His is blue. Mine is pink. Natch. His loiters in his trousers, silently brooding. Ready for action whenever the moment might present — at which point, activity is energetic and generally sweaty. Whereas mine hums quietly away — no rush, after all — clipped to a bra strap or tucked into a waistband. For we…
Tag: Health
They think it’s all over…
It WAS over, apparently, Covid. Trampled under the weight of the Russian war machine, as if each new threat to human existence neatly and conveniently cancels out the one before. As if we can’t possibly have compassion for a country being systematically reduced to rubble, its people zapped into oblivion like so many video avatars,…
Stage fright and the yoga teacher? Surely not?
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…
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…
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…
Packing it in for another stay in Vassiliki
Did you pack your capsule holiday wardrobe this year? You know the one: classic white tee, perfect day-to-night dress, floaty boho blouse, flattering swimsuit (whatever that is) and insouciantly-drapable wear-everywhere scarf… No, me neither. For hard-won experience tells me that classic white tees tend not to stay thus over the course of a two-week trip…
When you gotta go… you gotta go
Three small bottles of water (two of them half empty and very well-travelled, far beyond any sensible drink-by date), one pair of nail scissors, the previous Saturday’s Times Review (with me in case I had a moment spare in my day to complete the crossword), one large hankie, one window cleaning cloth. And a jacket…
Scattering ashes, falling in Filey and finding little comfort in Doctor Alexa
The family would probably tell you I’ve always been ‘a bit accident-prone’. Ski injuries mostly, on and off the snow. Any number of bruises on account of entirely unscheduled cartwheels across the piste. The ripped tendon in a right-hand finger thanks to a collision with a speeding Frenchman. A brace of stitches on one wrist…
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…
Hackette on the How 