Intense daily yoga with monkeys all around

- January 17, 2020

Can you imagine being in your downward dog yoga pose (photo above) with your head upside down and see through between your legs a giant blue butterfly glowing and floating through the lush green jungle? Or being in your seated twist gazing behind you and spotting a spider monkey make a leap-jump from one tree to another? Or lifting your hips up in your radical rainbow and realizing there is not just one spider monkey but about 4 or 5 in that same tree and one has a baby attached around her? Or being in your final Savasana corpse pose relaxing after an intense yoga practice yet wanting to open your eyes to find out what animal just did this sound right next to you outside the shala? Welcome to Costa Rica Yoga Teacher Training daily life at Ojo del Mar in the Peninsula de Osa!

Our daily schedule: 6am meditation for 30min, then 2 hours of yoga class. Then 1h30 break for breakfast until our 10am morning theoretical classes during 3 hours about spirituality, the Shamanic Medecine Wheel, the Yoga Sutras by Patanjali, anatomy and everything else needed to become a yoga teacher. 13h is lunch time until the next class at 15h where we 'dissect' each yoga pose, alignment and assists, practicing teaching bit by bit to our peers.

In the middle of yoga anatomy, we can barely hear Inka because the howler monkeys have decided to hang out in the trees above the yoga shala and their howl is so loud! Early mornings, we can hear the huge bright red macaws who fly around and scream as loud as they can! Several times we stopped the class to all look at the monkeys or the macaws or the hummingbird or the tiger heron or the blue morpho butterfly going by - just incredible wildlife all around us. Once there was something hanging upside down in the tree just outside the shala, first it seemed to be a monkey but no, it was kinda of like a bigger raccoon with long black tail that looked a bit like a bear, it is actually called coati and is super cute!! We all stopped right there what we were doing and went to watch it hanging out eating in the tree. And towards the end of the training we saw some monkeys and thought they were babies, nope they were a kind of small monkeys we hadn't seen before: squirrel monkeys! It is the 4th type of monkey that can be found in the Osa Peninsula along with the howler mokeys, the spider mokeys and the Capucins (white-faced). These little squirrel monkeys are actually almost only found in the Osa Peninsula, nowhere else in the country. In an already highly biodiverse country, here we are in the most biodiverse part of it!

Magic all around us!