Adore Yoga Blog

Trekking to Everest Base camp and yoga in Mosman have more in common than you might have realized. Belinda Gurd, a student at Adore Yoga, recently embarked on the biggest challenge of her life when she trekked to Everest Base camp and yoga played a key role in making it up the mountain.

Mosman based Belinda, 31, has had a truly transformational year. From desk-bound office worker to mountain-climbing yogi, Belinda’s story is inspirational. But why trek to Everest Base Camp?

“I visited Nepal a few years back and went on a 5 day walk through the Annapurna region,” Belinda explains when I met her for coffee this week. “One day I was sitting having tea and I met three girls who were trekking to Base Camp that week. I decided then and there that if they could do it, so could I.” But it took a while for that conviction to become reality. What propelled Belinda to take up the challenge, several years after her first taste of the Himalayas?

“This year I went through a lot of change in my life and I needed a goal to focus on.” In fact, Belinda’s self esteem took a nose dive earlier this year when her relationship of seven years came to an end. Usually a bubbly, outgoing woman, the break up of her relationship left Belinda in crisis and following her dream of trekking to Everest Base Camp seemed like the ideal way to re-focus her energy.

“I threw myself into a full-on training schedule, including weight training, running, strength work, sessions in an altitude training gym and 5 hour walks in the Blue Mountains,” says Belinda. She believes that yoga also played a pivotal role, both during training and on the trek itself.

“Yoga helped me to fix my posture, train my breath and focus my mind’ Belinda explains. “I kept thinking about my yoga classes when I was on the trek. I’d been in challenging postures and I knew I could do them. I just went back to that mindset. I’d listen to my teacher in my mind and it helped me get through the tough times because I knew I could do it.” 

Focusing on the breath was one of the many yoga skills that helped her on the trek. “All you do is think, walk and breath. Breathing is very important at altitude and, like yoga, you need to keep a continuous breath at the same pace.”

Belinda’s experience of being on the mountain had many unexpected parallels with her regular Saturday morning yoga. 

“Saturday mornings at yoga were like a refuge for me. That’s why it’s so addictive, I want to feel like that all the time.” Being on the mountain gave Belinda that same feeling of balance and perspective.  “I love knowing that place of stillness, focus and clarity is always within me and I am able to achieve that and go back to that. Hopefully I’ll be able to integrate that into my everyday life.”

It wasn’t just the breath and mental focus that made yoga such an important part of the trek for Belinda. She practiced yoga poses every day and believes it made all the difference to her physical performance.

“Every night I did yoga stretches, lots of child pose and down dog. In the mornings I did a full routine that I’d learned at Adore Yoga. I didn’t get sore at all. No lactic acid build up, nothing. I didn’t feel like I’d been walking for 5 hours. The yoga made a big difference.”

Ask Belinda what she’s learned from her trek to Everest Base Camp and she says, “The world, life and the universe is so much bigger than what we make it.” And she’s bringing the lessons she learned on the mountain back home to her busy Sydney life. “When I first got back from Nepal, I had a really overwhelming week. But I found I could go back to the moment on the mountain when I stopped, breathed and just was. I can still reference that.”

Belinda’s not the only one who has benefited from her trek. “I decided to raise money for charity. I work closely with Oasis Youth Support Network and managed to raise 3k for them, which I'm stoked with.” As a regular volunteer with this Salvation Army youth homelessness initiative, Belinda’s now sharing what she learned on her trek with some of the youngsters she meets there. “I sent photo’s (from Everest) to the kids at the Salvo’s to show them anything’s possible. You just need focus. When you can focus, you have more self discipline and can achieve anything” she says, echoing Patanjali’s famous yoga sutras, extolling the importance of stilling and focusing the mind.

So, what’s next for Belinda? “Kokoda, Kilimanjaro or maybe a marathon. I’d love to do a marathon,” she answers. It looks like her Everest Base camp trek has given her a sense of adventure that is going to be supported by her yoga practice for years to come.

Many thanks to Belinda Gurd for sharing her story.

It must be spring. The red eyes, runny nose and itching throat are dead giveaways. Every year it used to be the same, I’d suffer with the symptoms of hayfever until I couldn’t stand it any longer and dosed myself with anti-histamines. Then I discovered Jala Neti.

Neti is one of six yoga cleansing techniques (shatkarma) that are designed to purify the body and balance the flow of prana, or energy. It’s basically a nasal wash, but the technique is infinitely superior to the commercial ‘nose squirty’ products that I’d tried before.

All you need is a neti pot (you can buy one for $9 from Adore), some non-iodized salt and warm water. The neti pot is like a tiny teapot. You fill it with body-temperature water, add a teaspoon of salt and mix the two together. Then place the end of the neti pot's spout gently inside your right nostril, creating a seal. Tilting the head so your left ear is parallel with the sink, tip the neti pot up so that the water travels along the right nostril, across the septum and down the left nostril, from where it flows in to the sink.

When the pot is empty, repeat the technique on the second side. Then gently blow your nose a few times to remove any excess water. That’s all there is to it.

It doesn’t hurt and you won’t drown (you breathe through your mouth) and if the water does go down your throat the first time you try it, spit it out and try again, just tilt your head over a bit more so your ear is closer to the sink.

