There is so much yoga around these days – every gym, every sports studio, every village hall seems to offer a yoga class and classes differ so much that you can begin to wonder what yoga is? The title ‘Yoga’ doesn’t give any indication of what a class might be like or the style and experience of a particular teacher.
Here we are at the beginning of February and I have already let one of my new year resolutions lapse -which was to write a weekly blog. So much for good intentions! If you made a new year resolution have you managed to stick to it and, if you’ve already given up on it, are you beating yourself up about it?
According to a Bupa poll nearly half of Brits who made resolutions (43%) gave up on them in less than a month. Typical new year resolutions include losing weight, spending less money, staying fit and healthy and giving up smoking- to name just a few.
Lots of people including me start yoga because they are feeling anxious. There are, as we know, many physical benefits to practising yoga, but yoga can make a big difference to mood and to helping you cope with life.
I started yoga when I was doing a job I hated but had recently retrained for through the open university -teaching modern languages in a secondary school where the support and resources were limited, the result being I felt anxious and stressed much of the time. Continue reading
Do you ever find that you are taking yourself too seriously and getting things out of proportion? I was having a trying week last week and one day was particularly difficult, which made me think that someone was out to get me!
At this time of year with a reduction in sunlight you might be feeling a bit out of sorts. In autumn it can be very tempting to want to go into hibernation mode. However if you are feeling lethargic, low or generally out of balance the chakras present a fascinating way of viewing bodily energy. Continue reading
I don’t know about you, but with the clocks going back on Saturday night it made Sunday feel quite a long day and I seemed to fit in much more than usual -even though I didn’t get up particularly early or go to bed late. Time is strange because sometimes it feels as if it is creeping slowly and at other times it is whizzing by. When you’re a child, time seems to pass slowly-the wait for Christmas seems endless and a short car journey can take an eternity, ‘Are we there yet?’ being the constant refrain. As you get older time speeds up.
Has anyone else been feeling low in energy and a bit sluggish? We have had some pretty good autumn days recently, but now that the days are shorter and the weather is getting cooler and damper I have noticed a drop in my energy levels and my muscles have started to feel tighter. In the summer it is easy to take for granted how much difference the sunshine and warmth can make to our daily lives and how much better we tend to feel. Continue reading
This week I have been thinking about the ego. In many respects ego is very important to our lives as it is the part of us that looks after our daily survival, ensuring we eat and sleep enough and look after ourselves. There is nothing wrong with being self confident but the ego can get out of hand if it starts to create too much emotional drama in our lives. It can turn into an over-inflated sense of our own importance so it is all about ‘me’ and ‘my story’. Continue reading
The summer had been lovely but suddenly it is starting to get cooler and feel like autumn at last and the days are getting noticeably shorter.
With the onset of cooler weather I have been motivated to de-clutter the house, room by room and start to sort things out – recycling or throwing away anything that is no longer needed.
A couple of items were of interest to me this week. Firstly two of my yoga students drew my attention to an article in The Daily Telegraph entitled ‘Is your back pain all in the mind?’ which discusses chronic, lower back pain. It highlights the huge number of working days lost to low back pain -a condition which affects 1 in 10 people and increases with age.
Secondly I watched the first part of the television documentary, ‘The Doctor who gave up drugs’, which made fascinating viewing.
