Retreat Intensive in Nar Nar Goon North, Victoria, Australia | Yoga studio

Retreat Intensive

Locality: Nar Nar Goon North, Victoria, Australia

Phone: +61 481 139 200

Address: 940 Bessie Creek Road 3812 Nar Nar Goon North, VIC, Australia

Website: http://www.retreatintensive.com

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25.01.2022 We take a break in March and our next retreat is 12-14 April 2019. Fuller information at retreatintensive.com

25.01.2022 The loop walk in the hills up behind the house which we took in the three hour break after lunch on the Saturday: with various loiterings took us about an hour and a half.

24.01.2022 Last day or so before heading off to Nar Nar Goon North (no footpaths so no footpath hieroglyphs) for the July retreat: room for one more male with an indoors bed in shared room. I’ll be outside in a tent across the grass away from the house with a thermometer retrieved from my fish tank. You could bring a tent and join in, and gumboots as the weather icon suggests days of continuous downpours of rain.

24.01.2022 Exhibit B, Helen's King Protea photographed by Tania at RI.2 and Exhibit A, the same drawn by Donna at RI.1 before they had opened.

23.01.2022 We forget to take pictures as we have other things on our mind, but some eaters sent us some snaps.

23.01.2022 Our next workshop is the weekend of 7-9 June. Might be a good idea to bring uggboots.

19.01.2022 Just back from our fourth retreat-intensive. The next is scheduled for the weekend of May 10-12 (Friday evening to Sunday afternoon). Again photos only for the food (of Sunday lunch), but so not only food I add the duck sign for the duck pond on the hour loop walk that almost everyone did, and the Etruscan chariot that turned up in my talk on Saturday night.

15.01.2022 Saturday 8 December, some photos from the after-lunch walk which turned out to be a little more epic than maybe it should have been; but we got to peer down into some very inviting gullies, passed a duck pond with its own floating duck house and saw a great swarm of bees sliding slowly through the tree tops above us.

15.01.2022 On the Saturday evening of each of our retreats I give a brief talk on some aspect from the history of yoga. At our upcoming New Years retreat (11-13 January) I’m going to speak about Mind-Chariots. As mentioned in my first talk, the term yoga literally means yoking, the joining of draught animals to a wagon (or plough). Most likely the reference here is to the prestige form of the cart, the fast light chariot for war or racing. Invented sometime around 2000 BCE either in cen...tral Asia or the Middle-East, the chariot (ratha in Sanskrit) transformed the political landscape across Eurasia. Even after it became obsolete in warfare (losing ground to the elephant and more broadly to the ridden horse), it remained a symbol of the majesty of kings and gods. The analogy between the chariot and the mind, or between the chariot and the total person, is a natural one. The working chariot team is a composite of its human driver, the apparatus of the vehicle and the animals that must be trained and controlled (or even subjugated, literally ‘brought under the yoke’). Chariots of course are made to go and go fast, and as we know from Ben Hur, they crashand grisely chariot crashes are depicted in some of the earliest texts. So there is an element of risk. The taming and integration of horses, vehicle and driver (representing various components in the person) is not a one-off tune-up but an ongoing work in the unpredictable conditions in the world. This metaphor was an early way at looking at some of the tensions and problems that come with being a self-reflective animal aware of the contradictory impulses within itself. The yoking of yoga was to be a discipline that brings the fraught, disparate elements of the person into a state of coherence: what that good, proper or higher state of the person is meant to be will vary from system to system. Curiously, the Human-as-Chariot analogy is prominent in both ancient Indian and Greek philosophy: I’ll present a couple of passages.

15.01.2022 Published in 1996, N.E. Sjoman's The Yoga Tradition of the Mysore Palace was one of the early studies in what has become an academic subfield: the history and anthropology of modern postural yoga. (The quoted paragraph is from p.60 of the 1999 edition.) This scholarship also makes use of or extends into the older traditions of 'Indology', the study of India's long textual tradition especially in Sanskrit. But the centre of its interest is the modern and early modern periods (...that is, India under British domination and just before)and its focus is on the innovations in yoga practice and meanings, carried out in India by Indians in the last two centuries, from highly diverse sources: indigenous and imported, yogic and (originally) non-yogic. The images of the backbend and crane pose are from a 19th century (non-yoga) training manual, the Vyyma-dpika, Light on Exercise. On the face of it, vyyma, literally extension, would be a more likely word in Sanskrit for most of the repertoire of what are now Yoga poses: sana by contrast means sitting. But sana is the term because a meditation practice has gone gymnastic or a gymnastic practice has shifted itself into a meditational framework.

