Moving under Treescape

I was so excited to find a little platform under this Natal mahogany in Pretoriuskop rest camp in the Kruger National Park. In the fast-motion video, you can really see how alive the tree is, leaves being played like a piano in the breeze. My favourite part of this practice was simply being in the tree’s steady presence and knowing that we were being touched and tickled by the same currents of air.

There really is no separateness, and I know many of us feel this most when in nature. A lot of the constraints fall away. Here, for example, in public and with a video camera on, I felt not the slightest bit self-conscious.

I also loved doing yoga asana while life went on around me—my mat rolling away; other guests arriving back at camp after a day in the reserve; people coming to chat to me in between; my hands and feet becoming a sticky mess from all the fallen mahogany fruits.

“There will need to be some changes,” I later wrote in my journal. “I cannot spend my life tethered to a laptop. I need to be out and about in the world. And, I’m ready to move here.”

I returned home to Cape Town vociferous.
Rebellious.
And very clear on what had to go.

I need to live and work and play and love in nature. I need 360-degree, surround-sound wildness. I need to be near people who need that too.

And so we left, not long after. My then-husband and I moved to the bush—the most wonderful thing we’d ever done together, in my opinion—and I have now been here for almost two years.

I spent most of my childhood, teens and 20s daydreaming or reading about living in the bush.

Being here feels like a merging of a past dream state with a current reality.

It’s not perfect.
There have been C.H.A.L.L.E.N.G.E.S.

But don’t get me wrong: it’s so right.

This video was filmed in November 2020 and the practice is inspired by Yoga Synergy, which forms the basis of my slow flow and vinyasa flow classes.

PHOTO: Felix Mittermeier/Pexels