'I know what you're banging on about!' The tattooed athlete who is still chilling after her pole dance workshop playfully shouts it at her friend, who has landed a solid left direct on my boxing glove. 'Well and truly,' she calls back. She smiles kindly at it. I know I don't have to take her slaps personally, but there is a thingy from her recent past at play. Besides, I may hit back like this. And I hit nice and harder anyway.
We stand, with ten others, on a sunny meadow on Texel and participate in a workshop 'Mindful boxing'. I had signed up for it because it struck me as the height of idiocy: combining the rather fashionable word 'mindful' with something as earthy as boxing. Halfway through the hour, I lost my reserves. Sweat gushes down our backs on this last day of summer after a few minutes of side-jumping à la Mohamed Ali. Then the hardest part is yet to come.
Cool location
So you actually find out pretty quickly what mindfulness was again: emptying yourself and focusing only on one task, in this case aiming the gloved fists at the opponent's glove as precisely as possible. Welcome to the girls from Los, fresh-faced twins with Rotterdam roots who are now giving a taste of their work at the Tipitoefestival on Texel.
TipiToe is new. In the growing range of food and party festivals, there are not many yet that focus purely on yoga and related health issues. Reason enough to check out Texel on behalf of the FestivalAtlas, where the two-day event takes place at an exceptionally cool location. De Bonte Belevenis country estate is an old farmhouse that doesn't even look that pretty itself, but is situated on a piece of land with goat pastures, duck ponds, stray gardens and its own brewery and distillery. The holiday feel is built in and Tipitoe's loose tents and stalls blend into the landscape as a matter of course.
Here we can go for dozens of sessions, including a 'Motherhood & health' workshop, a cocoa ceremony, something with 'voice expansion' or 'Towel Twist Therapy'. You can also buy organically grown cranberry plants, which will deliver their first beneficial harvest after five years in Rhododendron soil.
Wine by the sea
TipiToe's initiator is Jeanine de Hoo, herself active in coaching and personal development. 'After an intense time around the birth of my son, I wanted to change course,' she says, as we sit at the central checkout table. 'I needed new inspiration. That's how the idea for a yoga festival was born.' Having no experience in festival organisation herself, she enlisted the help of a friend of hers, Valerie Jongeneel. Jongeneel has already made a name for herself with festivals on Texel. Her responsibilities include the Beach food festival, Wine by the Sea and the Film Food Festival. 'So I do a lot in the food sector, and then this was something different, but so far I like it better than I expected.'
Apart from the location, the specialness lies in the programme, Jeanine explains: 'I started looking at the healing and personal development offerings I am already familiar with. I put together a programme that is as creative, diverse and distinctive as possible. There is so much out there in the field of alternative healing and personal development. It is all of a high standard, but to make a choice is difficult. There is nowhere to visit it all in one festival in all its forms. Here you can really get a taste of everything. Here you do a TRE workshop (Tension & Trauma Release Exercises. WS), because you don't know what it is, and so you can experience for yourself what happens. The same applies to yoga. So if you are interested but don't know about everything yet, this is a good way to learn about it.'
Chaff and wheat
A kind of market, then. Then it is important that there are no charlatans among them. How does TipiToe separate the wheat from the chaff? 'Now seventy per cent are people I know personally, through training courses I have attended or from collaborations.' Valerie Jongeneel adds: 'What we didn't know, we tried ourselves. I went to things I had never experienced before. I don't want to offer anything I can't stand behind myself. Of course, there is also a lot of nonsense, and we did want to avoid that. What's there is top of the bill from the island and from what's available across the street.'
It is not just an advertising pitch, her reputation is also involved: 'Actually, the tactic is the same as when setting up a food festival. Then the chefs have to have their dishes tested in advance, declare their main ingredients and the origin must also be known in detail. So not 'meat from a butcher on texel'. That's not enough. We talk very critically about the offer with an open mind. Also to make sure it is varied enough, and we don't have any duplications.'
Cost recovery
This is also how the offerings come across. No yoga form is the same, and the stalls offer everything from woolly religious (a stall where contact with the core of everything is promised) to serious gaming, where you discover in a playful way how difficult it is to tackle the world's problems with the means, but more importantly, the preferences you have.
The workshops, such as that mindful boxing and the in another way very uplifting mindful walk where I learn to smell the scent of the Texel heath again, do not break even for the providers, explains Valerie Jongeneel: 'everyone is taking a step forward here. That's the idea. It's a first edition and we chose to create an affordable, accessible festival, so not with a ticket price of 100 euro entry, but free. We wanted everyone to experience it as a testing ground, so we are all in it with a shared risk. Where the emphasis does lie on our risk. Basically, they are loose economies. The food court has to be able to cover its own expenses of electricity and water. There are more little models in this way.'
At that moment, there is a sound of breaking crockery. Valerie Jongenelen jumps up: 'there are children playing there, we should probably intervene before there are any injuries!' Jeanine de Hoog remains calm. She has seen where the sound of breaking glass came from: 'Don't panic, that's the glass walking workshop. Everything under control.' 'So you see' says Valerie Jongeneel with a smile: 'She's in the programming and I do the safety and practice.'
Choice stress
It remains to be seen when this festival can be called successful. For Valerie Jongeneel, it can't go wrong already 'although we won't know until two weeks from now whether we will make it financially.' Surely her sense of success is mainly in the atmosphere and the visitors: 'I just came into the Healing Garden and there were two girls looking around with a kind of choice stress, because they didn't know what to do. I asked, can I help you with anything, and listened to their story. They thanked me personally for organising this. One of them said, I have wanted to do this kind of thing for a long time. That was about Tarot reading and Akasha. One of them didn't have the money, and the other didn't have the time, and now everything was together and the two of them could just spend a weekend trying out all kinds of things. So those then are super grateful. And also: if I see some children jumping there and mothers can sit in a yoga pose for a while because of that, then that's successful too.'
This does define the largely female target audience, from young and dynamic to mature and ready for some deepening. In the evening, the men join them, for the lectures and the excellent local beer in the food court. Mostly locals or regular island guests. After all, the last boat back to 'The Other Side' leaves at nine o'clock.
Goat wool socks
The atmosphere is remarkably earthy, for a yoga festival. I was expecting more hippies, I say. 'Hippie in the sense of the floaty?' asks Valerie. 'We have that, but it's not overpowering. There are also lots of little animals.' We laugh, just now a rather self-conscious duck attacked a couple of guests' picnic. 'Yoga has also become much more mainstream, of course, recently.' adds Jeanine. 'With that, all the other forms that are less known than yoga, but related, are also coming more into focus. It is also the aim of this festival to make that better known, and more accessible. Without that stuffy image.
For the hard business side of one other, Valerie Jongeneel did good planning: 'We look at the period and key figures of visitors to the island. You also look at what percentage of your target audience is present at that time. That is very technical and not fun at all, so you quickly let that go, and then you start looking at what is a fine period to organise something.' To Jeanine de Hoog: 'You even looked at the phases of the moon.'
'Yes,' says De Hoog with a broad smile, 'this is the time of the new moon, of undertaking new things, a new period dawning.'
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