Join Us for a special yoga and essential oils workshop on

Saturday, February 25th

10am to 2pm

10am-12pm TWO HOUR YOGA FUSION FROM ALL FOUR OF OUR TEACHERS
(Mara Pike, Michelle Mendoza, Erica Jago, and Rochelle Ballard)

12pm-2pm DOTERRA Essential Oils
Reinventing Health Care with Essential Oils

POT LUCK LUNCH – Bring your best organic dish of love

$15 per person

Please RSVP to retreat@surfintoyoga.com

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DIVINE POWER YOGA

Kundalini Day Retreat with Babaji Maharaj

Sunday, February 26th

1pm to 6pm

Awaken the divine power within yourself to heal, balance, clear, open and accelerate your evolutionary process.

Highlights include:

• Kundalini Yoga and Meditation
• Shakti Healing
• White Tantra Kriya—the Sacred Art of Soul mate Connection

This one day retreat is a master class for all spiritual seekers, students, teachers, athletes, and healers. $100 per person

Aura Boulton, from Venezuela, a surfer, environmentalist, lover of life, and passionate for change in our quick and easy fast pace way of living. Her mother Aurita Siso, now living in Colombia in a small but beautiful apartment overlooking the harbor in Cartagena. Aura spent the Christmas and New Year holiday’s at her mom’s with her sister Claudia and nephew Alex. She asked me to come and visit in the new year and see what is was like in Colombia. I had never been or even ever thought of going. I only new of a little short history and some good coffee of the place, and other sorts of things better not to mention.

Always wanting more surf adventure, yet the cultural depth interest a little more flavor in my life of culture, history, and good family experience. I was on a plane a couple weeks later and being taxied to the town center where we stayed for the first night. Entering into the city along the ocean was an old fortified wall. Couples were sitting within the window’s of it looking out at the sun setting. The town was lively and very much so in new year’s celebration. We stayed up in a room directly across from the old clock tower, above the full moon rising, below, african drum dancing. I was so excited to be in the presence of a new experience.

Walking through the old city at night, eyes wide open with all of the different architecture, colors, music, dancing, the smell of fried plantain, fish and herbs sauteing, laughter, and off in a short distance behind me the sound of clicking, clocking. I turned around to see a horse n’ carriage a few feet behind me ready to run right through me with a quick step to the side curb. On the curbside a big hole in the side walk with rusted iron running across the cracked pavement. No one can sue the city for curb tripping here. Watch your step, look for horse and carriage, enjoy the old and the new, dance and be merry.

Entering into Aurita’s home we were greeted with a finely set table of delicious food and a beautiful family awaiting our arrival. A view of the harbor and city center across the bay, and as all of Latin America, maids to serve us. Over the next few days the stories I was introduced to within the history of Colombia through to Venezuela and the interweaving significance of Aurita’s family genealogy, deepened my appreciation for all that my eyes and senses experienced from the first moment I stepped into the town center. I was having more than just a holiday, it was lesson in history, from a hedonist perspective with great appreciation for the finer things, the details, the hardships, as well as the impermanence of life and the people we share them with.

-Rochelle

Aura provided me with the following pieces of history:

• Imagine being an ambitious spanish conquistador and finding a continent in which all the natives were covered in gold and jewels from head to toes.
• Back in the time of the Spanish conquest, all the gold and riches the spaniards would take from the Indigenous people in the South American lands, were first kept in the fortified city of Cartagena de Indias, in Colombia. Protected by forts and canyons, this city was Spain’s “safe”, and from there, all the precious stones, gold and riches, were then shipped to the old continent to be given to the spanish crown.
• It is said that this is when the legend of “El Dorado” came to be…. A city filled with treasures and gold, wanted to be found by many.
• The French and the English fleet tried to enter the city of Cartagena in an effort to take all this from Spain, and the many true stories of Pirates still to this day remain alive as you see some of the old ships still floating in the city’s harbor. A city where slaves were bought and sold, and  much of the afro caribbean culture can be heard in the beating of the drums, dancing and music all around the city and its surrounding islands. A city were all of what this era was still lingers in our senses and in the air.
• In the city’s gold museum, some reminiscent pieces of the Zenu tribe jewelry can be found. The Zenu’s were adorned in gold, as well as workers of the land in many sustainable manners. They created irrigation systems with the natural flooding of rivers, and to this day, no system has yet been able to be applied in the same efficient manner as in those times.
• Another great interesting piece of history that can be visited in Cartagena, is Palace of the Inquisition. Here, the Catholic church would hold trails on citizens suspected for practicing witch craft, homosexuality, or just plain opposition to the church. If they were found to be guilty, they would be tortured, locked away and even killed or burned alive.
• This Palace is now the museum were all the torture artifacts can be revisited. Among them we found guillotines, stages with a nuse for hanging people, human fire pits, among others. It is an eire place, were the energy is heavy and all that once happened there can still be felt. Recently, the pope apologized to the human race for what the church did to many people during this time.

