I see a lot written about tech neck at the moment — the discomfort and muscular imbalances caused by too much looking down. Surely this is just a new name for something that has long been a problem in human history, at least as long as we had electric light to enable extended hours of…
asana / philosophy / Sanskrit
When people ask me how long I practise yoga each week, I’m usually pretty evasive, second-guessing the response I think I’ll get. I usually down-play it, since most people look perturbed at the idea of daily practice. And even in the company of serious students/teachers I also hesitate to make my practice sound too heavy…
I’m feeling wildly intrepid at the moment. Not that anyone would notice any difference from the outside if they watched my practice. But I’m being adventurous even within my modest shapes. I’m exploring, creeping my way into new territory one breath at a time. No sudden movements, no great disturbances, just patient, persistent exploration. My…
The fall? Not the season, transatlantic friends. I’m waiting for the fall that follows pride. Because I’m feeling unusually proud of myself at the moment — in the balancing acts I’m currently managing, small steps in flowing a little more gracefully along with life, floating over some old obstacles that would have tripped me up…
asana / off the mat / teaching
Wednesdays are weird days for me. It’s the one day of the week when I work a half day in the office and then the afternoon is mine. Or Yoga’s! 🙂 It’s the time when I usually teach, and I also have time to work on some yoga-related writing assignments and maybe a bit of…
I’m doing a lot of sweet-talking to my body at the moment, coaxing it to move, to loosen up, to come on a journey with me. All my muscles are hurting, some of them pretty uncomfortable, with old injury points reasserting themselves for no good reason. It’s not an excess of practice, I think it’s…
A yoga outfit fail last week! I was coming straight from work, in a huge hurry because we’d had an end of financial year celebration (involving a soft drink only for me, in my yogic virtue 🙂 ), and when I got to the changing room with minutes to spare before class I realised I’d forgotten…
The guru mantra got me from the first time I encountered it. After all I love learning, exploring, and sometimes mastering new things; I’ve always enjoyed finding ways to teach myself and I’ve been blessed with some truly phenomenal teachers through my life. I’m married to a teacher too! So I guess the surface message about learning…
One of my reports at work has just been refused a place on a management training course, as part of a cost-cutting exercise. She’s disappointed and she feels as though she’s missing out on something. But really she’s been doing just fine without this course for more than a year. “You don’t need it,” I told…
I hate yoga challenges, you might have heard me say this before. But now I’m thinking about setting myself one… Bear with me. I love to be contrary, you know! So here’s the story: A student of mine posted a lovely note on my FB page last week, telling me I’d been top of her…
I’m a few months now into my routine of a monthly private session with my teacher. It sort of feels already like an indispensable yoga must-have, but it also feels like early days in something new, something that I am/we are feeling our way into. What do I want from this opportunity? Help with figuring out…
How hard is it to sit still? It’s one of those things that seems easy until you try it! I took up yoga precisely to help me with sitting still. Ah, the irony that movement has become such a dominant part of my practice now…! But even so I like to think I’m a tiny bit better now…
I went to a long class-cum-workshop at the weekend. Honestly it wasn’t quite what I expected but of course I learned heaps from it nonetheless. It was a deliberately very challenging sequence with the explicit aim of ‘pushing our buttons’ and seeing what happened, providing a laboratory for us individually to observe our responses and…
“Enough already!” It depends how you say it. It’s either a slightly tetchy way of telling someone to stop doing something or it’s a kind acknowledgement of the sufficiency in all things. I’m flip-flopping back and forth at the moment with both ways of talking to myself. I am having serious ‘enough’ issues, feeling never…
I found myself quite naturally using the model of koshas when I was talking to a friend recently, a yoga friend that is, so it wasn’t as weird as it sounds. She was expressing fear or frustration about decision-making and I was speculating that good decision-making was a matter of getting quiet enough to hear…
