my yoga journey
I spent time this weekend playing in my parents' garden with my little niece. She's four and a half, full of energy and apparently fearless. She loved rolling down the slope where my brother and I used to do the same thing several decades ago. She revelled in doing a run-up to perform multiple forward... Continue Reading →
I got out of town this bank holiday weekend for a workshop plus kirtan. I've kept my yoga experiences pretty close to home for some time now, since my last visit to a new teacher was a bit more than I bargained for. Long story short: it's made me reluctant to leave the safety bubble... Continue Reading →
“Go to the limits of your longing... Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final” (Rilke) Practice at the moment is an experience of longing. I feel a deep yearning to be more fully with myself, to let go of the past, to feel the reality of the... Continue Reading →
Telling stories. Telling stories. RE-telling stories I was formally trained to study the past. I used to be an archaeologist. My academic training taught me that there's usually more than one interpretation of the evidence and if you follow the more radical post-modern theories the past is unknowable and all interpretations become equally valid... Death... Continue Reading →
Numbers are one of my least favourite things. If you can have a phobia of numbers, then I do. I prefer things I can count simply on the fingers of one hand. Thankfully, leaving the magic 108 aside, yoga seems mercifully free of numbers. Or is it... After all, I have an Astanga-trained friend who... Continue Reading →
First words from the teacher, first breaths on my mat and nothing felt right. I never know how to handle this start to practice, when I just don't jive with what's going on around me and everything feels wrong. In my own practice time I never have a plan to adhere to so I don't... Continue Reading →
I'm feeling a certain softness and tenderness towards myself these days. It's growing a little within me. My teachers are inspiring some honest self-care. Not the self-soothing warm baths and small indulgences type of nurturing that seems commonly advocated in popular media but which I suspect has little to do with yoga. Theirs is a... Continue Reading →
"Inhale hands to prayer. Make it real" My teacher knows I'm nervous, gives me a breath to settle myself here before I 'show him' my Surya Namaskar A. I know it's not, but it feels like a test. He's standing just on the edge of my field of vision, a safe distance away, an unnerving... Continue Reading →
Limiting beliefs are wonderful things to have! Aren't they? They keep one's expectations nicely contained, prevent you aiming so high you set up for an embarrassing fail, and just keep everything safely within reach. I'm not known as a shirker among my friends, family and work colleagues: I have the reputation for being hard working,... Continue Reading →
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