cheri en en
I do swimming and I do some gym practice—some working out type of thing—and I do yoga at the same time. The reason for yoga is to help me stretch a little bit more and to build the core strength I need.
I do swimming and working out, but because my work schedule is kind of difficult to control from my side, it’s very difficult for me to balance all of these together. When I came here, I found I can actually get all of them here. I feel I was building the strength and also I got to stretch my body more. That’s my physical feeling, and emotionally I also feel like I got a little bit of mental rest here—kind of shutting myself down for like an hour and a half from my work and other messy stuff in my life.
The first thing I actually noticed after coming here for three months—I felt like I could swim longer. My swimming was usually around 30 minutes, but then suddenly I started to feel I could swim like 40 to 50 minutes and in different styles. I would just do one for my 30 minutes, but for 40 minutes I can do 20 minutes, 20 minutes in different styles.
When I travel outside, it’s not like I can travel as actively as before, so I kind of have to slow down myself a little bit when I travel. But actually, I felt more like the energy level is slightly different from last year or two years ago. After practicing this, I feel I know more about my body. For surfing or diving, I know I can do more today or I should do less, and the way to rest my body, the way to use my body—I think I gained a lot of awareness of my body, which I didn’t have before.
I feel I can stretch more today, but sometimes I don’t feel that way. When I feel I can stretch more today, I try to push myself to deepen the positions a little bit more. But when I feel I’m probably not feeling very well today, I probably shouldn’t do that, so I can stop myself from there and prevent or avoid any potential damage.
I think there are two things that are very important. The first thing is consistency. Basically, if you go to other yoga studios, sometimes different instructors are telling you to do things differently, but here I feel the practice is very consistent. It’s step by step, it’s always this way.
The second thing is, I think different instructors have different perspectives in a very good way, so they can give me different clues, different things to help me gain this awareness of my body to practice more.
Here I feel the practice is very consistent. It’s step by step, it’s always this way. I get to practice my core strength or the legs or arms as well. I actually feel that and I see that. The way I practice, the instructor actually explains why this is going to help you if you keep it this way, and this is how you’re going to get the strength gradually. I feel it’s very helpful.
Maybe it’s just my personality—I want to understand why first, then I can start and I can keep doing this. Fundamentally, it’s how you can feel your physical body and health here, and I actually feel that way.
I think most people coming here feel this practice is helping them. You can feel your core strength, you can feel you have more flexibility during your life, you can move your body more easily—just simple things like that.
The masterclass is very helpful in terms of understanding more about how your body moves and how you should practice. It’s like very detailed mechanisms and instructions. Those things are very difficult to understand immediately from the practice classes, so I think the masterclass is quite a good opportunity to learn more about that, to understand the “why” behind everything.