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Yoga By Koula Kyriakidou
Mani 2019
Every dawn is a new journey
A land of tower houses, castles, ancient sites, Byzantine chapels, beautiful beaches and spectacular caves in the Peloponnese...
Dry, bare and rugged. The land of the prickly pear bristles with forbidding tower houses, stone villages, Byzantine chapels, delightful coves and astonishing caves. Mani.
The people here are frugal and close-knit, still adhering to centuries-old bloodlines and family ties.
Barricaded behind the crags of Mt Taygetus and ready for battle, the Maniots developed a powerful sense of autonomy, answerable to no one.
What you, the visitor, see today is only what they consider permissible.
But you’ll be overwhelmed with images of authentic Greece, because here in this corner of the Peloponnese,
at the second-most southerly tip of continental Europe, everything is dramatic and bewitching.
The beautifully built Maniot towers, war machines. They are the emblems of Mani. Vigilant lookouts.
You won’t find such a spectacular sight in all of Greece. Stone strongholds that thrust from the rocky land as if to strike the sky itself. Their height was directly related to their defensive powers, but also to the rank and social position of the family to which they belonged. Their construction was dictated by military strategy; no windows, minimal openings, battlements and multiple storeys, to give their defenders the advantage. Their spare, elegant masonry was the product of generations of local craftsmen who drew their inspiration
from Byzantine fortification.
Each day of our life is a new beginning.
Most of the times, the day we perceive as a new beginning is the first day of the year. On this day, we make decisions for the year to come, but also for our life.
What if that was to change? What if we saw each “Dawn" as an opportunity to make it better than all the others?
Every day you wake up is the beginning of a new life.
Every day is another chance to become happier and grateful for all your achievements. Every day you wake up is a reminder for everything you love, everything you fear and everything you dream of and not yet fulfilled.
See your goals with the willingness to do all it takes to achieve it, even if it means “twisting your approach around”.
Although, twists might seem to be painful - it is actually the process of letting go that scares us and translated as pain.
Indian yoga master B.K.S. Iyengar describes twists as a “squeeze-and-soak” action: The organs are compressed during a twist, pushing out blood filled with metabolic by-products and toxins. When we release the twist, fresh blood flows in, carrying oxygen and the building blocks for tissue healing. So from the physiological standpoint, twists stimulate circulation and have a cleansing and refreshing effect on the torso organs and associated glands. Therefore, twisting poses gives us the opportunity to try and leave our old habits behind in order to look forward and open up for new possibilities.