free people road trip

Let me see....spectacles, testicles, wallet+ watch.

Ok, I think I have everything >.<

No sooner have I arrived here in London and I'm hitting the road again!

I could have done cartwheels on the moon when this exciting opportunity came up a few weeks ago.

To celebrate their UK launch, clothing brand Free People are hosting a weekend long road trip to the pretty seaside town of Newquay in Cornwall... and they invited me to come down and cover the event for their blog!

Wild stories of VW camper vans, live music and beach yoga classes have my heart skipping beats and I'll probably burst with excitement on the train down there today. To even be asked is such a huge honour and I'm stoked that this brand are launching in my homeland~ I love losing myself in their collections, they always stir the wildness in me.

If you fancy following the fun in Cornwall this weekend you can do so on instagram: #fproadtrip

Back soon!

(with sand in my jorts probably ^.^)

link party ♢ weekly wishes #2

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Time for round 2 of Melyssa's weekly link party!

I'm pleased to say I did really well with last weeks promise to keep up with the daily yoga challenge I signed up for.
There's a quote I love from Joseph Pilates: "You are only as young as your spine is flexible".
  I love to see those pictures floating the internet of 80 year old women who are in wonderful shape and can still contort into the most impossible asanas~ proof of the truth behind this statement. I like to keep this quote and those images in my mind's eye whenever I feel like shirking my daily practise.

Today my weekly wish is based around a big brown envelope I dropped off at the post office today.
5 years ago I developed a keen interest in Nutrition which  has ballooned  into a desire to pursue it as a career choice. After 5 years of procrastination and talking about it I have finally bitten the bullet and filled out an application for an online degree course in Nutritional Therapy.
After much mulling over with my Mom about how this will eat up the next 4 years of my life and income I have decided the end goal is so worth it. I will be able to begin a career in something I am truly passionate about.

My wish this week is that the universe will send back a positive response to my brown envelope and send me down a new and exciting path in my life.

Fingers, toes and eyes crossed >.<

link party ♢ weekly wishes #1

I'd like to take a long moment in this post to introduce you to a purdy young lady I have had the pleasure of acquainting with through this funny ol' blogging world.

Meet the lovely Melyssa of The Nectar Collective.

I "met" Melyssa earlier this year when I came across her blog and instantly connected with her as she is a fellow expat teacher in an Asian country. Even though she currently teaches in Japan while I used to teach in South Korea, I instantly related to her blog posts about the struggles and breakthroughs of living, essentially, as an 'alien' on another planet.

Not only that but her blog is peppered with beautiful crafts, recipes, adventure stories and, my personal favourite, her 'Musings From Monja' series where she chronicles (hilariously) life as viewed from her cutie pie dog Monja's eyes and all the thngs that "really get my nub wagging".
 Leaves me rolling around in happy tears every. single. time. 
(I challenge you to go read about the poop barf and not chuckle)

Anyhoo, fawning aside, you should check the gal out. She wins the internet in my book.

Which is why I will be taking part in her Monday Link Party: 'Weekly Wishes'...

Each Monday Melyssa will host this link up over on her blog and she is inviting one and all to share their personal  wishes/goals/challenges/promises with each other. I can't wait to click through to some new blogs, maybe find a new favourite, and also read what goals people are making each week and gain some inspiration from them.

This will be my first contribution to the Weekly Wishes link up and I am going to start this week by challenging myself to be vigilant and keep up with the free 30 day yoga challenge I signed up for yesterday.

Apparently this Weekly Wishes has come at just the right moment in my life because it's personal challenges like this that make me hold myself accountable when I sign myself up for things and then end up not doing them. Case in point, I was emailed my first yoga video this morning and I still haven't done it ~.~

I was, however, very proud of myself for sticking to my one week raw cleanse which I posted about yesterday.

I had a bit of interest about my eating schedule since posting that so for any who are interested just leave me a comment or email me on tremblingstarz {at} gmail {dot} com and I will send you my 7 day recipe plan which I made to follow every day of the cleanse.

The plan breaks down the week day by day and gives recipes for all meal times; some  recipes are taken from the book I was following and some were from recipes found on Pinterest, including raw blended tomato and coconut soup and lemon chick pea avocado salad.

Just drop me a line if you're wanting to cleanse and I'll shoot it to you lickety split.

Peace!

x

travel//journal

These past few days have been chilly, snowy, nothing to do but roam around the house days.

I have reminiscence written all over me.

Photo albums are being pored over, old love notes read and re-read and journals flipped through and smiled at fondly.

