It's been a wild week. I'm not even sure where to begin... There are 40 of us in the first week Mystical Dance workshop, 26 will continue on in the hopes of becoming America's Next Top Mystical Dance Teacher. Hee hee. We are from 15 different countries, and our gorgeous instructor goddess is the head of a yoga school in Rishikesh, India. We meet in the morning for 3 hours and promptly adorn ourselves with glitter and bindis, and again in the evening, each time learning dances, rituals, and meditations from all over the world. The goal here is to connect to the Divine and each other through movement, while building self confidence. After a week I can say I'm enjoying the process a lot and look forward to deepening it in the teacher training. There are, of course, weird moments that remind me why I transferred out of Naropa University. Holy spiritual bubble, Batman! This course has a lot of crossover with the nearby yoga school Agama. I can say it's a great gift being a decade older and able to take it all with a grain of salt.

Our first offering to the community was a couple nights ago and it went really well- we did 6 dances from Morocco, Turkey, Egypt, and other countries. One involved dancing with a candle in each hand, and I'm super impressed that nobody's hair was burned. I'm not sure how to describe the spiritual aspects of the training at this point, so I'll save that for another episode.

Between our class times we have a long break for the hottest part of the day - it's been around 95 each day except 2 when it was raining. During my breaks I've been swimming with my classmates, having Thai food, laying in my room sweating, riding scooters, and apparently, sailing! I met a fantastic Swiss Irish guy on the ferry over to the island who is great to adventure with. The other day we were looking for a good beach on his scooter and saw kite surfers, so we stopped. And 20 minutes later we were on a hobie cat 16 and I was squeeling and freaking out (I have zero sailing experience) and then it was calm and fun and beautiful. Thank God Sam's an experienced sailor. After we made it back to shore we walked to the beach for a swim. That was lovely until I managed to step on a very angry animal that sunk its tiny evil spines into my foot. Impressively deep, too- they were too deep to get out. The beauty in this is now it doesn't hurt at all and I have an ocean souvenir to take home with me! lol.

Sam left with his brother to some other exotic Thai locale, so now I'll be doing my explorations with the lovely ladies of my course and on my own... starting with doing my laundry in the sink. Life is good.

Love to you,

Gracie