❄ Dusting off the writing machine.. With a quick introduction ✎ ✎ ✎

Greetings my fellow Steemers!

This introductory post is coming at you from sunny South Africa. I hope you will enjoy my future work - it will include post about my respective explorations in yoga, qigong, meditation, martial arts, plants, cryptocurrency. I do have a diverse ecosystem of interests and I am always looking to find the thread of commonality between them. This will be the journey.

❄ My first love is music. I have been playing the electric and acoustic guitar for close to 16 years. I also like to pick up a bass guitar every now and then! Besides that I've also been playing the djembe (African hand percussion drum) for around 10 years. I enjoy fiddling around (no puns intended here) on the didgeridoo (Australian wind instrument), and my singing has evolved a lot since the early days. I am a songwriter and I write music in different genres including blues, jazz, metal, acoustic, folk, etc.

❄ I have a solid background in martial arts. You can expect a detailed post on each different style I have explored, and my thoughts on each one with the experiences associated.. from Japanese Karate and Chinese Kung Fu to Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, from injuries to politics, from disillusionment to black belts, and everything in between.

❄ I have been teaching yoga for 6 years, mainly consisting of traditional hatha yoga, which is very slow and restorative. It also incorporates yoga nidra (deep yogic relaxation) at the end of each session. I also like to work in some stronger forms of vinyasa (flow) and ashtanga (power) yoga asana, depending on the people in any group. You're also likely to learn some basic qigong movements and meditation techniques in my class! I have mainly taught yoga in my hometown of Pretoria, but also in Beijing, China, where I lived for several months while practicing martial arts. I also teach pilates on occasion, as it has helped me greatly to develop core strength, which was fairly lacking as a teenager who spent most of his time hunched over a guitar or in front of a computer screen.

❄ I have developed a proprietary knowledge of plants and their various uses. I enjoy a good Terence McKenna lecture now and then, and I am very open-minded when it comes to exploring consciousness. Though I am not an intrepid traveller, and I generally prefer to work on my consciousness internally, I have taken away many lessons from using plants. I will certainly share more about that here in the future.

❄ I have been learning about cryptocurrency for the last year or so, and have recently started looking more closely at mining, trading, and generally diversifying my portfolio. I hope to share the beginning stages of this journey with anyone here who is completely new to that world (though I don't believe there are many of you on Steemit).

Also, kindly upvote this so that I can buy myself an ergonomic chair of some kind. 30 minutes of writing and my back already hates me.

Namaste for now! 🕉