Through some video clips and moments captured in photos Aura and I will take you through a colorful, experience of our short journey in a long history of an abundant land.

Here is part one of three … a picture says more than a thousand words, just as people surfing on the net skip a beat and pass through faster than a wave takes to generate onto the reef and break.

Thursday, January 26, 2012 @ 4:00 PM

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Our Program will cover:

• Reinventing Your HealthCare
• Essential Oils for Natural Health
• Natural Weight Loss
• Muscle Pain Relief
• Cooking for Health
• Get Better Faster With Alternative Medicine

RSVP to Rachell
808-391-3849
surfdoterra@gmail.com

Friday, January 27, 2012
8:00 pm till 12:00 am
Surfer the Bar
57-091 Kamehameha Highway
Kahuku, HI

Mahalo to Hawaii Style for providing such a great write-up with lovely photos!

Click Here for the Party Invitation

As Surfers we are constantly rotating our shoulders forward paddling and slouching over our board sitting for waves. In today’s day with cell phones and sitting on the computer, this also has a similar effect to too much forward rotation in our structure. The long term result is chronic pain in the shoulders, upper back and neck.
Being active in releasing pressure in the tension in the neck and shoulders will allow us to stabilize the shoulder’s and begin to correct slouching.

1. Interlace your fingers behind your shoulders, starting with the pinky fingers, with your palms facing the body to keep the chest and shoulders open. Make sure you are comfortable and keep your shoulder blades pulling down to protect your rotator cuff from over-stretching. Keep your thumbs and index fingers open and down and away from the body.
2. If clasping your fingers is uncomfortable and you are not able to keep your shoulders from lifting or coming forward, you can hold a strap between your hands. The ideal way is to make a loop with a yoga strap or belt that is the width of your shoulders. Place your wrists in the loop of the strap and keep your fingers wide open during the stretch as this will facilitate a deeper connection to your core. Use the breathing movements to open the connective tissue in the front body, strengthen the rotator cuff muscles that stabilize the scapula, and stretch the muscles in your chest. Lightly hold the strap behind you with the same intentions of opening the shoulders and chest and contracting your shoulder blades and rhomboids.
3. Take a deep breath in and allow your pelvic floor to open as you feel the breath initiating from the movement of your rib cage and oblique muscles. Imagine a balloon is in your ribs and you are blowing up the balloon with your breath. As you inhale rise up on your toes and contract your back muscles to strengthen your back extensors at the same time you pull back to stretch your chest. Visualize energy rising up the spine allowing your head to be as if floating on top of your spine.
4. On the exhale lower with control and return your heels onto the ground keeping your weight evenly distributed on your feet at the same time maintaining a feeling of keeping length in your trunk. Keep your hands reaching down towards the ground and bring your chin level as the top of the crown on your head lifts towards the sky. Imagine a string at the top of the head lengthening the neck.
5. During exhalation, accentuate the contraction of your muscles of exhalation in the rib and trunk area. Lengthen your waist as you exhale to train your core muscles to stabilize your core rather than flexing the spine which shortens and compresses the natural curves. When we do exhalation movements that cause spinal flexion, it leads to forward head and shoulder carriage than can inhibit our paddling strength and efficiency. The key to the exercise is to work with the breathing muscles in a way that creates a lengthening of the spine whether inhaling or exhaling.
Repeat a few times
Benefits:
The active breath movement on the inhale and squeezing the muscles in contraction, awakens the body, through breath, blood flow, muscles, nervous system, and quick muscle response with control.
Balance and control of movement
Strength
Flexibility with stability
structural alignment begins to be established and awakened.

Haleiwa, Hawaii Lotus pond

We spent a couple of weeks exploring, surfing, relaxing, eating amazing food, cooking, reading, doing yoga, and mingling with the locals. We became close to the familia we stayed with on the beach front to one of the heaviest sand bars I have ever surfed.

In the next blog, Chucho takes us to an ancient crystal cave, gro pro footage in the surf, and truck loads of sea salt.