The Flat Cap: The Costume of Spirituality in Modern Wellness In the north of England, the flat cap wasn’t originally fashion. It was practical. It kept rain off men working long days outdoors. Men grafting in factories, fields and shipyards. Men hunting because they needed food on the table, not because it was a leisurely…
What if your discipline is just your anxiety in a nicer outfit? One of the stranger things I’ve noticed in yoga is how often tidiness becomes a moral virtue. Teachers jokingly shame students who don’t put props away. Mats must line up perfectly. Blocks must be stacked just so. Somewhere along the way someone quotes,…
Vairagya (pronounced vai-RAHG-yah) is often translated as non-attachment but that can sound a bit cold or distant. In yoga it’s actually much more tender than that. Vairagya is the practice of letting go without hardening, of releasing your grip while keeping your heart open. It’s not about pushing feelings away or pretending you don’t care,…
The Farmer & The Field A simple yoga teaching from The Bhagavad Gītā. In the Bhagavad Gītā, the body is described as a field. The Sanskrit word is kṣetra (k-sheh-truh) , ‘the field’. Then equally as important, there is the one who knows the field, kṣetrajña (k-sheh-truh-gyah) , ‘the knower of the field’. To make…
Chidakāśa: The Kind of Space We All Need Yoga philosophy is full of beautiful concepts that sometimes feel like they belong more in a candle lit cave rather than everyday life. Chidakāśa is one of them. It translates roughly to “the space of consciousness,” but before you switch off stay with me because this idea…
When Everything Feels Like a Conflict Lately it can feel as though even the simplest interactions are heavier than they used to be. A quick email, a text, a conversation about something small can suddenly feel like a misunderstanding waiting to happen. It’s not just you. When the world feels uncertain economically, socially, emotionally, that…
WHY PAIN REMAINS AND RETURNS AND WHAT THAT REALLY MEANS When pain lingers or keeps coming back, it’s easy to think something must be wrong with the body, with your approach, or even with you. If you’re a movement professional, you might start to wonder if you’ve missed something, if you have failed or not…
We get into shaky territory in yoga and especially yin yoga when we start suggesting it can fix pain. Pain is personal, complex and multifactorial. It doesn’t neatly dissolve after a class or a stretch and even speaking anecdotally about an individuals persons experience of their pain improving through yoga can be irresponsibly misleading. It…
It can look slick to have your own branded class or signature method, but sometimes that shiny box becomes a cage. When you chain yourself to a fixed style, you lose the freedom to adapt, shift with evidence or simply meet people where they are — and yoga, at its heart, is about fluidity. Yes,…
Group Classes: The Meeting Point of Movement and Philosophy The online yoga space loves a dichotomy. Scroll long enough and you’ll notice the tension: on one end, group classes are dismissed as exclusionary or superficial, and on the other, there’s the idea that realyoga is found only in stillness, study or pure philosophy. I’ve seen…