Yoga Retreat in Tuscany

Villa Benvenuti

Sometimes in life a series of events sets off a chain reaction that results in an outcome that is beyond your expectations. This is exactly how I ended up spending 7 days at a yoga retreat in a centuries old Tuscan villa just outside of Lucca back in June. I got to spend the week with four incredibly beautiful and talented women who shared their laughter, life lessons and hearts with me. I got to spend the week  in an amazing villa, surrounded by vineyards and luscious green gardens. I got to fall asleep daily in a hammock under the trees, or on a sun lounge by the pool. I got spoilt with delicious Tuscan food, vegetarian of course, and a cheeky glass of wine with dinner, made from the grapes grown on the property. The retreat was at the delightful Villa Benvenuti, which is also available for private hire, and consisted of all food, accommodation and twice daily yoga & pilates.

Our yoga teacher for the retreat was Lauren from 19r Yoga and Pilates, originally from New York and currently residing Florence. Lauren started us off each morning with an invigorating Ashtanga sequence in the dedicated yoga space on the top floor of the villa. Afterwards we would head downstairs for breakfast of home made muesli and toast with local jam and honey.

During the day we had free time for bush walking, a swim in the pool, a massage with the delightful Isabelle, or of course a sleep in the hammock.

Enjoying a chair massage from Isabelle the onsite masseuse

In the afternoon we would head back up to the yoga room for about half an hour of ab-focused pilates, after which we would pick up our mats and head outside to the grass for some inversion practice and yin yoga.

Towards the end of the week we did a cooking class with the retreat chef Maria-Angela. I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned how good the food is yet but it was ah-maze-ing, there was not one meal that I didn’t go back for a second helping. I think we were all trying to think of ways that we could bring her back to Australia with us. In our cooking class Maria-Angela taught us to make Gnocchi with pesto, over a cheeky glass of prosecco of course.

Maria-Angela demonstrating how to make gnocchi

The town of Lucca was only 15 minutes away from the villa, so we spent a bit of time exploring the ancient walled city and eating some of the best Gelati we found on the entire trip to Italy.

The week was truly amazing and if you are ever looking for an unforgettable yoga retreat experience in Europe I can’t recommend Villa Benvenuti enough.

L xx

Savasana and the Parasympathetic System

Savasana or Corpse Pose probably has to be one of my favourite poses. My fiancé likes to refer to it as ‘the lie down bit at the end’, and it certainly is a great chance for relaxation at the end of class, but it is also so much more than that. After a yoga practice Savasana allows us to connect in with our parasympathetic system and make sure our body benefits from all the work we have just done.

The parasympathetic system is often referred to as the ‘rest and digest’ function; it works in opposition to the sympathetic system, or our ‘fight or flight’ response. The fight or flight response uses your body’s energy sources to prepare for a stressful situation, whereas the rest and digest  system helps restore the body’s energy. As suggested by referring to the parasympathetic system as ‘rest and digest’, it also increases blood flow to the gut and aides digestion. Savasana is particularly important if we’ve done a strong yoga practice and raised our heart rate; it brings the body back into a balanced state.

For me, Savasana is like an old friend, I know it is always waiting for me at the end of my practice and while we may not always get on, it’s always there for me when I need it. On some days I can’t wait to get through my practice so that I can flop into Savasana and on other days lying in Savasana feels like an eternity and no matter how hard I try I can’t surrender to its calm. Either way there is always a comfort in knowing that the pose is there when I need it.

My relationship with Savasana wasn’t always comfortable, particularly as a beginner when there were times when Savasana almost felt like torture. If this is you, try to stick with it, the calm will come and I can’t stress how important this pose is. Constantly hanging out in fight or flight mode stresses and exhausts our body, Savasana is a chance to reboot and replenish the body, not to mention it’s nice to have a little lie down at the end of class.

L xx

Advice From My Future Self

Intuition and trust.

It’s been a recurring theme in my life lately, more specifically I’ve been working on listening to my intuition and trying to trust my instincts.

It hasn’t been easy.

I constantly second guess myself and question my motives…

Thankfully I’ve had some help in the form of Samantha from Dakini Grace. I don’t think I can neatly put a label on what she provides, nor would I want to, but terms like mentor, life coach, guide and teacher all come to mind. Sam helped me to realise that when you trust your intuition the path will always be free and easy, when you go against your gut the road will be rocky and fraught with obstacles.

