Namaste Home?

"Aeras!" the man who owns the Agriolivadi beach chair concession – aka Andreas' father – said to me. Thanks to Duolingo, I know Aeras is wind or windy. It was a solid understatement. Saturday was like mini-hurricane at Petra – blowing dust from the seasonally dry lagoon over the beach and out into the water. Needless to say, this made for a less enjoyable beach experience than usual and except for a few people like me determined to get in some Petra time, the beach remained underpopulated. 

While my image of the weekend was two afternoons reading and swimming at Petra, I decided to retool and head to Agriolivadi on Sunday. It faces East and generally gets less wind than the West or South. While better than Petra, and certainly Lampi on the western coast which blusters on an otherwise still day, Agrio had a lot of Aeras. It has easily been the windiest weather I have experienced on Patmos in summer. 

In the mid-afternoon, the sky became hazy and it seemed like clouds were coming in. Only something was wrong with the light – it was too yellow and orange. My Angeleno senses began tingling. The haze and light had all the signs of a fire, only there was no smell and certainly no one was alarmed. Take dry landscape and hot weather – add strong winds…. that's the same recipe as Southern California's fire season. All you need is a poorly maintained power line or some jackass who uses fireworks or sparklers for a gender-reveal party on a windy, fire-warning day and the Dodecanese Islands and Southern California would be indistinguishable. 

In truth, fire-prone similarities already exist. In Summer 2023, Rhodes – the prefecture capital of the Dodecanese experienced raging wildfires that led to evacuation of tourists and took weeks to fully extinguish with firefighters coming from other countries to assist. At the same time, there were fires all around Greece including a large one in an Athens suburb. The smokey haze of Rhodes reached Patmos and the idea of the whole country battling fires with international help felt familiar. 

Last night's sunset was definitely a fire sunset. Only I kept looking online and no fires were reported anywhere in Greece that day. There had been a significant fire on Chios three days prior – but it was reported extinguished and the Greek equivalent of WatchDuty showed nothing. But there were little white specks falling from the sky – the way ash does. I decided it must be from the foliage blowing in the wind – particulates of flowers or leaves… but part of me wasn't convinced. At 12:30 am I smelled smoke from inside, with the windows closed. I went outside – absolutely the smell of wildfire. Again, neither Google or the Greek fire monitoring site would corroborate a fire in Greece.

I got more more clever with the search terms until FINALLY Google spit out a result that made sense. There was a sizable wildfire near Izmir, Turkey and the news story specifically mentioned the smoke was reaching as far away as Patmos. While the shortest route from Patmos to Izmir – if all things go perfectly – is 9.5 hours, they are only 68 miles apart as the crow flies. With a strong wind and a large fire, that made a lot more sense. 

With the mystery solved and the impossibility of the fire reaching Patmos – or any of Greece – I was able to go to bed. It was also a lesson that the Greek fire map really has a hard-stop at the border.

Today the good people of Izmir have no reprieve – the news says the fire is still going strong and the airport had to be closed. On Patmos, however, the sky is clear and smoke is gone – but the wind hasn't relented much. Realizing this wouldn't be much of a swimming day, I felt more committed to yoga – something neither smoke or wind would affect.

On Patmos, I have two real yoga options – online videos enabling me to do yoga at home or visiting the yoga and pilates studio Athina runs with one yoga class on each of Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday mornings. 

Obviously today being Monday – I really had one choice. Because it's a national chain that developed online options during the pandemic, my membership at CorePower Yoga gives me access to a fairly robust selection of on-demand classes, all in formats with which I'm very familiar. My favorite is what CPY calls Hot Power Fusion – which is really the Bikram "26 and 2" sequence he built a chain around. You can't patent yoga postures, so anyone can teach it. 

CPY also has other class formats that bring in other postures while remaining intense – so I weave those in too because I think it's good to move in different ways and challenge other muscles and neural pathways. 

The advantage to the home CPY videos is the classes are relatively aggressive, I can choose the class I want and I can weave it into my day as I like. Last summer I got myself a good quality mat and yoga block, I brought yoga mat-towels and sweat-towels from home. I'm fully setup.

The downside is losing all the advantages of a live class. Showing up creates accountability – both for engaging in yoga and for doing it right. It's nice to have someone to "adjust" me or tell me when I'm not on point. The teacher in the video will never know if I'm doing the pose wrong and sometimes misalignment can create injury. Said differently, yoga videos don't really help you learn the same way.

Then there's the group or community aspect. Sometimes at the studio I have a friend who also plans to go to the same class – it's nice to see them. I invite people to yoga – like our rabbi. I do yoga with the rabbi! Then there are my favorite teachers. I want to show up for Ross or Brenda's class because what they bring to the experience makes it more than a sequence of postures. It's motiving, grounding, educational, inspiring. Videos offer none of that. 

