This is a gentle yoga class open to everyone. The class would be particularly good for you if you have pain anywhere in the body, have a chronic health condition, are undergoing treatment for cancer, suffer from anxiety, fatigue, stress or are feeling stuck or overwhelmed. The class will include gentle movement patterns which when combined with the breath help to build resilience in the nervous system and bring about overall balance. I will also be teaching pranayama (breathing techniques), mindfulness, meditation and guided relaxations. The class will help you to grow your self-awareness so you are better able to self-regulate. It will enable you to build proprioception (where your body is in space) and interoception (how it feels inside) skills which are both essential for wellbeing. I believe that yoga has the potential to make us all feel better no matter what is going on in our lives. It is my hope that this class will also allow you to feel more joy in your life.
Last updated Aug. 12, 2019, 11:37 a.m. UTC
Fun classes for joy and wellbeing where everyone is welcome.
I took my yoga teacher training at the Sivananda Ashram in India in 2005 and more recently I have been taking courses with Peter Blackaby and Kristine Weber to further my understanding of yoga and the nervous system, chronic pain and brain optimization. What I have learnt over my many years of studying with different teachers is that yoga can help us all feel better in some way. We don’t have to be super flexible or fit, we can do simple, gentle, quiet movements and still feel the benefits. All we need to begin is the courage to be still, to listen, to breathe and to take an interest in how we feel in the moment.
The yoga that I teach encourages us to enquire into our relationship with our body, our mind, our emotions, our community and our environment. As we begin to explore these relationships we notice that our perception of them influences how we feel and behave in the world. Only then is it possible to break down old unhelpful patterns in our system and replace them with new healthy ones so that we feel more at ease. As well as being a powerful transformational tool yoga balances the desire for change with acceptance and the felt sense that we are already enough just as we are. It is this balance between self-transformation and self-acceptance that is at the heart of my own personal practice and provides the inspiration for the classes that I teach.
In 2017 I was diagnosed with chronic fatigue. I remember one of my friends saying to me, “Now you have to put your yoga into practice!” and that’s what I did. I began to practice restorative yoga when I felt too exhausted to do anything else, I practised mindfulness and yoga nidra (deep guided relaxation) several times a day and alongside changing my diet and doing some therapy I began to get well. Being ill and my journey back to health made me embody what I teach and I am passionate about sharing what I have learnt because I know from my own experience that yoga can help us to set up an internal environment that makes it more possible for the bodies own innate healing abilities to start to work.