Image from here

In my last 1:1 with Sam she took me through a guided visualisation and asked me to have a conversation with my future self. This is what future Larah had to say to present-day Larah:

Don’t be afraid.

You already know the answer.

There are no mistakes or failures only lessons learned.

Trust yourself.

Those are some wise words from my future self, words I should listen to.

I’m afraid to fail, this fear is so firmly entrenched in my being that I stop myself from trying. My reasoning is that if I never try I can never fail… But I can also never succeed.

Recently I can feel something shifting, I’m starting to look forward to those failures, and more importantly, the lessons I will learn from them.

L xx

Oh, Italy!

Is it possible to be smitten with an entire country? I think I might be a just a little bit smitten with Italy. The food, the wine, the scenery, the cities, the countryside, every little bit of it is amazing. We only spent a very brief two weeks in Italy, where we had a couple of days in Rome, a couple of days in the Cinque Terre and 7 days on a yoga retreat in a villa just outside of Lucca in Tuscany. It was really only a taste tester of what Italy has to offer and I can’t wait to get back there.

Here are a few of my favourite pics from the trip:

The famous Trevi Fountain

Gelato! Chocolate and lemon. Yum!

Riomaggiore, where we stayed in Cinque Terre

Our own private Tuscan villa.

If you want to see more you can check out my photos on Flickr.

The yoga retreat was absolutely amazing and deserves its own dedicated blog post, so stay tuned for that.

L xx

Hello? Anybody there?

Things have been a bit quiet on The Pollen Path for the past few weeks – sorry ’bout that! I just got back from a trip to Europe where I flitted around Italy and Holland, and spent a week on the most amazing yoga retreat in a villa in Tuscany. So stay tuned for some travel photos, reviews and witty anecdotes :-P

L xx

Expectation = Disappointment

Bear with me for this post, it follows on from my last post on letting go of expectations and I’m hoping it proves cathartic for me. Recently I upset a friend, I told her the truth about a situation and her reaction was not what I expected, it didn’t fit my framework of how an adult and a friend should react in that particular instance. To be completely honest, her reaction really disappointed me. If you read my last post you’ll be seeing a recurring theme here… I had an expectation, the reality was different and I ended up disappointed.

To say that this interaction has been playing on my mind would be an understatement and it got me thinking what exactly was it about my friend’s reaction that upset me. It wasn’t necessarily the reaction itself, it was more my history with this friend.

Yoga constantly teaches us to be in the present, however in every interaction we have with friends, family and partners we build up an arsenal of past arguments and annoyances. This is something I struggle with quite a bit, I’m still not sure why I’m holding on to this arsenal but encounters like this are a perfect chance for self-enquiry. We are not our past, sure it got us to where we are but we live there. We are not our future, all we are is our present. I know I am not the same person I was 10 years ago, and I’m sure I will be a different person again in another 10 years but I can’t interact like the person I was then or the person I will be in the future, all I can do is be present-day Larah.

I’m definitely not the same person as little Larah :)

The lesson for me from this encounter with my friend is to try and remain present, drop the baggage of past interactions and remember that her reaction is not personal and is likely formed from a whole gamut of things happening in her life.

L xx

Letting Go of Expectation

We all have expectations of how we think things are going to turn. You may have had a really good coffee at that cafe once, so you expect it to be really good the next time you go back and are disappointed when it’s not.

This topic of expectation has been coming up a lot in my yoga teacher training and while I didn’t think that much about it before, I can clearly see the link between attachment to an outcome and the suffering it causes when the outcome is not quite what we expected.

Some expectations are so deeply rooted that the mind actually clings on to them. When you have an expectation that you have been holding onto for a while, you keep holding onto it because on some level it is serving a purpose, it might be protecting you or providing a diversion from your current reality. It is these long-standing expectations that cause the most suffering when they don’t materialise.

I, of course, have been holding on to a few expectations that fall into the above category and my teacher asked me to investigate why I was holding on to those expectations, how were they serving me. It was something that I had to sit with for a while, but when I realised that the reason I was holding on to certain expectations wasn’t actually serving me, I was able to start to move forward. That is not to say that I was able to let go of the expectation immediately but it did allow a new pattern to occur. When the expectation popped up in my head I simply reminded myself that it was no longer serving me, and to stay in the moment and trust that the universe will provide me with everything I need for my health and happiness. I’m still working on the part about completely trusting the universe but I’ll save that for a different blog post ;-)

L xx

This is a beautiful post from A Charmed Yogi that just has to be shared. Sometimes in life we all need a reminder not to sweat the small stuff, to appreciate each moment for what it is and to not give a damn if our yoga pants get covered in dog hair :)

A Charmed Yogi

For those of you under the age of 40 (yea, I can say that now), you may not know who Erma Bombeck is. She was a humorist and newspaper columnist from the 1960s through the 1990s. She wrote a column after she found out that she had cancer entitled, “If I Had My Life to Live Over.”