If you’re still not sure, take a look at this instructional video.

In parts of India, Jala Neti is practiced daily. Rather than just using it as a cure when you’re experiencing allergies or congestion (it works for colds too), neti is a powerful preventative medicine and a daily cleanse will help keep you sniffle free.

You can buy a neti pot from Adore, or speak to an expert Adore Yoga teacher about learning how to do this safe and effective cleansing practise.

Have you tried Jala Neti? How has it helped you combat allergy or cold symptoms?

“You’re never happy,” my father said to my grumpy 8 year old self. He’d spent all morning painting a wooden toy box for me, only to be told that the colours weren’t right. 

My father was frequently exasperated by my childish ingratitude. Nothing anybody did for me was good enough, I always wanted more (“give you an inch and you’ll take a mile” was another phrase that was frequently directed at me).  

As I grew older, I became increasingly contrary and took great pleasure in scandalising teachers at my conservative high school by taking a radical position on everything from school uniform regulations to the dogma of our religious studies class.

There was nothing about the world that didn’t need changing and nothing about my life that couldn’t be improved. I was the anti-Pollyanna, the opposite of that fictional paragon of childhood who could find a reason to be glad about absolutely anything.

Finding fault with the world (and oneself) is a perennial adolescent indulgence, but I never seemed to grow out of it.

I first learned about Samtosha, Patanjali’s second Niyama, while studying to become a yoga teacher. Samtosha means contentment and Desikachar’s description of the benefits of applying this principle is compelling:

“The result of contentment is total happiness. The happiness we get from acquiring passions is only temporary. We need to find new ones and acquire them to sustain this sort of happiness. There is no end to it. But true contentment, leading to total happiness and bliss, is in a class by itself. ”

It certainly seemed like a skill worth cultivating, but I was at a loss as to how to make myself contented. As with my first encounter with yoga, when it helped me to recover from an undergraduate melt-down, it took a crisis to teach me one of the most important lessons of yoga.

Soon after graduating as a yoga teacher, I fell pregnant with my first baby, Ruby. I was determined to have a ‘yogic’ pregnancy and birth and that meant daily yoga, meditation, Ayurvedic food and a wholly natural home birth. Everything went well until the labour itself, a 36 hour marathon of pain. Rather than compromise my ideals and go to the hospital I stayed at home and toughed it out, a decision that left my ideals in tact, but my body in tatters.

The combination of exhaustion and adjusting to life as a new mother proved overwhelming and when my partner gave me a post-natal depression check list from beyondblue.com.au, I ticked all but two of the criteria.

As a yoga teacher, I knew how effective yoga was at treating depression and anxiety – I’d even completed an assignment on the subject as a teacher trainee.  But there were no specialist yoga classes in my neighbourhood and I wasn’t up to doing a regular class. I went back to my study notes on yoga for depression, searching for practical ideas to help me move away from the fear and claustrophobia that had gripped me.

I cobbled together a personal practice, combining gentle movements with some yoga breathing exercises. I diligently did my daily practice and while it did bring some relief, I still felt helpless and desperately unhappy. 

One morning while feeding Ruby, I started to cry uncontrollably. Why was I feeling this way? I had everything that anyone could wish for. How could I be so ungrateful? I wanted to talk to somebody, but my depression made me feel insular and unable to communicate. I decided to put my feelings down on paper and ‘write it out’, so when Ruby had finally fallen asleep, I turned on the computer and opened a new document called “Things I’m grateful for”.

At first it was hard. I found it impossible to feel good about anything at all. Then I typed “Ruby.” Of course I was grateful for my perfect, healthy baby. Then I typed “Kevin,” recognising the unstinting support and love he provided. As I looked at those two words on the page, I realised that I didn’t have to make myself feel ‘good’ about anything, I simply had to acknowledge gratitude for the people and things around me. 

I began to type more quickly, acknowledging my parents, friends and students. I looked around me and understood how lucky I was to have a comfortable home in a safe, peaceful and beautiful country. Friends, family, home, the hibiscus in the garden, the food in the fridge. The list of things to be grateful for grew longer and longer until the baby started crying and it was time to stop. As I turned off the computer, I promised myself that I would add at least one item per day to my list of things to be grateful for.   

Some days it was easy to fulfil that promise – Ruby slept well, the sky was blue and friends looked in to see how I was. Other days, when the baby howled all night, bad weather kept us in the house and I felt lonely and isolated, I had to read every single item on my gratitude list several times over before I could dredge up a single extra thing to be thankful for.

But the discipline of going back to the list every day made a difference. Like a regular yoga or meditation practice, the simple conscious, ongoing effort gradually changed how I felt. I began to spontaneously experience gratitude in every day life and was less susceptible to knock backs. I felt positive and more resilient. 

I still use the gratitude list now; it’s the perfect antidote to self pity. Before having children, I often gained extraordinary insight into my own good fortune through overseas travel. There’s nothing like a trip to a Mumbai slum to put your petty worries into perspective. I don’t travel so much these days so the gratitude list is an important reminder of how lucky I am and why I have so many reasons to be cheerful.