Our bodies change as we age, of course, and the pelvic floor is no exception. Our inactive and sedentary life styles, hormonal fluctuations, loss of estrogen, and a widespread cultural disconnect from the pelvic floor - these are all additional challenges women face in maintaining or restoring a well-functioning pelvic floor into and beyond the menopause.

The menopause is more talked about these days. But many (most?) of us have not been taught about our pelvic floor. Women’s health is, typically, underfunded and under-researched. Yet there is growing evidence connecting yoga, pelvic health and emotional well-being. One recent randomized controlled pilot study found that pelvic floor contractions significantly reduced vaginal dryness in postmenopausal women: even in this small and limited way, it seems attending to the pelvic floor can offer support for some of the symptoms of menopause.

Research also suggest that pelvic floor training is most effective when woven into functional movement and whole-body coordination. This makes complete sense - the pelvic floor is a key participant in the orchestration of breathing, stability and movement. It helps us manage changes to abdominal pressure and it keeps us contained, both literally and energetically.

As we learn to engage with these muscles more sensitively - and, crucially, to relax them too - we improve blood flow and tissue resilience, we build our connection to the body, and learn to integrate the pelvis and pelvic floor into daily movement.

In Chinese Medicine, rather than the euphemistic (and non descriptive) term “The Change”, the female menopause is poetically called our Second Spring. It suggests a time of growth and positive change - a new, spring-like beginning.

Make this a time to reconnect with your body. Your pelvic floor is connected to so much that helps us live well: digestion, breathing, sexuality, energy, vitality, confidence, and grounding.

I’ll be running another course on the female pelvic floor this autumn - please do get in touch if you are interested or have questions. Here are the dates:
Dates: Saturdays: Sept 12; Oct 3; Nov 7
Time: 10am-12.30pm.
You can attend: in person, on-line, or via video recording afterwards.
Cost: £135 for the series. If you are not sure you can commit to all 3, come to the first one for £50 - and then decide.
Venue: Frankie's Yoga Studio, Stroud; or on-line.
Contact me to book a place, or for more information, or if you'd like to join but can't make the dates.

Just wanted to say thank you for the Pelvic Floor and Yoga workshops. I thought they were excellent with lots of useful information and practical exercises and approaches for looking after your pelvic floor. I came away thinking this was knowledge that every woman should have about the physiology of the pelvic floor and how it is integrated with breath and movement. There was a lot of attention to detail and care in the way you ran the classes: the exercises were interesting and well planned, you provided a safe and compassionate space for women to discuss particular issues and I appreciated the detailed summaries of each class you sent. I hope many more women benefit from your pelvic floor workshops.
R, Stroud

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I can recommend a little lie down in the daytime - to help both with night-time sleep and with bringing a more soothing tone to your nervous system during the day. Most especially if you feel hot and bothered. Lying quietly has a calming, cooling effect on the body and mind. This is fabulously useful on a hot day, when very little activity feels possible.

Shavasana and sleep
While it is a common experience to nod off and have a little nap at the end of a yoga class, or during the practice of yoga nidra - and I hold my hand up here too, I know how delicious it can be - rest and sleep are actually two physiologically distinct states. We need both. Rest helps us sleep better; sleep is essential for health.

Shavasana lies in the liminal space between sleep and normal waking consciousness.

Feeling restless or bored?
When we lie down, when we stop doing stuff, when we ask ourselves to rest and be still, we may experience an urgency around the tasks that still need to be done. The increasing volume on our to-do list may be hard to resist. We may cut our practice short, giving in to restlessness rather than rest.

We may feel the tedium of boredom. We may feel distracted by all of this.

But here’s the thing: these can be ways we resist slowing down and becoming still, ways we resist coming into the present moment, even if it’s a hot and uncomfortable moment.

The practice of Shavasana helps us rest, and in the process we learn about stillness and presence.

As Thich Nhat Hanh tells us, over and over again, this is the only moment we have, the only moment in which we can experience what’s here, now - the only moment in which we can be fully alive to the life we have.

And here’s something else too: a recent academic article, published in Frontiers in Public Health, explores the use of Shavasana as a profound practice, not just to rest and recuperate, or to become more familiar with being in the here and now - but to help reduce death anxiety.

In states of deep rest and stillness, we can learn to fully surrender the body. In this way, it becomes a powerful tool to explore, contemplate and experience the meaning of letting go, and of meeting the impermanence of life from a place of greater calm and compassion.

It’s a reminder that our yoga practice can support us in so many ways, not least how we inhabit our bodies, look after ourselves, and prepare for the final surrender.

Savasana: Corpse Pose
Marianne Murphy Zarzana

On the bonsai-green carpet, you stretch
your frame out flat up on a blue yoga mat,

and parallel, I lie down up on a purple one.
both of us becoming still, our bodies sinking

further into the floor with each slow, steady
breath. It’s night, and together we’re letting go.

Mollie, our old black lab mix, wanders in, licks
your open palm, sniffs my hair, snuffles, settles

by my head with labored breath. Soon, I know,
we’ll lose her. Someday, each other. This is

practice. We’re learning to dissolve, surrender
to earth, release thighs, hips, necks, skull, all

the bones, pay attention only to breath - let it
all become a ribbon, the texture of fine silk.

But, perhaps surprisingly, the benefits of asana practice go well beyond the physical and the individual. Yes, our structure - muscles, connective tissue, bones - does change over time: we can expect to become freer in movement, more functional, more likely to age well.

Our nervous systems change too. We learn to recognise and trust the information that comes from the body. We get better at perceiving this and responding to it. This is neurological change.

And, in the process, the architecture of the brain changes too.

