Yoga with moose and beaver
A trip to a Swedish yoga retreat provided a few surprises and some radical results
A White-tailed Eagle swirls above the nearby tree-tops, a pair of Bitterns boom into the crisp morning air and I’m sure I spot a moose lumbering into woodland beyond a shimmering river. It’s 7.45am. The morning light is dazzling and I’m taking in this raw landscape while perched on all fours - or the cat position as it should be called - breathing air so pure I can taste it. At this time in the morning I’m usually packed onto a commuter train, drinking coffee, reading the paper, responding to emails on an iPhone.
A failing body brought me to a yoga and nature retreat in the wilderness of Sweden’s Vastmanland region. Years hunched over a computer, sat on commuter trains or believing that health and fitness could only be pummelled in through punishing runs, bike rides or gym sessions at the weekend, had all taken their toll. With my aching back, sciatic nerve pain and twinges in my left knee suggesting another trip to the surgeon, it was time to do something that might ease the inner turmoil of my body - not to mention my mind - but let’s not go there.
I didn’t arrive at Eden’s Garden - the idyllic Swedish farmhouse that would be our home for the next four days - a complete yoga novice, but I wasn’t far off. I’d tried a couple of lessons in a dusty school hall years before. Felt ashamed when I couldn’t touch my toes as the octogenarian lady next to me eased effortlessly into every position and I lacked the discipline to persevere.
Set up by Suffolk yoga teacher Kari Knight and her half-Swedish partner Stefan, the small-scale retreat is aimed at providing intimate yoga instruction in a place that seems undisturbed by modern life.
Classes started at a civilised time in the morning with breathing exercises and gentle movements on the lawn. I could sense my body waking up in ways that the combined effort of coffee and Radio 4 fail to achieve at home. Then, inside the monastic simplicity of the farmhouse, we took part in a more vigorous session before tucking into a big breakfast of delicious food. It’s not all downward dog and there are no enemas - which is a relief as I’d read about one retreat where rubber tubes and caffeine provided an uncomfortable early morning ritual. In fact, thanks to Stefan who toiled away in the kitchen throughout the day, every mealtime saw a table laden with delicious porridge, creamy risottos, butternut squash, coconut and snap pea curries and more fruit, vegetables, nuts and seeds than I’d usually eat in a year.
Our group, made up of varying abilities, but with me firmly at the bottom of the class, were stretched in every sense of the word. There were times when I found the sessions either soul destroying and gloriously uplifting - shocked at my bodies inability to hold what looked like a simple pose and trying to breath at the same time. “Don’t forget to breath Jonathan,” was a line I heard regularly from Kari as she noticed the sweat beading on my brow.
But it’s as far from a boot camp as you can get with ample time between the morning and late afternoon yoga sessions to explore the region on foot, bike or in the canoes provided. Alternatively there was ample opportunity for a bit of sunny solitude. This is Europe’s closest wilderness - even without the meditation and yoga there is a powerful restorative feeling from just being outdoors in such a glorious landscape.
We spent one afternoon on a meditation walk through an ancient woodland of towering trees. A place of astounding silence that was only broken by birdsong and the humming of bees. On the second evening, under a soft, dwindling light that never quite extinguished I paddled a canoe along the Black River that runs in front of the farmhouse and for a couple of hours drifted through a primeval landscape. As a low mist snaked along the river, Moose plodded along the reedy banks, Beavers swam up to the canoe before slamming their tails onto the surface and swimming furiously back to the riverbank. This is how nature is supposed to be experienced.
By the end of the third day my shoulders feel lower, my breathing deeper. I'm not sure if I feel completely disconnected from the or more connected than ever before. thehing deeper.
And that was before I went for the Tibetan singing bowl treatment. Various sized bowls were plaved on my body and bonged! At one point I drifted off to my childhood, a long undisturbed memory from a council house in Harlow, and I see the moment played out in fluorescent blue before floating out of the treatment room and failing to remember how I got there.
On the final night, when I genuinely began to wonder if I could feel any more relaxed, we slipped into the Swedish hot tub in the woods, where we indulged in a platter of fruit and supped sweet birch sap juice while poaching ourselves under a darkening sky and a canopy of dazzling stars. I flew home the next day, feeling like I’d been taken apart, oiled and put back together again.
Despite the glorious barbecue summer, I haven’t touched a sausage since returning. In fact I haven’t eaten any meat, or drunk any alcohol - shocking statements to anyone that knows me. And if you live anywhere near Long Melford, yes, that probably is me you’ve seen saluting the sun on the water meadows or downward dogging on the cricket pitch. My cycling times have improved and the constant pain in my lower back has almost disappeared. And I’ve started seeing Kari. Every week. In a dusty school hall where I can almost touch my toes and breath at the same time.
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For further information on Eden’s Garden go to www.edensgarden.se
Flights with Ryan Air from Stansted to Vasteras
Treatments and extra activities, include Tibetan singing bowl massage, traditional massage, Swedish hot tub, Reiki, cycle hire, canoe hire and beaver safari.
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