Transports of delight

Hubby's thinking about buying a car. We've never owned one, and on a practical level we mostly get by without. Plus it allows me to feel slightly smug about my (otherwise lamentable) eco-credentials! But ever since we guzzumped Eric Catona in a hire car office in the south of France and were freely upgraded to the... Continue Reading →

November 25, 2015 1

Back to school

My Facebook feed recently abounds with proud pictures of friends' kids in their new uniforms all ready for the start of the school year. It gives me the heeby-jeebies. School definitely wasn't the happiest days of my life. Hubby confesses that he still has anxiety dreams about school exams, and once I got through uni finals... Continue Reading →

October 1, 2015 6

Mantra calling

I'm feeling a bit physically wrecked this week (just a a cold, but oh! that little virus certainly packs a punch!) so I haven't been up to much asana practice. I've been weak and a bit feverish. It makes for 'hot yoga' but not in a nice way... So asana practice is clearly not what my body... Continue Reading →

September 30, 2015 7

108 blog posts

108 is a symbolic number to some. So this could be a beautiful point in my blogging journey. I wish! Instead it's a moment that finds me bogged down in probably all the kleshas (the obstacles to the state of yoga) at once. I had a little abhinivesa moment (fear of death, or clinging to life) in class at the... Continue Reading →

September 17, 2015 2

Dying for the yoga class to finish

Hot tears leak unwanted from my eyes. They trickle down the side of my face and into my ears making the teacher's voice a little distorted. I'm lying in savasana, corpse pose. Some say it's their favourite yoga pose. How can that be? What do they find there that eludes me? Some say it's the... Continue Reading →

September 12, 2015 6

Compassion for the skeletons in the closet

Compassion is a topic I keep coming across in blogs at the moment (picking up the idea of serendipity from my own blog recently!). Yogis often talk about cultivating compassion towards others, but receiving compassion is also an art that's worth practicing. I read a great post recently about handling compassion, how to confront one's vulnerability and... Continue Reading →

August 24, 2015 6

Comparing crows and seeking contentment

I came across some photos just recently that I took of myself about two years ago, near the start of my yoga journey. I wanted to record how particular poses looked so that I could understand what I needed to work on. It was a learning exercise. I didn't understand how to interpret the sensations in my body to have much of a... Continue Reading →

August 15, 2015 9

Reading Kaminoff’s ‘Yoga Anatomy’

I've started reading Kaminoff's Yoga Anatomy again. I hope now that I understand a bit more overall about yoga I'll be able to get more benefit from it compared to a bewildering first perusal. I'm still in the front-matter and loving their notion of the body as laboratory for the exploration of what it means to be human and... Continue Reading →

August 9, 2015 7

Brahman and bacteria

Class started today with the teacher asking what came before Siri. His rhetorical line was to trace back a sequence of ‘what came befores’. What was before the internet, before reference books, spoken language, sound, breathing… "What was before breathing?" I volunteered "anaerobic respiration" which got a laugh at least (I am in a very... Continue Reading →

August 4, 2015 4

atha yoga anusasanam? now my yoga starts?

So I completed the 3 day immersion I was fretting about so much. And I've been trying to figure out how to write about it in a reasonable sized blog post... but I can't! It was just too much of an experience to boil down to anything sensible. Plus my heart, mind, and body are... Continue Reading →