There was a cyclone where I live recently. It felt like natures representation of what is happening in the world right now – a churning on a mass scale.

In Indian mythology, there is a story where the asuras (demonic forces) and the devis and devas (divine forces) were churning the milky ocean, looking for the amrita (the nectar of immortality). As they began churning the ocean, wonderful things began to appear, but as they continued churning, a poison rose up to the surface.

I feel this churning and see this “poison” rising to the surface both in my personal life and in the world around me. I feel like I have uttered the phrase “wow, I never thought that would happen” more times in the last six months than I have in my whole life! Maybe you can relate?

I’m reading a book called Wintering by Katherine May, and it’s beautiful for so many reasons, including how it speaks to the experience of yoga nidra without talking about the practice at all. One of the stories it tells is about a woman who woke up feeling so sick and scared she called out “help me, I’m dying”. She reached for the door handle and everything went black as she fell into a coma. She remembers having this extraordinary dream, where she felt as though she was falling through darkness but somehow there was this singing that caught her, carried her and saved her (she realised that the source of the song was one of her ancestors).

The author said she thought the time this woman spent suspended in that dream state, being sung into safety, has echoed through the rest of her life, how it made her more conscious of achieving what she can while she’s here, and at the same time that it removed her fear of death.

It got me thinking about how our practice builds resilience.

Often we expect our life and the people in it to show up for us in the way that we want them to. When they don’t, we feel a certain way about it (maybe angry, sad, resentful etc) and this activates our sympathetic nervous system (fight or flight).

If we express our emotions in a way that is skilful, we move from a sympathetic nervous system response to a parasympathetic nervous system response (rest and digest).

The thing is, often we don’t fully express our emotions, we keep some bottled up inside of us. Those unexpressed emotions (or emotional tension) leave an imprint on our body – they create tightness in the body’s fascia.

Most of the time, the mind tells the body what to do. In yin yoga, the mind observes and deeply listens to the body, which is constantly sending you messages. As the mind learns the language of the body, this builds trust between the body and mind.

I am seeking the end of holding
I offer my gratitude and devotion to the earth, the moon and the stars
I embrace the wisdom of the darkness and the light
I pause and honour the beauty in transitions
I soften again and again and again
May the Great Mother hold me
May I be free

When you uncover and dissolve a limitation / obstacle, there comes a time where it feels like there is a new reality inside of you. Yoga would say that you haven’t really created something new, but rather you’ve dissolved something that was clouding your clear view of the reality that has always been there.

The laws of the universe say that what happens in the world inside you also happens in the world outside you (and vice versa). I’ve noticed that there is a period of time, a space in between when I uncover that ‘new’ inner reality and when it is reflected in my outer reality.

In practice, what has been concealed is revealed.

In softening, there’s an unravelling, a dissolution of that which is not truly you.

With dissolution, effortlessness naturally arises.

As you become more and more effortless, your inner world harmonises.

I gave someone some advice the other day. Afterwards, I reflected that it was advice that I also needed 😬😂.

This kind of thing happens all the time. If we pay attention, we might notice that our judgement of others reflects some kind of judgement we have about ourselves, it can also show us what is important to us. Our jealousy of others can show us what we really want.

You get the idea… it’s never really about them.

It is in moments of softening that we fall in love.

Your practice is a sacred love story.

Each time you soften, little by little, the love that is already within you is unearthed.

We can inhabit stillness in many different ways.

There is the kind of stillness that feels rigid and restrictive, even constrictive. And the kind that feels spacious and expansive, even infinite.

Yoga is a practice for transformation. In my experience, sometimes the catalyst for that transformation is discomfort and sometimes it is beauty.

The other day I had a visceral reaction to something that I read.

Yoga shows us that these moments say more about us than they do about the person or thing that our reaction arose in response to.

Some of the most difficult moments in my life have also created space for some of the most beautiful. Maybe not straight away, but on the other side of that discomfort, there has always been a sweetness. If I hadn’t experienced that discomfort, the knowing that emerged on the other side wouldn’t have been nearly as lovely.

For the longest time, the thing I wanted the most was to fall in love. I used to watch rom coms and cry because my heart ached so much for it. I felt that there was something lacking in me that could be filled with the love of another person - that being loved would make me feel complete. And each time I didn’t find love, or a love didn’t work out, or when I fell and that love wasn’t reciprocated, it reinforced my belief that there was something wrong with me, that I was unlovable.

Then I found this practice and little by little that feeling that I wasn’t enough started to fade. Through my practice I have found a love beyond my wildest imaginings. And it’s a love that didn’t come from anything outside of me.

Sometimes I find it difficult to tell the difference between what is my conditioning, what is me rebelling against my conditioning and what is truly me.

Yoga says that when we think, say or do things either under the influence of our conditioning, or as a rebellion against it, it’s our ego that’s calling the shots. When we say, think or do things because they are truly us, this comes from one place and one place only – our soul.

Yoga teaches you to choose you - not your ego ‘you’ (which is just part of your mind), but the ‘you’ that is beyond your mind. Yoga calls this purusha, pure consciousness, the part of you that is infinite, eternal and unchanging, that is luminous and all pervading, that is indestructible and unsurpassable tranquillity, calm and clarity – your soul.

The Bhagavad Gita teaches us to consider our worth as a student – are we willing to empty ourselves out so that we can be filled up?

If all we want is a teacher who validates everything we think we know, it’s never going to work - what can they teach us if we already know? It’s only when Arjuna gets to the point of ‘help me, I don’t know’ (I’m paraphrasing), that Krishna starts talking.

We need to empty ourselves out to the point of ‘I don’t know’ in order to be prepared to listen, ready to hear and open to receive.

I feel, deeply.

For the longest time, my conditioning and worldview made me believe that it wasn’t okay to feel too much. It made me believe that I was too much.

My conditioning and worldview valued achieving, so that’s what I strived for, and between all of the doing and busyness and accumulating, I masked the feeling.

Then I started meditating.

I have this desire to grow, to expand beyond my limitations.

One of the words yoga gives these limitations is vasana. A vasana is a colouring or a tendency - it starts as an impression you had of an experience, and either because it was a big experience that rocked your world or a smaller experience that happened repeatedly, this impression wore a groove so deep in your mind that it became a belief, it shaped your habits, your personality and your worldview.