Yoga Teacher in a Box

I’m super excited to introduce you to Yoga Teacher in a Box: a little deck of cards and philosophy book with big ambitions. When I was invited to write this, I was determined it would be different from other yoga books. I wanted it to show ‘real’ bodies: all different sizes and shapes, genders, ethnicities, abilities. So that it embodies the idea that yoga is for every body, no one is excluded.

Everyone is welcome, and the practices reflect deeper internal enquiry rather than the external pose. All the practises are invitational rather than prescriptive, with plenty of possible variations to suit your body, energy and time, and reflections to guide you to a more introspective space.

I’ve been getting some great feedback from those of you who’ve received your pre-ordered copies, about how much you love the illustrations, how useful it is to develop your own home practice and how great the format is – thanks so much! If you haven’t got your copy yet, you can buy from your nearest indie bookstore or online at most stores.

Order Yoga Teacher in a Box

Please do leave a review too!

April day retreat

Barcombe yoga day

Gentle, nourishing yoga, walking countryside meditation, Thai massage and delicious vegan lunch in tune with the seasons.

When: April 28 (spring moving into summer), 10-4pm
Where: Barcombe Village Hall
Cost: £85 per person (£160 for 2 people booking together).

Spend a luxurious morning exploring quietening, somatic, meditative movement, expanding breath awareness and creating space for deep rest and reset of the nervous system in tune with nature and the shift of seasons (within ourselves and in nature).

We will be served an incredible vegan lunch (gluten free, please let us know when booking if you have any allergies) cooked by creative chef Lynne Mason @theveganexperienceuk. Importantly, there will also be pudding! All veg will be provided by local organic farm, Barcombe Nurseries. Please state when booking if you have any further dietary requirements.

We will then take a silent, meditative walk (weather allowing), followed by an afternoon of simple shared Thai massage techniques to ground ease out tension.

Not to be missed, this will be a day of soothing the senses and feeding the soul.

Email to book

Feedback from previous day retreat:
“Just to say how thoughtful the day was in every way, a recognition of the human being and all our individual needs – you noticed and noted all of them. From our needs to drink, to be alone, to be silent or chatty, to listen to ourselves. Everybody and every body was welcome to just be.” Anya

“I just wanted to say thank you so much for such a wonderful day on Sunday. I don’t ever remember feeling so calm and so regulated. I arrived home feeling very serene and realised just how far from that state I live! Also, for showing us how powerful it is to be given permission to be ourselves. I never realised just how much my nervous system would love that too. I could feel my whole body giving such a sigh of relief. I could just be me.” Pippa

“I slept so well Sunday night! Thank you so much for providing such a restorative day.” Nola

“On Sunday night I slept for 9 hours straight, it was the best sleep I’ve had in a long long time, thank you!” Kim

Come with me to Turkey!

Never mind Christmas turkey, why not come to Turkey with me next September?

Yoga & Mindfulness Week
with Leonie Taylor & Charlotte Watts
Grenadine Lodge, Turkey
Sep 30th-Oct 7th 2024

This week will be dedicated to guiding you to feel calm, connected, restored, rejuvenated and content.

Mixing mindfulness within yoga practice and through meditation space and personal exploration is a profound and enjoyable way to let go off the stresses of day-to-day life.

This yoga hotel is really lovely, with great service and truly lovely staff. The swimming pool is big enough to properly swim with a small bar beside the pool, which also serves snacks and amazing fresh pomegranate frozen juice ‘slushies’. It also has two yoga shalas which overlook a pomegranate field, which is where the yoga sessions will take place and a Turkish tree house where students can relax.

Dalyan village is situated on the small river that joins the lake to the sea and the yoga hotel is situated in the conservation area between the village and the beach. There are hotel bikes you can use for a lovely (and flat!) 10 minute cycle into town. This means you can either completely escape or enjoy this lovely town with beautiful river, cafes and great shopping if you want…. The beach is a 15-minute bus ride or you get get there by river taxi from town – there is turtle sanctuary at one end.

