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Author Archive

harvest

a morning practice to harvest positive energy

sitting comfortably – hands resting in your lap
watch your breath go out and downwards as it removes any old feelings of tiredness and difficulty

and then in and upwards as it carries in something fresh and new

take your time

after a while

as you breathe in let your hands lift up towards your heart as if you are gathering the fresh radiance of the breath and lifting it towards you – as you breathe out your hands drop – helping to carry the old breath away as they settle into your lap

sandra sabatini

Sandra Sabatini will be teaching workshops in England again this autumn – i have been one of Sandra’s students for the last 7 years and her creative approach and sensitive guidance has been life changing

she and Michal Havkin are offering three weekends of yoga

20-22 October in Rye
27-29 October in London
3-5 November in Leicester (currently with a waiting list)

Sandra is a world renowned yoga teacher and was the primary student of Vanda Scaravelli for 18 years. Sandra believes ‘Learning no longer comes from wanting to reach a goal or fulfil an aim but from a gradual unfolding, an effortless blossoming’. The key to this unfolding is the breath; and in Sandra’s hands, awareness of the breath becomes a radical and intensely powerful tool capable of stripping away tension, tightness and toxins, and restoring the body and mind to balance.

if you are interested in the weekends, let me know and i’ll pass on details and contacts for your enquiry

september

a poem – full of love for the freedoms of summer and a suggestion to hold them close

Just as the Calendar Began to Say Summer

I went out of the schoolhouse fast
and through the gardens and to the woods,
and spent all summer forgetting what I’d been taught –

two times two, and diligence, and so forth,
how to be modest and useful, and how to succeed and so forth,
machines and oil and plastic and money and so forth.

By fall I had healed somewhat, but was summoned back
to the chalky rooms and the desks, to sit and remember

the way the river kept rolling its pebbles,
the way the wild wrens sang though they hadn’t a penny in the
bank,
the way the flowers were dressed in nothing but light.

Mary Oliver

yoga shorts

whilst practising

if your mind is wandering
and you can’t settle

close your eyes

then

the mind cools a little
awareness steps inside
time becomes

irrelevant

everything changes

august

i like the idea of exploring postures on the floor in august. here’s a time to rest – and whether you prefer the shade, sun or indoors – drop into the support of the ground.

how about lying on your back – moving around in apanasana/knee hold pose to wake up the pelvis and lower back – then stretch out with one hip open as if your were taking tree pose but lying down – do this on both sides – then come to sit in cobbler pose and put down your roots deeply – take your time – let the legs open like butterfly wings before folding into a forward bend

here’s an extract which captures something of august from Tuck Everlasting by Natalie Babbitt – a children’s book much loved in the US.

‘The first week of August hangs at the very top of summer. The top of the live long year. Like the highest seat of a ferris wheel when it pauses in its turning. The weeks that come before are only a climb from balmy spring and those that follow, a drop to the chill of autumn. But the first week of August is motionless and hot. It is curiously silent too… Often at night there is lightening but it quivers all alone. There is no thunder. No relieving rain. These are strange and breathless days.’

quiet

yoga speaks quietly

if we can
tune in
through each moment of each practice

perhaps we will catch

a whisper

a sentence

a message

or sometimes

silence

part of a whole

artist Christi Belcourt creates art from dots of paint, representing the colourful beadwork of her Métis ancestry.

her beautiful and detailed paintings, mostly of plants, creatures and water, thread ideas of interconnection ‘We are all part of a whole. The animals and plants, lands and waters, are our relatives each with as much right to exist as we have.’ CB

you might like to look at her work online

each piece a meditation – each piece an invitation

adlestrop

Yes, I remember Adlestrop –
The name, because one afternoon
Of heat the express-train drew up there
Unwontedly. It was late June.

The steam hissed. Someone cleared his throat.
No one left and no one came
On the bare platform. What I saw
Was Adlestrop – only the name

And willows, willow-herb, and grass,
And meadowsweet, and haycocks dry,
No whit less still and lonely fair
Than the high cloudlets in the sky.

And for that minute a blackbird sang
Close by, and round him, mistier,
Farther and farther, all the birds
Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.

Edward Thomas

yoga research

a recent study involving over 500 people who had recently recovered from cancer, has been undertaken at the University of Rochester, New York state, and has shown significant benefits for those practising yoga regularly.

‘They were asked either to take part in two weekly 75-minute sessions of gentle yoga for four weeks, or spend the same amount of time in health education sessions on how to care for themselves. Blood samples were taken before and after the four weeks, revealing significantly lower levels of inflammation markers in the blood of the yoga group than in the education group.’ (Kat Lay, The Times, 7 June 2023, p.7)

the lead researcher Karen Mustian summarised the findings, ‘the basic take-home story is that inflammatory chemicals were lowered by the yoga. Inflammation underlies virtually everything that we don’t want to see in cancer.’

the yoga was gentle and postures were modified where necessary to offer access for everyone. ‘The researchers will follow up participants to see if lowering inflammation translates into improved survival rates.’ (Kat Lay, The Times, 7 June 2023, p.7)

falling awake again

Falling Awake: How to Practice Mindfulness in Everyday Life
by John Kabat-Zinn

a broad approach guide to mindfulness written with Kabat-Zinn’s usual generosity. the first half of the book focusses on tuning the senses for mindful living and the second part looks at the practicalities of establishing and maintaining a meditation practice.

Falling Awake
by Alice Oswald

a book of vivid, thought provoking poems deeply connected to the physicality of the natural world and themed around gravity

“water which is so raw so earthy-strong
and lurks in cast-iron tanks and leaks along

drawn under gravity towards my tongue
to cool and fill the pipe-work of this song

which is the story of the falling rain
that rises to the light and falls again.”

extract from A Short Story of Falling – Alice Oswald