Can you do a headstand? Wrap your leg behind your ear? Survive a sweaty hour of dynamic yoga in 40 degrees of heat? Sorry, I’m not impressed. For me, the ulltimate yoga challenge is when you become a parent. If, through the blur of sleepless nights, depleted energy and sheer lack of time to even […]
In the middle of a busy day at work or looking after kids, “bliss” can seem a long way off. When I’m juggling the competing demands of several little people at once, trying to cook a meal, keep the house reasonably tidy and catch up with emails – all within the same hour or two, […]
With Christmas party time a distant memory and summer still a long way off, it can be a tough old time of year. Here are my suggestions for seven ways to beat the winter blues – originally published in Brixton Blog. Get outdoors If the dark and cold makes you want to hibernate, try to […]
Earlier this month I saw findings of a scientific study of 25 Australian veterans of the Vietnam War who had suffered decades of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) – the mental illness with symptoms such as anxiety, depression, insomnia, flashbacks and emotional numbness. Counselling and other treatments hadn’t helped these men and many were alcoholics. Fourteen […]
Last week I missed the Oms off the end of one of my yoga classes. I’m not sure why – I just didn’t feel like it. One of my students stopped me after class and asked why we hadn’t Om-ed; she’d missed it. This got me thinking about why do we Om in yoga? Om-ing […]
It took over three hours, but we did it: 108 sun salutations on a bright Sunday morning raising money for the Prison Phoenix Trust, which supports yoga and meditation in prisons. Thirteen of us – a mixture of yoga students and teachers – took part, dividing the 108 into nine sets of 12 rounds. Different […]
An article in the New York Times, How Yoga can Wreck Your Body, has been causing a stir. Science journalist William J. Broad tells horror stories of yoga teachers who have snapped their Achilles tendons by forcing heels to the floor in downward dog; brain injuries, nerve damage and even strokes caused by neck injuries […]
What to do about my wine habit? For decades it’s been my default reaction to stress. Nervous about meeting new people at a party? Have a little drink. Exhausted after a challenging day at work? Unwind to the sound of cork unscrewing. Upset and angry? Drown my sorrows. I’ve practised them all. It’s a well-established […]
Gil Scott-Heron was one of my heroes. As an English student in the mid-80s, songs like The Bottle and Pieces of a Man were the soundtrack to many good nights out; but they also told me that poetry and philosophy weren’t just things done by the dead white men on my degree syllabus. Twenty-five years […]
Today, yoga teacher Sunny Jacobs is a smiley, sweet-voiced 63-year-old woman , who walks with a slight limp (the result of a car accident) and lives quietly in Ireland with her partner, a brood of dogs, cats, chickens and goats and a prolific vegetable garden. It’s a long way from the Florida jail where she […]
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