12.01.2022 It's not really possible to write a history of pryma as such, since apart from some visual representations the main available type of information about it before modern times is prescriptive texts: manuals in effect, relatively brief, and shedding little light on the practice operating in actual settings. Still the available texts are numerous and variousand there's a convenient collection of translations in Roots of Yoga (2017), edited by James Mallinson and Mark Singleton.

12.01.2022 TAN ‘stretch, extend, reach’ is the word base in Sanskrit for a set of words carrying notions like stretch, extend, reach. From that can be generated the hundreds of forms of the verb ‘stretch.’ For example: tanoti x stretches...Continue reading

11.01.2022 One of my favourite things on the property at NNGN is the curious tree island up the lawn on the north side of the house. Around its heavy base it had a skirt of blackberry creeper, kind of attractive when viewed from aways off, but it was stalking up into the trees themselves: and what a brutal plant it is. After the close of the retreat on Sunday I went out with the extendable pruning rod I had brought up on the train and set to work extracting it. It took about 10 hours, i...n two bursts evening and then again in the morning, and more work will be needed next week to finish. The history and structure of the place is now revealed again: evidently four wattle trees growing there in a little stand had been cut down and their root boles heaved up and over onto their sides so that the stumps projected sideways and downwards. Then the whole thing was burntand then the wattles projected new trunks upward out of the mass of burnt roots, now mounted on this little hillock of their former selves. (In there too now is a young not exactly flourishing gum tree: but maybe it will come into its own.) On the far side from the house my nephew had some years ago deposited a dismantled garden shed and covered it with a tarpaulin. This had sagged to form a little pond. We saw tadpoles in this on the first retreat. Much of all the wood was sodden and rotten and I set to pulling it away. As I got to the basement layer of the pilea pallet with the sheets of roof tin over ita blue-grey light-bellied snake between one and two metres long coiled slowly out of the back end of the pile. After a short pause it slid off among into the hollows between the root boles. This is the first snake seen on the property since Helen and Geoff have been there. Hopefully now it has lost its perfect lair, drinking pool and screen of thorns it will withdraw. The daily gang of kookaburras may take a hand in policing the matter. Other life while I was working: two blue dragonflies mating on a leaf, many many skinks and a rabbit that dashed in a blur down into one of the root gaps. O rabbits, are you sure this is such a good place to live! Snake Island looks denuded now but Helen is making plans. AK

10.01.2022 After dinner on the Saturday evening of each weekend retreat I give a brief talk on some element in the history of yoga. (This weekend just passed there were so many kangaroos milling on the lawn outside the dining room I was thinking I would have to postpone on the children-and-animals principle, but eventually it must have got dark enough that people were able to stop staring out the windows.) I spoke around this one verse from the not-that-old Haha yoga textit was probab...ly compiled in the 18th centurythe Gheranda Samhita (‘The compendium of Gheranda’). The verse proposes a state in which the self, the subjective minimal point of consciousness, is simultaneously placed at the centre of (unbounded, empty) space (this at least is easy enough to imagine) and itself contains (unbounded, empty) space. A point on a plane with a plane inside the point When it comes to sensation we tend to have a very crisp sense, even just in our language, of the notionally five senses (see hear smell taste touch)but we don’t have distinct words for proprioception, the body’s mapping of itself in space or for the suite of somatic, internal sensings of pressure, temperature, wellness/illness, pleasure/pain, liveliness/weariness, tightness/looseness, emotional tone and the like, all of which have to fall back vaguely on the word ‘feel’ perhaps an extension from the use of ‘feel’ for touching something/something touching us, unless pain is the determining example. That composite internal realm of awareness is the ground of meditative practice: even if elaborate visualisations are being deployed the stage for them is the body’s inbuilt capacity to place itself in a theatre of space and to assign that internal space a texture of feelings. Asana/posture practicewhich was first elaborated in the Haha traditionis likewise just as much a matter of sensation, perception and attention. So is golf of course: golf unperceived by the golfer could not be golf for her. But it is essential to all forms of yoga practice that they bring the basic background systems of the organismbreathing is the most obvious exampleto the foreground. Space is another even better example: we are hardly even aware that we, the human organism, run a faculty of spatial modelling and self-assesment. I’ve always preferred asana practice that instructs and calls each breath as much as possible: more and more now I’m drawn as well to deliberately inhabiting the space that the poses occupy and contain so that they become as much a place as an act. From that it does not seem a giant step to sweep the table clear of content and think about the kind of empty extensions proposed by the Gheranda Samhita. Andrew