I can honestly say showing up to yoga five to seven days a week kept me going through tough times. From the time Emily told me she wanted a divorce, through the 18 months of couples therapy and through the two years of divorce – yoga kept me functional. I needed to be mentally clear, make good decisions, be there for my kids, show up for work, not allow myself to become overwhelmed. Daily yoga – especially hot classes – was hugely helpful to those goals. While I had previously experienced yoga as something that made me feel physically and emotionally better – lifted me higher – during the 3.5 year saga, yoga kept me from falling off a cliff. I came to look at going to yoga similar to how someone might view going to a twelve-step program – whatever was going on, whether I felt like going or not, I just needed to show up on my mat that day. It was essential.

During that time, I did what I described to my therapist as "angry yoga". I just tried to release all my anger and negative feelings – or as much as I could – in that yoga studio. While it's not necessarily in keeping with the tenets of the yogi masters, angry yoga helped me immensely. And it was people like Ross, Brenda, Holly who didn't know everything going on with me at any given time, but who knew intuitively when to challenge me and when to leave me be. Ross always says, "lead with love" at certain points of his class – and I was more leading with rage and anguish – but his words helped me remember where I wanted to be, even if that's just not where I would be at that time or for awhile. 

I was pleased last October when I began to notice I wasn't doing "angry yoga" anymore and I could get back to being present in the class – enjoying it for what it is. The first time I did yoga was in 2006 at Bali Spirit Yoga in Ubud – the predecessor to today's fairly well-known Yoga Barn. During the class I thought it was the most insane and possibly hardest thing I'd ever done, ending in a puddle of sweat. But the buzz I got from it afterwards was unlike anything I'd ever experienced. I suddenly got why someone would be willing to try standing sideways on one leg straining their hips and hamstrings in a humid (but very pretty) room. Beginning last October, some of that was accessible to me again – although thankfully, I'm never sore the way I was after those first few classes when I activated muscles I didn't know I had.

Obviously, showing up in-person at a yoga studio has a lot of advantages. But here on Patmos, not always.

I like Athina tremendously. Her classes are…different….

I have written about a couple of the more odd experiences I've had at yoga here – such as the time I did partner yoga with a stranger or went to a movement class that was one of the most awkward experiences of my life. And yet… for the all the reasons I like showing up for an in-studio yoga class, I occasionally go to Athina's. Last Thursday, I was reminded only part of the class is what one could truly classify as yoga. For example, we spent the first five to seven minutes of class patting ourselves – every part of our bodies – to "wake up and get the blood flowing". I kept looking around to see if anyone else thought this was as odd and awkward as I did. It was hard to tell. There were definitely people who don't do yoga at home and this was their vacation yoga class – people who may go with it just because. 

There were some true yoga postures along the way – but a lot of times it was just movements like arm circles. At one point when she had us twisting about and kicking, I wondered if we were doing Balanchine Yoga. Unlike at most studios, I don't think Athina has a sequence in mind going into the class. The classes on video or at any yoga studio I've been to the in the US, or Bali, or Singapore or Thailand or France or pretty much anywhere else have sequences that involve different parts of the body, creating a relatively well-rounded experience. Certainly, you can't do everything and teachers will choose an emphasis like hips, hamstrings, heart openings, balance, core strength, etc. Maybe a challenging posture to try to learn in the course of class like Mermaid – which is like telling me "there will be a three-minute break for you, Eric". 

Athina doesn't seem to have anywhere in particular she's trying to achieve in the course of a class. She has told me she sees who shows up and then pitches to the ability level of the group – which makes some sense. Notably, there are no locals in Athina's classes. Yoga doesn't seem like a very Patmian thing to do – even Thanassis' gym isn't THAT busy. Patmians don't seem to be into the health and wellness scene. Instead, Athina's classes seem to have a mix of Athens Greeks, British, French, Italians, Americans and the occasional other Europeans. In my experiences, French people over 50 dominate her classes – and more of them north of 60. Maybe for them patting every part of your body to "get the blood flowing" in a group setting is more socially acceptable than it is for me?

Whatever Athina's classes are and aren't – they take place in a pretty little studio overlooking the water – and a lot of times with the French doors open allowing in a nice breeze. Moreover, when I go, they have their accountability function – I'm up and out of the house  for the 9am class and done by 10 in a location that's great for doing any needed errands. And they invariably turn out to be an experience – although it never includes a yoga buzz.

All of this to say, there's probably room for a more structured, traditional yoga studio or program on Patmos. I only found out about Athina by referral when I was asking about yoga classes. I've never seen her actually marketing her classes – which maybe explains the older French contingent, referred by other older French people?

Either way, it's nice to have a choice as to how I do yoga. Even more, it's a blessing to engage it. 

I suppose for Patmians, a swim in the Aegean is the popular way to both exercise and meditate. The beach in the front of Skala functions a lot like the community swimming pool and on a sunny summer day, it's packed with locals. Even at the cafe from which I write this, there are boys with swim towels around their necks passing by on their bikes, heading to the front beach. I hope they have fun and I wish them Namaste.