In-Person Group Session: Holistic Yoga
Mondays 1:30 - 3 pm at Union Church, Weston Park, London N8
Dear Yoga Practitioner,
As well as writing my essay on Yoga Therapy for the Hypermobile Sacroiliac Joint, I’ve also been a busy bee reorganising my Substack website. There has been a lot of screen time!! The weekly articles are all stored on a website that can be found at holisticyoga.substack.com. There is also an app you can download. If you read these articles on your phone, you’ll find the app improves the quality of your reading experience.
I’m in the process of moving my old site over to reside entirely within this Substack realm. Once it’s done, when you click on holisticyoga.co.uk, you’ll go to the Substack site. This will take a little while and I’ll update you as I go.
Introducing the Holistic Yoga Online
Studio One advantage of the Substack site is that is easy to upload video and audio. So I’ve created a new section in the Substack menu called Holistic Yoga Online Studio. If you go to holisticyoga.substack.com you can see it. Founding Member subscribers can now watch and listen to an ever-growing selection of yoga, somatics and meditation sessions. If you missed the audio yoga sessions I recorded during lockdown, they are all up there. I’m also uploading yoga and somatic video sessions I have recorded on various topics such as back and joint health. This growing library of Holistic Yoga practices offers a great way to support your home practice, between the yoga sessions you attend in-person or online.
What is Holistic Yoga?
Holistic Yoga is a continually evolving exploration of movement and breath practices that have helped me to alleviate chronic aches, pains and stiffness. Due to hypermobility, I’ve had aches and pains since my teens. In addition during my childhood to early twenties, I had chronic sinusitis and bronchial asthma.
I’ve been practising yoga for over 35 years and teaching for around 20 years. During this time I’ve trained in Anatomy in Motion, Hanna Somatics, Yoga and Yoga Therapy. These mindful somatic movement disciplines have greatly improved my mental and physical health and well-being. The group classes are a process of me sharing what has helped me, to enable you to explore what works for you.
What is the Soma?
Thomas Hanna, a philosophy professor at Florida University, began to use the term “somatics” in the 1960s. Hanna’s study of Neuroscience led him to recognise the importance of the mind-body connection, that is psychological processes create physiological change in various body systems and vice-versa. In ancient Greek soma means “body.” Yet Hanna created a new definition of soma to mean the felt experience of living in one’s own body.
Uniting the Psyche and the Soma
In the 1970s Hanna was a director of the Humanistic Psychology Institute, which was founded and supported, by Rollo May, Carl Rogers and other person-centred psychotherapists. In this way, Thomas Hanna immersed himself in the study of the relationship between the psyche and the soma. He created a simple, yet elegant way of working with the neuro-muscular system that enables an unwinding of habitual patterns held in the body due to the inevitable shocks, traumas and stresses we experience through life.
I have trained up to level III as a Somatic Movement Educator and weave these practices in with the yoga practices to enable the release of tension, stuck stress and built-up holding patterns.
Yoga as a Somatic Practice
Yoga in and of itself can be somatic if we practice it in a mindful, slow and non-mechanical way. Vanda Scaravelli taught her students to be curious, to allow time for listening and responding to the body’s and breath’s needs, rather than to be concerned with fitting the body to a particular shape or posture. Yoga is somatic in quality if we are interested less in how the pose looks like from the outside, and more it is how it feels to us on the inside, at the level of our soma.
My teacher Sophie Hoare, trained with Vanda Scaravelli one-on-one for many years, and my one-to-one lessons with her shifted my understanding of yoga practice and teaching so that I began to resolve the chronic pain that I had been living with for many years.
Balancing the Nervous System
Since then I’ve been most interested in teaching yoga to people who experience chronic stiffness, aches, pain, fatigue and illness. The gentle, slow movements that we explore during the Holistic Yoga sessions work both on the autonomic (ANS) and sensory-motor or Somatic Nervous System (SoNS)
The ANS mediates our feeling state and mounts responses to our inner and outer environment, such as the fight and flight response, or the relaxation response. The sensory part of the Somatic Nervous System “listens” to our fascia, via the many sensory nerve endings embedded in this connective tissue that surrounds and contains all our organs, joints, bones and blood vessels, right down to the cellular level. The motor part of our Somatic Nervous System sends messages from the brain to the muscle fibres, to create movement within our body.
Refraining from Striving
Somatic yoga works with these systems in a fun, playful and relaxing way. We refrain from striving, trying and forcing, which just engrains habitual patterns within us. Instead, we explore functional, yoga and somatic movement patterns, in a way that is calming and safe. In this way, we learn how to carve out clearer pathways through our sensory-motor nervous system. In addition, we regulate the ANS so that we learn to drop into the parasympathetic, rest and digest state at will. This creates resilience and increases HRV heart rate variability, which is a measure of our ability to recover from the stresses of daily life.
Accessible and Inclusive Yoga
The classes are designed to be accessible and inclusive, they are ideal for people of any age who feel that they can’t “do” yoga. People who are exhausted, stressed or working with a chronic ailment can also benefit from this type of practice. Together we’ll explore ways of waking up muscle fibres; uncovering healthy breath patterns; creating calmer, wiser minds; and finding ways to nurture ourselves through deep and blissful relaxation.
Local In-Person Yoga
If you are in the North London area, you are very welcome, to pop in and join us at Union Church on Monday afternoons. Presently, the Zoom classes are not running. I’m planning to start two new in-person classes in March at the new Shiva-Shakti Yoga Studio in Hornsey. I hope to be offering Holistic Yoga on Tuesdays at 7 pm - 8:15 pm and Thursdays at 10 am - 11:30 am. They have lots of lovely classes there, so check out their timetable if you’re a local.
Also, if you know friends or family in the North London area who have chronic back pain, do let them know about the gentle and effective Yoga for Healthy Lower Backs Course starting in February. Details are below.
With love and good wishes,
Julia
For Those Local to North London
Yoga for Healthy Lower Backs Course - Starts February 23rd 2024
7 Places Left!
A twelve-week course which supports you to better understand and support your back.
We’ll work with posture, breath, relaxation, anatomical approaches, the physiology of pain, mindfulness and much more. This is a holistic, scientifically validated approach that has changed many people’s lives for the better.