fanart, Teyla as Waterbender

[ratcreature]

Fandom: Stargate: Atlantis / Avatar: The Last Airbender Fusion
Characters/Pairings: Teyla as Waterbender
Media used: pencil, fine liner pen with waterproof indian ink, acrylic paint
Rating/warnings: G
Notes/comments: I did this for the prompt "SGA/Avatar the Last Airbender crossover" for the SGA fanart fest paintedspires, as additional fanart for the Amnesty Week. This is more a fusion than a crossover, but I think it's still within the prompt's parameters. Originally this was supposed to be a series of portraits with each of the team matched with an element from Avatar (I thought after Teyla I'd do Rodney as Earthbender, Ronon as Firebender, and John as Airbender), but I only managed to finish Teyla in time to still post (just barely) during Amnesty Week.

Preview:

Comments

[astridv.livejournal.com]

If you have back problems, I can recommend Yoga. *has back problems, too* I tried all kinds of sports, all kinds of martial arts as well, including Tai Chi, but Yoga was the first thing that really helped in the long run.

(gonna rec this piece with my next recs post...)

[ratcreature]

I never really thought of yoga as a possibility for me, because I'm not flexible and quite uncoordinated, so much so that I even had problems with the simple Qigong exercises. Also I could barely bring myself to go to that course because I tend to be easily embarrassed when I have to try to do movements in groups. (I have lingering issues with physical activity in groups from the usual fat kid school sports experiences.)

Also that Qigong course made me wary of any of the "Eastern" health/exercise stuff offered here, even the ones offered in a plain health exercise context rather than as meditation or whatever, because the new-agey idiocy of the teacher and many in the course got on my last nerve. Not so much the underlying energy premises per se as obviously I expected that, but things like that when the guy talked about modern day illness to be fixed/prevented the example he gave wasn't backaches, but he started to ramble incoherently about AIDS being caused by modern civilization, and if I hadn't paid in advance I would have walked out right then. I mean, I realize that the one experience is hardly a large enough sample to judge all such courses, but it was really awful, with a constant underlying hostility to modern medicine, science and rationality in general that was really hard to take.

[astridv.livejournal.com]

Oh, no no no. Sorry to hear you had such a weird experience. There're all kinds of teachers in these disciplines, and sometimes it takes some shopping around to find the style and teacher that suit you (the first Yoga class I attended involved a lot of lying around, and bored the hell out of me). I think I have a pretty pragmatic, non-esoteric approach to eastern sports. I mean, there're some aspects that may seem esoteric, that I definitely accept even though they're not part of our Western way of thinking - it took me four years of practicing Aikido to finally feel that Ki everyone was talking about... but it's *there*, you know.

But as to the esoteric talk you mention... *cringe*. You're not the first one to report stuff like that, but it's not the norm, I don't think. My Yoga teacher is quite down-to-earth.