Welcome to 2023! I'm looking forward to the year ahead with its seasonal rhythms, annual events and of course the unknowns, how will this year unfold?
A quick new year post for you where I share Michael James Wong's beautiful 'A Travelling Prayer' to inspire a gentle and mindful start to the new year.
What I have always known is that yoga is not about touching your toes, despite the images we see of yoga in the media. There's a famous quote 'yoga is not about touching your toes, but what you learn on the way down'. Being flexible is not what yoga is about (although you might become more flexible in time) you might never be able to touch your toes (and it's fine whether you can or you can't) but yoga will teach you about where you are in your body. With each pose/position (done in the way that suits you best) you learn more about what your body can do, what it can't do, what it likes to do, what is a challenge to do, what is calming, what is energising, what feels good, what doesn't feel good.
In this blog post I talk about how I study, practice and teach yoga to suit each individual and why you don't need to be able to touch your toes to do yoga.
Read MoreThere are so many benefits to joining a baby class, and so many benefits to joining classes that support you as a new parent as well as your baby. In this blog post I talk about 10 benefits of joining my Mum & Baby Yoga class in depth:
1. Build confidence lifting and handling your baby
2. Baby Yoga can help soothe those common baby niggles – digestion issues, colic and sleep problems.
3. Supports the development of your bond with your baby
4. Enjoy meeting other parents and babies
5. Builds confidence in communicating with your baby …
…Read on to find out about each of these in-depth and find out what the other 5 benefits for you and your baby are.
We can all agree that the last few months have been the type of change to mostly instigate a sense of fear, anxiety, overwhelm and deep challenge. But we have navigated the changes. In one way or another we find ourselves here, now, emerging into... more change.
Perhaps this time change may be at a pace more of our own choosing. There is still plenty of unknown ahead of course, changes we may not be able to anticipate, changes that happen quickly. But at least we now have the benefit of some knowledge and we know that we have come this far and somehow we can navigate the hurdles.
So now we begin to make choices about how we deal with the next changes, what will the next few months look like for us? How will we navigate the next round of change as we emerge from lockdown?
Read More"Waiting is a state of mind. Basically, it means that you want the future; you don't want the present. You don't want what you've got, and you want what you haven't got. With every kind of waiting, you unconsciously create inner conflict between your here and now, where you don't want to be, and the projected future, where you want to be. This greatly reduces the quality of your life by making you lose the present.” Ekhart Tolle
We all find ourselves waiting. Waiting for this phase in human history to be over, for the solution, for the answer. When we project ourselves forward into a future we cannot know, we are missing what is happening NOW.
So how do we get to the now?
Read MoreEvery week we bring our hands together at our hearts and say “Namaste” to end the class. It is a gesture to close the class and to enable our class community to thank each other for our practice together. Like all aspects of our yoga practice there is much to study, learn and enjoy in these simple practices as part of our yoga journey. There are deeper meanings to these gestures which I share with you here.
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How often does something an occurrence in our daily lives turn our differently to our expectation? e.g. A conversation that we've been dreading that turns out positive, a response to something that's the opposite of what we thought, an event unfolding very differently to what we had in mind...
Read MoreThis week in class we've been exploring how when we settle our mind on our body and our breath we are coming to the present moment. This is because the body and breath can only be in the present moment.
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