothered to journal “for real”.

I’m reading a book by Lynda Barry “What it is”

My ultimate goal is to get back that creativity I had as a child. I used to have a very active imagination (as a lot of kids do). I would write books, poems, and when I played I was fully in my imaginary world, and I could create a thousand of such worlds on a whim. But then something happened when I grew up. Maybe we are all praised for acting serious and mature so we slowly lose our imagination.

This book seems to be a solution, or a least a part of it.

I feel like every single time I write a post I always mention how big of an inspiration Austin Kleon. But here I go again.

So, I’ve build a habit of doing at least one prompt in my Steal Like An Artist Journal every day.

It’s been 23 days and by now I’ve truly made the journal my own. I took some washi tape and covered the prompts that are not my cup of tea. I’m not much for painting so it’s mostly those but also some that do not “speak to my soul”.

Another thing I’ve done is I came up with a few of my own prompts and wrote them on the blank pages. Most of them are stolen from other creative people and Austin himself.

So I want to share one of those prompts with you.

One of the things Austin writes in the Steal Like An Artist book is “Write the book you want to read”.

I decided this idea should have its own prompt in the journal. So I made a prompt that looks like this:

It turned out to be a great reflective exercise. The books I want to read tell me a lot about what is missing from my life and what kind of wisdom I want to acquire.

Did you ever think “Why hasn’t anyone written a book about …?”. Sit down and come up with 10 of those. It’s super fun!

My Reading page is updated with the first book I finished in 2023. It is called Your Head Is a Houseboat and I cannot recommend it enough.

I’ve also added all the books I am currently reading. The funny thing is that I have even more books I can’t wait to read. So now I feel like my cat Misou who is super impatient when I’m opening her food.