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

Moving and shaking

I trust my teacher. So when he gave me a ball at the start of our yoga session together I tried to go with it — even though ‘it’ was an excruciatingly awkward exploration of shoulder and hip mobility and how to connect the two. The ball balancing aspect added challenge, or focus, or maybe... Continue Reading →

May 29, 2021 1

Learning to learn

After my learning overload of the past month, I was looking forward to making time to assimilate all my new learning. Oh, I’d forgotten I’d signed up for a short series of Sanskrit reading classes! According to my usual habit of imagining all learning situations will be challenging and difficult, with an over-demanding teacher who... Continue Reading →

October 29, 2020 6

Under examination

Remember my Sanskrit exams earlier this year? I wrote at the time about the small support network I gathered around myself as I put myself forward for these exams, feeling very much out of my depth but with a determination just to try and see what came from it. I tried to enjoy the accelerated... Continue Reading →

August 17, 2019 6

Support network

A support network can be really.... well, supportive! I'm not a big one for sharing all the details of my life (anonymous blog, geddit?) and I can in fact go a bit the other way and tend towards isolation in my liking for privacy. Privacy is kind of comfortable; there's no accountability in secrecy, no... Continue Reading →

May 21, 2019 5

Calling Ganesha

A yogi friend of mine’s just been found by Ganesha. She’s been seeing him everywhere recently, she says, to the point where she bought a murti for her home. And she’s started a mantra practice multiple times a day. We chanted together recently: 108 times oṃ gaṃ gaṇapataye namaḥ. I don’t usually repeat a mantra... Continue Reading →

October 21, 2017 4

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

Sore throat, big leap

I've had a sore throat for weeks now. It started when I was on holiday in Canada and has persisted. The accompanying cold disappeared weeks ago, but I'm still croaky. "It's psychosomatic" one of my yogi friends told me rather brusquely. Yogis can be so annoying right?! My teacher joked (I think it was a... Continue Reading →

September 2, 2017 6

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 →