Tony Sanchez Training - Day 1

Tony asks us to start the day at 6am with a non-yoga activity. Some people walk or jog on the beach, some do tai chi or meditate. This morning I chose to lift weights. Bishnu Ghosh was a weight lifter, and the yoga often went hand in hand with weight lifting, so I have decided to give it a try. Often yoga and weight lifting are kept separate. I know a lot of yogis who look down upon weight lifting, but Tony is an advocate of it, so I thought I should at least try it.

I focused on doing exercises that the yoga postures don't do, like pull-ups and rows. Don, a yogi here from Winnipeg, Canada, was also in the weight room. He is very strong and he showed me some exercises to do with the free weights. We will see how my body responds.

We started with Tony at 8am. We began with a roll call of sorts. One at a time, we all got up in front of the room and told who we are, where we're from and a little about ourselves. It was beautiful to hear all the different voices, the different accents, the different backstories, how people have come to be together in this place. There are people here from Switzerland and Austria, the UK, New Zealand, Canada and all over the US.

Then we did the class that we are here to learn, what Tony calls the Master's Core System. It has 40 postures, give or take. He is very passionate about making the yoga our own, not following a prescribed system or necessarily doing it exactly the same every day.

He speaks freely about any number of topics ranging from the origins of Ganesh to Zarathustra to geometry to drinking a shot of tequila to kill a stomach bug. There are two things that I recall vividly from this first session.

First, the best yoga is nutrition. If we want our bodies to be healthy, we must give them what they need nutritionally. Simple as that. The second has more to do with the asana practice. He said to treat the two halves of the body, right and left, as identical twins. In every posture, feel the right and left side, even them out. Even the effort, the compression, the stretch, the relaxation. This will create symmetry in the body and the postures will become more therapeutic.

During the lunch break I started feeling sick to my stomach. I don't know if it was something I ate, but I spent the rest of the afternoon shuttling back and forth between my bed and the bathroom. So I missed the afternoon session. Luckily I am feeling better as the day draws to a close.