Canada’s “dreamy” Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is making the world swoon once again this week, simply by appearing in a photo from his own past — though, for most people, there’s nothing simple about his feat.
The photo above, taken in 2013 by freelance photographer Gregory Kolz, shows the prime minister in the yoga pose Mayurasana.
Also called the “peacock pose,” it involves placing your entire weight on the wrists and hands while keeping your body straight and parallel to the floor.
It requires a great deal of balance and physical strength to pull off this pose, and it “must only be attempted by advanced yoga students,” according to the International Sivananda Yoga Vedanta Centres.
“Mayurasana is more than just an impress-your-friends-at-parties yoga pose,” explains subtleyoga.com. “It is one of the original Hatha Yoga practices — one of the first 15 poses ever written down.”
Impressive, but why is this three-year-old image going viral right now?
It appears that a Facebook post by Toronto yoga teacher David Gellineau is responsible. “Canada’s Prime MInister #justintrudeau- practicing #mayurasana. Didn’t we say…#canadalovesyoga,” he wrote on the social network late last week, including the photo from 2013.
Now, nearly 5,000 shares later, every international news outlet from CNN to the Guardian has written about Trudeau the yogi, inspiring a new flood of Twitter posts about how hot the Canadian prime minister is.
It’s not every day that the internet sees a world leader demonstrating such incredible core and upper-body strength (outside of Russia.)
While Trudeau has shown on several occasions that he knows a thing or two about yoga, it’s unclear whether he learned this particular move in class, from his wife, Sophie (a certified yoga instructor), or from his father.
Former Canadian prime minister Pierre Trudeau, who himself was an avid practitioner of yoga, was photographed doing the peacock pose on the shores of the Nahanni River, N.W.T. in 1970, one year before Justin was born.
