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A video about Chocolate Yoga
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What the heck Chocolate Yoga !
First, It's not new.
Here are some links (including videos) to look at:
Ron Obadia and Nadine Artemis in 2006 giving a workshop and explaining
the concept
On Mojo at Metafe, Ingrid
Steimer describes her workshop
Cacao is: Pure love hearth medicine
Chocolate Yoga is a practice that combines the natural high of yoga with the
endorphin high of eating chocolate.
Chocolat is about relaxation, health and happiness. (source: Carolyn
Wheatherson, Guelph, Ontario)
"All eating is associated with ritual, but chocolate holds a unique, if underestimated place in feasting because we eat it with our hands. While most food is eaten with a knife and fork, chocolate is held by the fingers and melts against the warmth of the body, leaving us with the impulse to lick its traces. This sensuous experience heightens our bodily awareness in a way that other foods don't. Given the list of exotic ingredients in Vosges Chocolates, from curry to balsamic vinegar to Kaffir limes from Thailand, the pleasures of chocolate don't end with its feel on our fingers, but are enhanced when this unusual mix of tastes reaches our tongue. (Visit the Vosges website and, among other interesting tidbits, you will find instructions on the best ways to eat a chocolate.) Through the combination of spices and chocolate, Katrina believes that "you can give people a reason to slow down and have a ritual, intimate experience with their body through food-making eating into something sensual."
Moving from a heightened sense of chocolate as a sensuous, bodily experience
to chocolate as yoga was inevitable for Katrina, a long time practitioner of
yoga herself. (At the Vosges offices in Chicago, there is a room set aside exclusively
for yoga.) Every Wednesday, classes are available for anyone who cares to join.
It was following an afternoon yoga session that Katrina realized that eating
chocolates post-yoga held spiritual value. "After class one day I decided-I
am going to have chocolate," recalls Katrina. "I was so into my body
in that moment, my hips, my thighs, my insides, that suddenly when I had a bite
of chocolate, it was a whole new experience." That's when she had the idea
of doing a yoga and chocolate retreat and called a friend who runs a yoga retreat
company to talk about the possibility. "It was amazing, the flavors that
came out after that class. It led me to connect yoga, spirituality, ritual,
and chocolate, to think that maybe in certain yoga poses you could hold on to
certain textures, like flowers, or you'd be experiencing certain smells."
- Katrina
Markoff