Photo: Julia Moore…
This wonderful character resides in Sheringham Park, North Norfolk.
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.
Dear Yoga Practitioner,
Ah ha! You have been upgraded, from students to readers, to practitioners… I wonder how you feel about this? Let me know. Yoga is about so much more than doing a downward-facing dog pose, moving with awareness, communing with your breath, being kind inside your mind, contemplating ancient wisdom and immersing yourself in deep and blissful relaxation - this is all yoga.
These ways of paying attention allow us to take some power back, to participate in how Life shapes us. For we don’t have any control over what Life does around us, but we can work with our responses. If we pause the gap after the stimulus, before the response, perhaps we might catch the flow of Life around us. The sense of how the energy is flowing, showing us the way, the path of least resistance. Just as a crooked tree grows and adapts to the ecosystem of which it is a part… so can we.
We are all crooked trees.
On retreat yesterday, I read some poems from Nora Bateson’s beautiful book Combining… I’ve just done a little studying with her, through a course called New Ways of Knowing, an online, holistic, interactive, sensemaking course. She was talking about how her father Gregory Bateson (considered the inventor of modern complexity theory) had inspired some radical new ways of supporting people with paralysis in an specialist clinic in Italy.
She was invited to watch them work and observed that, to her surprise, they were not treating the paralysed part of the person’s body as the pathology. “So,” she inquired, “Where do you see the pathology?” The clinician replied, “The pathology is an organism’s inability to make sense of the world.”
What an incredible way to view what ails us! I have a feeling this approach will be a guiding light for me in the yoga therapy work that lies ahead. Nora and Gregory’s complex and holistic approach works in a yogic way. Working with the kosha in relation to each other each layer of our being (as they are interconnected) can inform the other layers. This happens when we explore different ways of sensing, feeling, touching, seeing, imagining, moving, breathing, relating, describing, allowing with a focus on the present moment. These sensory understandings, when combined, offer us routes to illuminating the path, to making sense, to finding a way through the muddle that works for the good of the whole.
Thanks so much to the yoga practitioners who came along to the Day Retreat yesterday. I so enjoyed being with you all, moving, resting, breathing, giggling, being vulnerable, anxious and sad, being radiant, relaxed and joyful, being ourselves, eating together and connecting. This is what Life is about!
I have listed all the dates for the One Day retreats in the timetable. They are running once a month throughout 2024, so now you can plan ahead. When would you like to drop in for a gentle yoga immersion? You are so very welcome…
And if your back feels like the trunk of a crooked tree, or you know someone who is suffering from back pain, then do let them know about the Yoga for Healthy Lower Backs course, starting in around one month’s time.
I’ll finish by sharing a poem from Nora Bateson. Symmathesy is a made up word, which means “transcontextual mutual learning through interaction.” Enjoy!
Symmathesy
Each one of us is a crooked tree,
Reaching for water and light,
Bending ourselves around obstacles,
Scary thoughts, hurtful moments,
darkness and thirst,
Finding a way to breathe in the sun and hold
the soil,
Our branches are kinked and twisted,
Because that is what it took to be here,
The ways of learning to be in our woods
Have shaped response,
Our many experiences are speaking through every
gesture.
Our loves, broken paths, a tenderness,
a criticism,
Learning always,
Yearning always,
In crooked beauty…
To be a home for those who may find comfort,
In the symmetry of our belonging,
A nest cradling new life,
Tucked into an old log teeming with creatures,
learning to be in each other’s reshaping.
With love and good wishes,
Julia xxx
Great metaphor!