Dabbling

I'm dabbling a little in Vedic chanting right now. I'm not fully committed, just dabbling. Like a duck or a duckling, just very unlike a baby crow 🙂 I am drawn to the simplicity of this form, just as my mother was in a previous life drawn to plainchant. These limited tones carry an infinity... Continue Reading →

March 24, 2023 1

30 day yoga challenge

One of the studios where I teach has just run a 30 day challenge. I found it really hard. Not because I participated myself but because I kept getting drawn into conversations I didn't want to have about it with the students. The judgmental part of my brain just wanted to laugh out loud at... Continue Reading →

February 23, 2023 0

Mindful teaching

I'm part way through teaching a short course on mindfulness to a small group of students. It's my first time teaching a sustained course over two months and my first time teaching mindfulness. I was not at all sure it would work, that I could do it, or what the students would bring to it... Continue Reading →

May 28, 2022 2

Thoughts and blessings

What does it mean to hold someone in your thoughts? I wrote a condolence card to a friend recently, a Christian friend, and I offered some words like this. I couldn't say I was praying for her in her distress and grief since that's not part of my practice but I am holding her in... Continue Reading →

September 4, 2018 4

What is and what is not

An artist comes into one of my classes each month to sketch the students in their asana practice. She’s a yogi herself and is learning to draw the human body in movement. We have some great conversations about how to read anatomy in the way we each need to. She told me that in life... Continue Reading →

June 27, 2018 4

Walk with me

I recently saw the film Walk With Me, about the Zen Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh. At first there was something slightly surreal about tucking into my chocolate ice cream, and Hubby with a glass of vino, settling back comfortably to be a voyeur on the simple Zen life. But life is a paradox, so I... Continue Reading →

February 15, 2018 1

Heart and hearth

Some time ago my yoga teacher suggested I meditate on the difficulties I'm having physically: on why my physio has identified limited thoracic spine mobility along with grumbling shoulders and neck. What is this really? It's been weeks since he dropped this idea on me and I have been avoiding it ever since! Bad yoga... Continue Reading →

November 24, 2017 1

Um, OM

Now that I’m teaching yoga in a gym setting, there are all sorts of questions I ask myself about my own practice, my teaching, and about what yoga is — or what I might reasonably assume a regular office worker wants it to be in their mid-week lunch break. Interesting questions, for which I don’t... Continue Reading →

October 19, 2017 3

What’s the answer? What’s the question?

My boss is just back from a conference so we spent some time chatting about it. The major theme for us was understanding how to organise information or data and how we find the information we need. We talked about the possible relationship between the availability of data and the questions we choose to ask,... Continue Reading →

July 13, 2017 2

The silence of yoga

I was introduced to the concept of mauna this week. Silence, the silence that underlies everything, the real essence and heart of things. Not just an absence of noise, but something more profound. Something essentially beyond description. I wonder: is the practice of yoga just about learning to get comfortable with this quality of silence, the essential loneliness of existence? And perhaps... Continue Reading →