Find out more

Compassion and lasagne

58d0cf4813e442201eb26cc341fcf704539034f4Today I made a veggie lasagne.
This is both unremarkable and totally remarkable.
I came into the house earlier, with 20 minutes ‘between things’ and a quiche set out to make… ingredients ready… pastry out of date and mouldy beyond use.

Hell!

Projection of impossible equation:
washing to hang out
+ dishwasher to unpack
+ swimming kit to pack
+ Skype meeting to stick to
+ admin
+ two children to collect from school
+ two swimming lessons
+ 20 mins at home later with hungry post swimmers to feed before dance class for older child
+ a partridge in a pear tree
= AAARRGGGGGGHHHHHH! + chaos.
Take a breath.
What is in my cupboard? Both literally and metaphorically.
What can I NOT do right now?
What can I?

20 minutes later a veggie lasagne made, the cheese sauce possibly a little runny.
Swimming kit packed.
Ready for Skype meeting, more or less.
Maybe you’re congratulating me at this point, recognising the juggle of seemingly ‘trivial’ tasks. But that’s not the point.
Maybe you’re not judging me for the mess in my kitchen. But that’s not the point.
Maybe my partner doesn’t mind that there’s wet washing to hang and my ‘job’ is not complete. But that’s not the point.
Maybe my kids would be just as happy with beans on toast. But that’s not the point.
The point is, I have done what I can, in the time I have, with the resources I have available to me right now.
My expectations may have been unrealistic.
Any self criticism is unnecessary.
All that in 20 minutes, a microcosm of the everyday… with kindness.

(Please note, I didn’t have time with all this to photo, upload, edit my own lasagne pic so this is someone else’s less messy version 😉 )

Rain, rain, RAIN

autumn leaves in the rain
This morning we awoke to the sound of rain, the clouds obscuring the light of yesterday’s sunshine.

This shift in the weather is the perfect way to start the day, an invitation, a reminder from nature to experience what is now. Michele McDonald developed RAIN as an acronym for a simple mindfulness practice 20 years ago:

Recognize what is going on;
Allow the experience to be there, just as it is;
Investigate with kindness;
Natural awareness, which comes from not identifying with the experience.

So, what is your experience right now?

Sit comfortably, either cross-legged or kneeling on the floor or a chair with your knees, ankles and hips aligned. Feel your sitting bones (you can manually take the buttock flesh out and back to ground yourself) and notice your spine. Allow your body to feel its way intuitively into sitting a little more symmetrically, more upright, so that the body invites the breath to naturally flow.

Notice any physical or emotional sensations as they arise and pass through the body mind. You may become distracted by these feelings or thoughts, you may notice internal dialogue. Each time this happens, just notice that and bring your focus back to the breath. The physical sensation or the emotion is not suppressed but you also don’t need to become caught up in it. Just as you watch the rain, you cannot hold on to a particular raindrop, each experience comes and goes.
No single raindrop is the rain.
No single experience, thought, sensation is ‘you’.

You don’t need to label the experience as ‘good’ or ‘bad’, ‘desirable’ or ‘undesirable’. You are not ‘succeeding’ in your practice if you remain focussed or ‘failing’ if you are distracted.

This is the same as if you were practising what you perceive to be a challenging pose in a yoga class. I often come across this, for instance, teaching students inversions. Many people encounter fear, old stories of inadequacy, anxiety about falling, failing… The more they become caught up in ‘thinking’ and either deciding not to try or caught up in the trying itself, the less likely it is they will ever come into the headstand.

In Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras, the aphorism that we often come to is:
“Prayatna shaitilya ananta samapatthibhyam”(II:47)
“Perfection in an asana is achieved when the effort to perform it becomes effortless and the infinite being within is reached.”

