Jambo Truong is a Forrest Guardian, what does that mean and how can it make your desk chair more comfortable?
Come into your yoga class and set an intent – something you will achieve in the next hour or so. It doesn’t have to be big, it doesn’t even have to be tangible but every Forrest yoga class starts with the same thing.
It’s this that Jambo Truong, Forrest yoga teacher and Virgin Active workshop instructor, prompts from his students, and even the people he talks to. It about being comfortable as we are, and being happy in that.
“Forrest is a modern way of doing a traditional practice,” say Jambo, explaining that the main difference comes from recognising that people’s bodies are just not the same as they once were.
Based on the more traditional practice of Sivananda yoga, which holds health and wellness as paramount, Forrest takes its modern principles to the mat. So instead of your practice ending when you leave the gym, you’ll take it with you.
“People’s biomechanics have changed so much because we are now sitting in chairs for long periods of time,” says Jambo, “so, we all have much tighter necks, shoulders and hips.”
His workshops and classes look to undo the effects of a modern life. The moves the antithesis of hunching in an uncomfortable chair, forced to maintain this unnatural position for hours at your desk.
And unlike the constriction of a life built around crammed public transport, tech-stress and endless sitting, Forrest doesn’t push past anything that isn’t completely natural.
“Forrest is the most honest conversation we can have with ourselves,” says Jambo “and whatever is achieved in a session you go away feeling that ‘I am enough’”. It stems from one of the niggling issues of some yoga practice that, whilst there is no right way to do a pose, there definitely is a right way to do a pose.
Take Iyengar for example, a practice notorious for its meticulous approach to accuracy. In triangle pose, or trikonasana, Iyengar would maintain that you should look up at your thumb. Jambo says that for some this discomfort is actually doing them lasting damage, all for the sake of a prettier insta.
Thumbs up: a regulation trikonasana
Instead Forrest works off the millennia-old mantra adopted by many yogis; “no pain, no pain” – there is very little reason to push yourself in the search of something that is not right for you at that time. Listening to your body is all important, and knowing that whatever you are doing, it is enough – “you have to move how you can move.”
It’s hugely important to those who practise Forrest yoga and one of the tangible takeaways from any of its classes. In fact, even as this writer sits talking with Jambo, he has fixed my breathing pattern and curbed a want for a fourth coffee of the morning.
Speaking with Jambo, it comes as little surprise of how key helping people is to his life. With a background in wellness and having studied complimentary medicine, moving into yoga was the natural choice.
During his time studying, Jambo picked up practising yoga, but it was years later that he began to teach it. “I was working with young people in a mental health clinic,” says Jambo, “I did an extra hour there covering and they asked me to do a guided meditation – but they wanted more movement”
So, as any budding yoga teacher would do, the room was soon full on sun salutations. “After a few weeks, I knew I had to go and get a qualification.”
It was on a third yoga course that Jambo met with Ana Forrest herself and after some mild persuasion, convinced her – and raising the necessary funds to fly her over – to teach in the clinic where he was working.
“88 addicts turned up! 88!,” squeals Jambo, “There she was, this woman in her gorgeous yoga leggings – they didn’t know where to put their eyes.”
Afterwards Ana insisted that Jambo did her training and started to prepare him to be a Forrest Guardian. Jambo has looked to share the world-changing effects of Forrest ever since.
“You get an emotional healing out of Forrest yoga,” says Jambo, “and it can get emotional, because it is so uplifting.”
So if you set your intention in one of Jambo’s classes, that your back will feel looser and you will sit more comfortably, you will most likely achieve that. But if you set the intention that you will feel more comfortable, free of bodily and emotional tension, you’ll feel that too – such is the power of Forrest.
“If you focus your mind on something eventually you will get there,” says Jambo, “but if you focus your body and mind on something you will get there a lot quicker.”