Yogandha’s Solstice Celebrations- Moynalty Yoga Festival

 

Moynalty Yoga Festival

Yogandha spent this year’s Solstice at Moynalty Yoga Festival.  The festival brought together about four hundred yogis from Ireland and beyond to a hill in ancient Meath – an area full of many well known and less well known pre-historic sites. It is a non-profit event purely to come together to share this sacred time through yoga, ceremony, dance, food and joy.

Solstice

The Summer solstice is when the tilt of our axis is most inclined towards the sun, this occurs in late June on the Northern hemisphere and late December on the Southern hemisphere at which times the sun is at its highest point in the sky. This is what makes the day of solstice the longest day of the year. It is recognized worldwide as a day to be celebrated with festivals and rituals of some kind depending on the culture.

The wonderful David Sye of Yogabeats kicked off the weekend with an energetic and fun vinyasa class that used asana, bandha & breath to shake off layers brought a wild and crazy freedom to the body, heart and mind. David does wonderful work in the middle East using yoga as a peace-building tool.

 

 

Kundalini

The Yogandha crew was delighted to see lots of Kundalini Yoga on the program and attended a class with the wonderful teacher James Madden of Kundalini Dublin. It was a beautiful class using Kriya, Bandha, Chanting and the breath. If you haven’t tried it, Kundalini has an extraordinary effect internally. Yogandha Ground was passed around to balance the energies nicely.

 

Sound bath

Michelle Harton’s Sound Bath, with Bowls, Gong, and Flute really brought you to another level of meditative state. Imagine the calm sounds of instruments taking you on a journey from full consciousness to total relaxation. If you want to experience pure bliss then that workshop is for you.

Check your senses!

There were many fascinating talks on over the whole weekend & we got to an engaging & nicely practical class by Brian Donovan called Reconnecting with Nature Through the 53 Senses. Yes! Who knew? We are having so much more fun now!!

Now Dance

The final session we made was a chakra-balancing ecstatic dance class called Body Waves by Carol McInerney. There was a wide variety of music and intention was to connect and express through dance. It was pure moving meditation and a beautiful experience.

We were sorry not to be able to attend all of the sessions – but we did have to be at our stand SOME of the time. We were very grateful to our stand neighbor who kindly found our phone number on our flier and phoned us (as we were out skipping among the daisies) with ‘come in, someone wants to buy something!!’

There are many celebrations thought-out Ireland and Europe to mark solstice. We think we’ve found a good one! We’ll be back Moynalty Yoga Festival.