Above is the journal I kept on my first trip to India back in 2009, it's probably been about three years since I last read through it. My fingers tips are worn smooth from turning so many pages that still smell like a mixture of incense and spices, a ghost of a scent trapped and preserved between the pages after all these years.

Reading through my entries I'm amazed at how resolved I was to document not just the events of my trip but the emotions, the connections, the conversations and the lessons learned.

I scribbled down quotes and snatches gleaned from chats with fellow travelers; things that resonated with me or I wanted to remember for future reference. Compliments given to me or assertions on life that had never occurred to me before.

I wrote lengthy excerpts from books that I was reading while I traveled, stories told by taxi and rickshaw drivers, my fortune given by a palm reader.

 There are maps, phone numbers and email addresses scribbled in the margins alongside my own doodles and calender entries detailing what I did each day.

 I will forever know that on June 4th of 2009 I "Sat next to the ocean reading Hemingway and drinking Ginger Lemon Honey Tea".

Every page is filled with the people I met, their impressions on me, the experiences I had, the romances and what I learned from them.

I'm so glad I have this keepsake from the most magical and influential 4 months of my life to treasure and keep for always.

It's a reminder in this time of healing of what once was and what once again can be.

I'll leave you with a final thought- a sentence scribbled on to the first page of my book, whether it was a quote I heard or read or it came from my own brain I can't remember, but it's a nice thought, and one that serves me well in this current path I'm taking...

Breathe in...Let it go

'Yoga Family' Practicing yoga on our guest house roof in Bangalore, India

Before my first journey to India 4 years ago I had dipped my toe into the yoga pool many times; on the living room floor with my yoga video after school, classes at friend's gyms and hot yoga lessons later when I moved out to East London.

I was never the sporty or athletic type but after practicing asanas (yoga poses) my body always spoke to me and thanked me for the balance, correction and mind connection I was giving it. It enjoyed the ritual and discipline of the exercise. 

Fast forward to my airplane landing in Goa: I was a girl enchanted. It was my first solo travel, I bore my load on my back like a galapagos turtle and it appeared I had just arrived at the Arabian Sea's tropical back garden. I threw myself into the bohemian atmosphere...sunbathing next to cows on the beach without a care, drinking from coconuts bigger than my hands could hold, magical night market wanderings and technicolor sunsets proceeded for the next month...all to the soundtrack of Bob Marley and birdsong.

I met many beautiful, insanely wonderful, cuckoo bananas people during that first month in Goa who I still speak to occasionally today...and one of those people twirled me around and sent me spinning like a top down a path that left a deep fingerprint on my soul that will be there for always.

He was a Creole spiritualist from Switzerland, I was younger and quite apathetic, used to my street smart peers from London. We were worlds apart with nothing in common but when he learned of my affinity with yoga he made it his mission to see that I join a Yoga University in Bangalore that he had been to.

The course was a month long, cost a bolder-sized chunk of my travel budget and you were not allowed to leave the compound for the full month while you were there.

This was definitely not part of my 4 month travel plan... but something, an inner intuition, a whisper from the universe, told me to step on to this new and unexpected path that was opened up to me. We parted and he sent me regular emails giving me all the information that helped me apply and find my way to the Ashram....

My month at the Vivekenanda Yoga University in Bangalore shines like a glittering mosaic of splintered images in my memory....

4am wake up calls and dragging our yoga mats for the first class of the day, bare toes to the dirt, while the moon still shone like a silver marble in the indian ink sky/ the rotund and stern faced Padma Shri, our Hindi Yoga tutor, who, despite her size and age could contort herself into the most impossible looking postures for our demonstration/ hours spent on meditation and learning the power of breathe and how to inhale with love and exhale every drop of bad energy from your body/ the powerful seminars on Hinduism and Spiritualism from some of India's most revered Swamis whose words touched me in a place so deep I would sit listening with silent tears rolling down my cheeks.

It was the best experience of my life.

I continued my asana and meditation routine for months after my return home from India but, of course, life gets in the way, routines and priorities change and my focus on yoga waned as I set off on a new adventure to South korea.

Last month my lovely friend Whit joined a yoga and pilates class here in my hometown of Beomgye and invited me to join too. For the first time in 2 and a half years I am treating my body to it's favorite exercise...and it hasn't forgotten. 

Every time I get in that class I feel my muscles smile and submit completely to every stretch, letting me move deeper into each pose with every breathe. 

Most importantly, in this stressful time in my life, it's a reminder of my power to breathe in deep, and just let it all go.