08.01.2022 There had been some concern the February retreat this coming weekend might be on days of extreme heat but looks like it will be on the cool sideand with buckets of rain: that will be good to have out the windows of the yoga room. I am especially excited as I will be sleeping in my tent on the far side of the lawn. I found a cupboard with a full array of gumboots. We have sent out for more umbrellas.

08.01.2022 One week until the next retreat-intensive. These photos from two weeks ago with some hot days but cool misty mornings. The last photo has some boxing kangaroos. The photo I wish I had taken: in the evening when the kangaroos returned they stayed in the shade that runs uphill from the big island tree and grazed there, until at some point they must have decided ok cool enough now and all streamed down across the open lawn. AK

05.01.2022 Be warned that if you come to our workshops you may come under artistic surveillance. Me and grass by Donna Wright. Now I understand why I suddenly felt like Christopher Robin on Saturday afternoon.

02.01.2022 A headstand not on the head on our very sturdy chairs.

02.01.2022 A side-stepped upward bow/wheel pose from scupltural reliefs at a Vijayanagara temple dating from the early 1500s. This is at the start of the pre-modern period in which the number of poses named or described in haha yoga texts begins to increase markedly. Before that in the earlier phase of haha yoga from 12th century most texts included one or two, or no poses, and at most 10. (A key commentary on the 4th century Yogasutra lists without description 10 poses followed by ...a and so on, but these almost certainly are all seated meditation positions.) It has been commonally observed that the number of poses deployed in modern postural yoga is much greater than what is found in haha yoga texts: e.g. while Iyengar’s Light on Yoga contains 200, the Haha-yoga-pradpika (Light on the yoga of force) mentions only 15. However this observation is looking increasingly less valid. As more haha yoga texts are published it can now be said that in aggregate they include a similar kind of number to Light on Yoga. One problem here both for number and degree of continuity across texts is that the naming of poses is highly variable and was probably a local matter: the name rsana/headstand hasn’t been found earlier than the 1920s, but similar positions turn up with names like kaplysana/skull pose, vksana/tree pose and naraksana/hell pose (! unless it’s named after the mythological character Naraka, also called Bhauma (born out) of the earth, so maybe he emerged feet first out of the ground) Pretty much all of the basic types of poses found in modern practiceinversions, twists, backbends, forward bends, arm balances etccan be paralleled in the haha texts and visual representations. The main exception is the standing poses which are not part of haha yoga at all and must have a seprate originindigenous martial arts, European gymnastics, British military calisthenics are among the candidates. (Haha texts do assert there are 8,400,000 poses which suggests: if we do it it’s yoga.) A further question is where did the haha poses spring from? Like Buddhism, yoga explicitly rejects asceticism, that is gruelling practices of bodily mortification. One type of these involved holding hard positions, sometimes for years until particular body parts atrophied: e.g. standing on one leg, holding an arm in the air. Complex challenging non-seated yoga poses may be a repurposing of such practices. Although haha means ‘force’ its texts are much more likley to recommend not pushing too hard: anai anai, softly softly, by gradual steps, is a recurring instruction. Seth Powll on the Vijayanagara reliefs: https://journalofyogastudies.org//2018.v1.Powell.Etchedi/3 Jason Birch on the proliferation of sana since 1500: https://www.academia.edu//The_Proliferation_of_sana-s_in_