Flow of words

In my teaching this week I was thrown off what I'd prepared by a comment at the start of class which kicked off some ideas in my mind and the moment I opened my mouth I found I was extemporising from her comment instead of doggedly sticking to my prepared plan. The physical sequence was... Continue Reading →

July 21, 2017 5

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

Grazie mille

Hubby's latest reason for calling me a weirdo (which he affectionately does over all sorts of things) is that I don't require him to buy me jewellery all the time! According to him this is how girls (and wives) behave. I think he's been watching too many American films, but he insists this is true.... Continue Reading →

June 25, 2017 3

Grumbles and aches

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... Continue Reading →

May 30, 2017 2

Raw yoga

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... Continue Reading →

May 19, 2017 0

Laughing plank

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... Continue Reading →

May 1, 2017 2

Clowning around

Hubby came in and interrupted my practice this morning. He's usually really careful not to do this, but it turned out he thought everything had gone quiet and assumed I'd finished. He planned to tiptoe in to give me a bit of a head/shoulder massage in Śavāsana. Sweet thought! He hasn't realised that my āsana practice is... Continue Reading →

April 16, 2017 4

Heart and ears

At work today I've been listening to a recording of a live kirtan hosted by a local Hindu group. I did this as a strange stress relief measure as I tackled an inbox burgeoning with technical queries that I must somehow understand and recommend solutions to. It pretty much worked -- though it didn't do wonders for... Continue Reading →

March 27, 2017 6

Equal parts of hope and doubt

I had lunch today with a fellow new graduate. She wanted to talk through the questions she's asking herself right now about teaching. It felt funny with her seeking my perspective on this. She has much, much more yoga experience than me (not just more years, but wider experience of different traditions) and her teaching... Continue Reading →

March 16, 2017 1

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 →