Bringing out a better version of you!

Hope for spring is awakening in our hearts when our calendars show the start of the month March. As John Gray once wrote: Men are from Mars and during this month we will reveal five male yogies which have been interviewed for the book A Million Ways To Love Yoga. Our intention is to contradict everyone who still thinks that yoga is for women...

 

Olli Vilppo

We start with a guy who when starting yoga was a bit concerned how his friends would react to his new hobby. When Olli Vilppo started yoga three years ago he was looking for some much needed streching to make his football training more efficient. "My hamstrings were so tight from my workouts that after playing football I couldn't even run it hurt so badly." After the first lessons of yoga, Olli describes his experience as feeling younger and having much more fun on the football field! 

 

 

What's more, Olli started noticing many positive mental effects as well. Olli describes his feelings after a session of yoga: "I just feel like a better version of myself, more concentrated, more energised and above all happier". 

 

Read Olli's full story in the book A Million Ways To Love Yoga along with other male yoga stories to know how yoga can become a man's best friend and bring out the best in you.

 

Tiina & Sofia



The yoga adventure within

Hanna Varheenmaa has been more or less constantly on the move for the last decade or so, currently in the thirties, she is settled in Holland. Hanna found yoga a couple of years back, when she was looking for a physical workout which would not be attached to any time or place. Nowadays Hanna considers yoga to be so much more than just a physical exercise.

 

For the past ten years Hanna has been moving from country to country, but now she says that she no longer yearns for the change of surrounding since yoga makes her experience change within her. Despite Hanna's relatively brief experience of practising yoga, her observations are nevertheless very inspiring and crystallises so well how we all feel about yoga: "I can see change in my practise on a monthly, if not weekly basis. My discoveries in yoga are like an adventure within".
 

Hanna Varheenmaa

 

Hanna is very musical and says that she has fallen in love with the simplicity of the rhythm in Ashtanga yoga. Her head feels empty and light with total focus on deep breathing. "Yoga for me is a strong buffer against negativity".

  

The book A Million Ways To Love Yoga reveals much more on Hanna's exciting yoga experiences and beautiful pictures of the poses that mean a lot to her. The book also reveals the reasons to why Hanna devotes her time to Ashtanga yoga at least three times a week, and why she would not settle for anything less!

 

Tiina&Sofia

 



Yoga on higher levels

 

We are both happy and honoured to announce that our first interview brought us to talk to ashtanga yogi and visual artist Asta Caplan! Asta is one of, if not the furthest advanced yogi within ashtanga yoga in Finland.

 

We were invited to the cozy yoga studio Moola in central Helsinki where Asta practices yoga together with her husband Daniel who is also a yoga teacher. Asta greets us with a warm and bubbly smile at 8:15 after her everyday morning yoga session. The atmosphere is relaxed and we quickly notice that Asta has much much to tell about the wonders of yoga.

Asta Caplan

See more about Asta
www.astacaplan.com

See more about Moola
www.moola.fi
 

Asta is one of a maybe a handful of yogis in Finland who have advanced to practice the fourth series ashtanga yoga. "Nowadays one of the challenges for me within yoga is to find a teacher to teach me something new", says Asta.

 

Still, she does not in any way come off as feeling superior to any one else. On the contrary, she insists on the fact that anyone can practice yoga and that it is not the number of asanas (poses) you master that make you a better yogi or person, but the fact that you are willing to work with yourself, and learn to know your true self.

 

And as we learn during the morning, yoga has helped Asta in a number of ways; both with her physique - as she was suffering from serious injury that made her quit her career as a ballet dancer, as well as with her mind - most of the challenges in our lives are actually only in our mind.

 

Listening to Asta excitedly telling us about her most memorable yoga experiences is mesmerizing  and we leave her yoga studio full of inspiration for the book!

 

Tiina&Sofia