Feel the joy!

I remember a picture I loved, that really inspired me. I told my teacher about it when I was studying backbends with him. It was a beautiful image of a girl doing urdhva hastasana. An outdoor setting, she had loose hair pulling free in the breeze, there was glowing sunshine and her posture was one... Continue Reading →

April 2, 2025 0

Begin again

Back when I met with my teacher regularly, I used to enjoy telling him what I was working on in my practice, what was interesting me, what I perceived as the challenge to address, how it evolved over the months until it turned into something different. The sharing of it was a key part of... Continue Reading →

January 18, 2025 1

General public

I had a small gynae procedure yesterday. It might have been ‘routine’ for the clinical staff but it was a pretty extreme experience for me and way more painful than I was expecting. At one point one of the assisting nurses told me to ‘do yoga breathing’ as she could see I was struggling with... Continue Reading →

September 10, 2024 1

Wild Weekend

Life in my forties seems crammed with new experiences -- which is somehow, and wonderfully, not how I expected my ‘middle years’ (groan!) to play out. I’m just back from my first ever wild camping trip. So many new experiences here: hiking further in 2 days than I ever have before (and being told off... Continue Reading →

August 24, 2024 7

Eumorphia

Eumorphia Is that a word? I just made it up. The benefits of a classical education 🙂 The opposite of dysmorphia, as in ‘body dysmorphia’, a condition where you become obsessive about how your body looks, the bits you hate, how flawed and imperfect it is compared to how you see others. So what would... Continue Reading →

June 25, 2024 3

Run done

tldr: I did it! ‘It’ being my first running event. I’m not going to call it a ‘race’ because time was never important to me (apart from fervently wanting not to finish last!). I’m just proud to have taken part and to have finished. I have wanted to run an event (race) for what feels... Continue Reading →

May 14, 2024 4

The training plan

After signing up for my first ever 10km event (or any event at all, actually!) I drew up a training plan to take me neatly up to the distance over several months. I don’t know anything about running training plans, but this seemed pretty reasonable to me, an incremental increase of distance from a pretty... Continue Reading →

May 3, 2024 5

My dream run

I’m having a lot of dreams at the moment, bad dreams (nightmares even) from which I wake up in a sweat with my heart beating hard, sometimes just a sense of unease or sometimes full-on panic. My first moments of consciousness swirl me back into reality, pulling me out of some strange situation or emotional... Continue Reading →

February 4, 2024 6

Upside down joy

I’ve written before how I could swear my handstand trainer has a degree is psychology. He seems to know the right thing to say, how to motivate and encourage even while remaining super-strict about form and attention to detail. Now that I’m a bit wiser or more experienced with physical trainers (not just lofty yoga... Continue Reading →

January 13, 2024 5

Running changes

When I first started practising yoga asana it seemed like such a miracle to me. To move my body, encountering the mysterious world of mind-body connection, to recognise that my world-view was changing. I developed a new vocabulary around movement principles and yoga philosophy, my wardrobe included more lycra, my diet changed... These thing happened... Continue Reading →