In the piece, she talks about all of the little things that she took for granted that she would embrace if she had to do it over. Two of my favorite lines are, “I would have burned the pink candle sculpted like a rose before it melted in storage,” and, “I would have sat on the lawn with my children and not worried about grass stains.” Well, my children have four legs and fur, but I still love how she articulates “seizing the moment.”

I think about this piece very often when I…

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Talking organic with Therese Kerr and Chef Kate

This morning I attended a breakfast hosted by KORA Organics and Women in Focus, where I got to hear from Therese Kerr, mum to Miranda Kerr, and personal chef to the stars, Chef Kate on all things healthy and organic.

Delicious fruit and yoghurt served up for breakfast

If you regularly read my blog you will already know that I am a strong advocate for living naturally and eating healthy but it was quite inspiring to hear Therese and Kate talk about the importance of embodying health from the inside and the outside.

Most women put around 200 chemicals on their face each day and as Miranda’s mantra goes “what you put on your skin, soaks in”. Eating certified organic foods and using certified organic products means that the body doesn’t have to waste time processing toxins, meaning your body functions can  get back to performing at their peak. This basically results in glowing skin, bright clear eyes, better digestion and a stronger immune system. Pretty much how I felt after I came off my detox last week :-)

KORA Organics Daily Hand Cream which smells delightfully citrus-y (it contains mandarin and grapefruit oil)

Branded Organic vs. Certified Organic

A lot of products will self-declare that they are organic. There is currently no government regulation over the use of the word organic in Australia so products and brands can declare they are organic even if they are not, so you may think you are buying organic but the product or food still contains a lot of the nasties you are trying to avoid. This is why certification is important, in order to be certified organic a product/brand has to jump through a lot of hoops and the certification process is quite stringent. In Australia the two biggest certifying bodies are Australian Certified Organic and NASAA Certified Organic, check out their website for more information.

Chef Kate also had a few tips and tricks, including which foods you should absolutely avoid unless they are certified organic, which was chicken, eggs, dairy and berries. She also said that Lamb is usually a good choice if you are out and unable to eat organically as it is generally lower in toxicity. The one thing Chef Kate said that really resonated with me was to have joy in what you are eating and I couldn’t agree more.

L xx

When Did Detox Become a Dirty Word?

I’ve just come off a ten day detox and I have to say, I feel amazing. It’s easier to get up in the morning, I feel less bloated and my mind feels a lot clearer. However over the last week I’ve been getting this reaction from quite a few people “Oh, you’re not doing one of those lemon detox things are you?”

Let me just clarify one thing, in my opinion the lemon detox diet is a fast not a detox. It came to fame after Beyonce apparently used it to drop a bucket load of weight for her role in dream girls, but let me reiterate, it is a fast, there is no food and your only nutrients come from squeezed lemons and maple syrup. Hardly a balanced or nutritious diet, me thinks. Warm water with lemon juice is a great way to start the morning, it cleanses the liver and is alkalising however sustaining your entire body on just water, lemons and sugar is definitely not something I would undertake.

I’m a big advocate for detoxing but to me this means eating super-healthy with loads of fresh fruit and veg, which essentially gives your body a whole bunch of extra nutrients to work with. The main things that I cut out of my diet are:

• No caffeine (this includes no chocolate)
• No alcohol
• No gluten
• No red meat (this one is pretty easy being a vegetarian)
• No sugar (a small amount of natural sweetners ie honey is OK)
• No dairy (yoghurt with acidophilus bifidus is also OK, just don’t over do it)

Giving up my morning coffee has been the hardest for me this time, I’ve given up coffee before but I was definitely feeling it this time around. Apart from that a detox just requires a little bit more ogranisation, you can’t fall back on takeaway when you are doing a detox but the pay off is well worth it. Tip: Rice paper rolls are perfect detox food if you forget your lunch ;)

Lastly, it’s important to drink a tonne of water, this will help your body flush out all the toxins. If you want more information you should check out The Detox Cookbook, it’s sub-title is ‘Cleansing for Food Lovers’ so you know you won’t starve ;)

Are you yay or nay on the humble detox?

L xx