As a child, making friends was easy. You'd walk up to someone in the playground and say, "Will you be my best friend?" They said yes, and Bob's your uncle*, you had a hopscotch* partner for life. However, it gets a little more complicated the older we get
Read moreBackache, Pain & Yoga
You’ ll find a slew of studies. Just to share one I looked at was a review of 10 studies involving a 967 chronic low back pain patients. The results showed strong evidence that yoga can provide short-term relief in terms of pain, back-specific disability, and overall improvement... More and more studies are raving about the benefits of yoga.
Read moreTaking Stock
Have you ever felt at odds when you heard yourself answering the question ‘What have you been up to’? That realisation that you thought you would have answered differently, but the reality takes you by surprise?
Read moreFeel like a superhero
After just 2 minutes in this pose, hormonal changes can configure your brain to either assertive, confident and comfortable, or really stress-reactive, and feeling sort of shut down.
Read moreFascia- Dance The Fuzz Away
Every night when we go to sleep the interfaces between our muscles grows 'fuzz'. In the morning when we stretch, this fuzz melts. That stiff feeling in the morning is the solidifying of the tissues. Just like a cat stretches every time it awakes from a snooze, so should we. This 'morning stretch' melts that fuzz that is building up throughout the whole of the body.
Read moreTo P or not to P
I had heard about the connection with the heel and the bladder, but didn't understand how it worked, so have gone down a bit of a rabbit hole trying to find out more…
Pee-pee, wee-wee, tinkle whatever name you have for urination, we all do it, we always have done it and sometimes we do it when we don’t want to do it.
PANIC ATTACKS
Yesterday a friend told me he was contemplating moving because he had a panic attack in his car on his way to work. He thought it might be better to move house so he’d have to drive less. This really upset me and I made me want to learn more. Here are some of my findings and thoughts.
Read moreDear Body, a word in your ear...
At the end of most of my yoga classes, I close by asking us to take a moment to "thank our bodies for the hard work they have just done and have gratitude for the hard work they do for us every day, all the time, without us even knowing it", or words to that effect.
I don't know about you, but I'm miffed when I can't do a yoga pose. It bugs me when my leg won't neatly slide behind my head and I can't then balance on my index finger. When in reality, the fact that I can even lift a leg is an amazing feat of engineering and yet here I am complaining that it's not high enough.
Read moreWhat are you thinking?
Yoga teachers say some odd things during class. I completely include myself in this. I've named various body parts different marine life forms: I often refer to the pelvic floor as a giant jelly fish. I've moved internal organs around the body, asking you to 'breath with your toes' or twist and 'pop the heart out and float it to the ceiling'. I have certainly said things like 'be in the moment', 'be present', 'be in the here and now'. But what do these phrases really mean?
Read moreYoga is yoga, isn't it?
'I am off to my yoga class' = I am going to a place where I will roll out a mat and do some weird shapes.
But technically speaking if we are talking about the postures we perform in a yoga class, we should be calling it Asana class rather than Yoga class. But that's like pointing out that a hoover should be called a vacuum cleaner and ping pong is the name of the brand of a table for table tennis...pointing that out would be pedantic, wouldn't it?
The Art of Turning a Blind Eye
I have been painting the Grand Hall of my house, which incidentally is 1m2. My other half says it looks much better than before. I think the paint now highlights all the imperfections in the walls and the old radiator, the cracked door frame and scuffed skirting board. These imperfections invisible prior to my contribution, now really annoy me.
Meanwhile, my other half is tiling in the West Wing, aka the bathroom. I think it looks fabulous, so much better than before. Yet all he can see is the gap between the centre tile is 2mm narrower than the tile above it. Had he not pointed this out, I would never have noticed. This imperfection really annoys him.
In both cases it's not perfect, but better than it was before and in actual fact - it is fine, it does the job more than adequately.
And yet it niggles...
We want perfection