It’s been two years since I took my first trembling steps towards teaching yoga (initially the ‘restorative’ variety), eight months since I qualified as a yin teacher, four months since that hard-earned 200-hour certificate landed in the inbox and eight or nine weeks since I started teaching actual people rather than their mic-muted rectangles, and…
Category: Namaste
Ah yes, I remember it well…
It’s been two years since we last holidayed in Vass, a place that has been our spiritual summer ‘home from home’ on the island of Levkas for some eight years now. Nestling in a very windy corner of the Ionian sea to the west of the Greek mainland, it’s a haven for windsurfers and sailors…
Buttering toast and learning to fly: Yoga Teacher Training in the time of Covid
Yoga teacher training in the time of Covid. Two hundred hours — stretched over eighteen tortuous months — of sometimes not quite knowing what I was still doing there, why I was hanging on in when family, friends, my own yoga teachers, trusted therapists and usually-reliable guts were telling me to walk away. Two hundred…
Introducing the lesser known Flamingo (yoga pose extraordinaire)
So what do YOU do every night before climbing into bed? And bear in mind this is a family show. Me, I stand on one leg at the end of the bed, the other knee bent up at right angles, shin and foot dangling, hands crossed shoulder to shoulder, and I close my eyes and…
Zooming in and breathing deep on yoga teacher training
Yoga teacher training in lockdown. Not exactly the experience I signed up for, back in that other life, eight long months ago, before Covid-19 knocked us all off-balance – but, honestly, so much better for it. I mean, what better opportunity to test your yoga-chops than through this ultimate challenge to inner spirit? What better…
Getting my head round Hatha
‘Slowly swallow a wet cloth which is four fingers wide and fifteen hands long in the manner instructed by one’s guru’, then ‘draw it out again’. Thus writes Brain Dana Akers in his English translation of the Hatha Yoga Pradipika. (Chapter two, Verse 24, if you really don’t want to take my word for it.)…
Alpine skiing and yoga. Chalk and cheese, right?
Well, I’d beg to differ. Okay, one has you hurtling downhill at speed, in minus temperatures, adrenalin pumping, the other hanging out on a mat in relative warmth (village halls in winter and draughty gymnasiums notwithstanding). But there’s so much in common too, if you want to do either well. And feel the benefit. The…
A new yoga adventure begins…
Well, I’ve only gone and done it. Signed up for a new adventure. Voluntarily agreed to put myself through the sort of physical and mental challenge the average sixty-something might think twice about. No, let me qualify that, the average sixty-something who only six years before got diagnosed with a couple of bulging discs and…
My how a ski trip flies with the flu
So much for the ‘First Defence’ squirted regularly and inelegantly up both nostrils as we travelled towards France, and so much for the frenzied scrubbing of every suspect surface between Cumbria and Les Trois Vallées with anti-bacterial wipes. So much for the constant hand washing, a travel-inspired obsessive compulsive aversion to making contact with anything…
Confessions of a bad yogi
Last week, in London… Overheard en route to the OM Yoga Show – on the bus to Ally Pally – one yogi to another, waxing really, really, REALLY enthusiastic about a favourite eatery which, despite really clear signage on the matter, really has trouble persuading people it’s ‘really vegan fish and chips…’ And, in case…
A fish without bones, a pea on a fork and a door to possibilities
Overheard while waiting at the gate at Aktion airport, en route home from Vassiliki: a woman impressing her neighbour with all the new-fangled food she’d tried out in Greece. Like tuna. Which (and this may come as some surprise to members of the tuna family) she referred to as a ‘fish with no bones in’….
Getting grumpy in Vassiliki
It’s the little things that trip you up isn’t it? I mean here I am in Greece, all zenned out with yoga and sunshine, and something is really buggin’ me. Quite apart fom the actual bugs. It’s the people next door. In the next room. They keep nicking our chairs. All the rooms have two….
Hackette on the How 