B.K.S. Iyengar

When we calm the mind, sensitively, intelligently and spaciously explore a pose, and, most importantly, let go of our expectations to reach a defined point we perceive as a goal, then our bodies are more likely, with time and practise, to open into the physicality of the postures. This attitude is inherently generous and kind, gradually revealing the nuances in the body.

It is the same when we are pregnant and preparing for birth: many women I encounter get caught up either in fear or in the need to control the outcome of their birth. Either of these mental states takes them away from the actual experience of their pregnancy or birth. In scientific terms, the focussing of activity in the logical, linear left brain, leads the woman to becoming disintegrated, where she needs to fall into a space of intuition, trust and connection with the primal part of her brain that effects natural chemical and physical responses that correspond with the progress of birth. Caught up in her thinking brain, there will be more associated stress, often reflected in more shallow breathing, her muscles will tighten and become more adrenal without enough oxygen and her birth will literally be ‘held’ by the brain.

In both these physical scenarios, as with the attitude we may take to the rain, if we can Recognize the anxiety, any negative projections that arise (suffering, ‘dukkha’, we cause ourselves – we are the only known mammals to do this! – by imaging outcomes in the future based on current events); Allow ourselves to settle, physically, mentally and with the breath into what is right now; Investigate these sensations with space, intuition, without getting caught back in the cycle of projection and judgement; opening ourselves to Natural awareness – we are not attached to or defined by the experience.
As the weather constantly shifts, so do we, everything that we ‘are’ is realigning, moving, beyond ‘control’. In these moments of awareness we are free.
Enjoy the rain!

Connecting with your partner after birth.

It often arises for women that their relationship with their partner faces challenges after birth.

For some time afterwards, as Mama you are flooded with chemicals that ensure you nurture and prioritise your baby. Perhaps you aren’t sleeping, perhaps you are still adjusting to the metamorphosis of motherhood. Perhaps birth itself has left physical or emotional traces in the body which take time to heal. Your libido may have been temporarily shelved. Even with the most understanding of partners, male or female, this can be challenging as they are not experiencing the same chemical or emotional experience. In many cases, their world most paternity/maternity leave is quite different from the space you have entered as mum. This can lead to a feeling of disconnect, anxiety, even antipathy, snapiness, arguments, feelings of not being understood… These feelings are regularly expressed by women in the UMEmamas community.

Sitting back to back in Baddha Konasana is a great way to re-connect non-verbally. Sit back to back to each other. Place the soles of your feet together. Make sure you really draw your sacrums in towards each other and spread out your backs into one another’s. As you start to connect to your own breath, coming and going through the nose, you will also become aware of each other’s breath, the warmth between your backs, and the release that starts to evolve with each exhalation. Each time you breathe, settle back into the mutual support of each other’s backs.

This article from Yoga Journal addresses the issue of coming up against physical resistance in the pose, and how we emotionally respond to resistance. Of course this is equally applicable to the resistance we find in our relationships, sometimes to situations. When we meet this, allowing ourselves to ‘confront our limitations’, to face our discomfort and to allow it space, through centering, grounding in the breath. Recognising that whatever we meet is not a definition of how, who, what we are, that that is constantly evolving given space. Let go of the stories that build in your head surrounding behaviours and connect through the breath to each others’ hearts.

We will sleep again… and without little people wriggling between us. We will not always feel like we feel right now, however that is. We will have time to invest in our relationships in a different way again as our children grow and need us less intensively.
In the meantime, draw your attention to the little moments where you feel love, connection… vocalise them. Appreciate the new depth that comes with being parents. See the beauty in how your love for each other is manifested through your child/children.
Notice all the little gestures, touches, cuddles, smiles over your sleeping child… which all build up to create a picture of connection in a different way.

Yogic parenting

Becoming a new parent can be a like a lucky dip of mixed emotions and experiences. You made it through labour and now you’re doing a good impression of a dairy cow, taking odd breaks to juggle nappies-ful of curry and pose for the family paparazzi, immortalized in spew-covered Primark pyjamas and scarecrow hair…
Continue reading “Yogic parenting”