Studies show that the more you practise, the more the brain changes: cortical thickness, and both the volume and density of grey matter all increase. These are changes that improve memory capacity and attentional control, and our ability to regulate emotions.

We feel quieter. The chaotic narratives that go with a noisy mind recede.

And - perhaps more surprisingly still - our sense of connection to others also improves. We don’t just benefit ourselves, we become nicer people along the way.

I can remember, years ago, a yoga teacher telling us that practising yoga helps make the world a better place - and while I sensed that this was true, I didn’t really know why.

Anecdotally, you might sense that this is true too - that on those days when you spend some time on your mat, you feel calmer and less reactive, kinder towards yourself and others.

A yoga practice quietens us and, from this quieter place, it leads us to more expansive states.

The research confirms this: hatha yoga practice creates greater mindfulness, and leads to increased compassion - both towards ourselves and others.

In learning to respect our bodies in new and different ways, we learn to respect life more generally.

Yoga really does help make the world a better place.

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The song of creation,
Sustaining, enlivening,
Is thrumming in your body.
Whispering secrets.
Listen in.

Vigyana Bhairava Tantra v.91

It can be hard to remember that life is a gift.

When illness strikes, or grief consumes us, when we are struggling with loneliness or fear, to feel the joy of being alive can feel like a distant land.

This week, I have attended a memorial for my sister-in-law, who died five years ago, and a funeral for the lovely mother of a dear friend; it is almost exactly a year ago since my dad’s wife suddenly died; and I am also remembering my brilliant friend Sarah, who would have been celebrating her birthday in style. She would have loved these hot sunny days.

They are timely reminders that life is short. Uncertain. Precious.

I came across this recently. Like the verse above, it also speaks of life as a song, a musical thing.

“We thought of life by analogy with a journey, a pilgrimage, which had a serious purpose at the end, and the thing was to get to that end, success or whatever it is, maybe heaven after you’re dead. But we missed the point the whole way along. It was a musical thing and you were supposed to sing or to dance while the music was being played.”
Alan Watts.

I find this musical analogy really helpful. In every culture there is some sort of a musical tradition, ways in which people come together to sing and to dance; all mothers sing to their babies; those with dementia can often remember favourite songs, even when daily words elude them. Music clearly plays a primary role in our development as individuals, and in our evolution as humans. Indeed, it is now thought that music is likely to have evolved before language.

It’s not such a leap, then to think that, while we are here, in this unique and unrepeatable human body, there is a kind of sacred music being played: a life song being sung. The invitation is for us to sing back.

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The western medical model tends to divide the human body into parts, to treat symptoms of illness rather than the person, and to separate the mind from the body. We have broken our anatomy down in order to understand it better - the intricate workings of muscles, the paths of blood vessels and nerves, the tasks of organs and hormones, even the brain itself.

While this has led to leaps of understanding and discovery, it also fragments us.

It leads to a tendency to focus on parts and bits.

It reinforces a view of ourselves as objects in a world of other objects.

Yogic descriptions of human anatomy are completely different. In these, we are deeply connected to the natural world. We contain metaphorical mountains and rivers, along with the sun and moon. We are made of the same elements as our world, and all the elements are alive in us: earth, water, fire, air and space. This is a vision of the human body as a microcosm of nature. In this view, we are not separate from the world. It is in us.

In this sacred landscape, we find rich, poetic metaphors from nature, which depict a mountain rising along the spine, connecting us to both earth below and heaven above; rivers and channels of energy, flowing through the entire body to maintain our life force, with subtle winds and currents controlling the movement and quality of this energy; along with images of lotus flowers blooming along the spine, and stories of a powerful snake unravelling upwards.

If we view yoga solely as a form of exercise, with postures to perform, and breathing ratios to master, we forget that it was never meant to just be a physical practice. If we strive to go further and deeper into the poses, looking for stronger cores and more flexible hips, we reduce our bodies to mechanistic parts. To focus on bits of ourselves can be compelling and interesting - and useful in cars - but we are living organisms, and we exist in relationship. We are fundamentally and profoundly enmeshed. Individuality is an illusion.

In relationships, in systems, nothing exists outside of connection and the relational. When we start to connect to the larger whole that we are part of - perhaps by imagining rivers flowing through the body, or a lotus flowering at the heart - we can attune to an enlarged sense of ourselves.

In a recent meditation class I was in, we were invited to try this short practice - you might like to try it too:
Take a minute or two to repeat the phrase: I am in the world…
See how you feel.
Then, leave that and repeat instead: The world is in me…
See how you feel.

If we can begin to see that the inner and outer are not separate, and never have been, if we recognise our interrelatedness, and our belonging, we are more likely to care for ourselves, for each other, and for this planet we call home.

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Getting down to - and rising up from - the floor is not one single movement. It’s many things that come together. It’s a brilliant example of how our nervous systems reflexively coordinate whole body movement, automatically engaging all the necessary musculature appropriately for us, so that we can perform sophisticated, complex tasks without having to think about it.

To get up and down requires all of these skills:
strength in the legs;
mobility in the joints of hips, knees, and ankles;
stability in the shoulders;
balance, coordination, timing;
the ability to shift weight and negotiate transitions.

We learnt to develop and trust these bodily skills as children. We gained confidence in our physicality by exploring movement and by using the sensory feedback this gave us. We trusted that feedback. Crucially, we were curious. And we repeated movement over and over again.

The ability to move confidently - not just to and from the floor, though this is one of the clearest markers of how well the body collaborates with itself - is something we can improve, refine, and sustain at any age.

But to do that, we have to keep moving!

Our sedentary, largely inactive lifestyles mitigate against these physical skills, especially as we age. So, for many of us, it’s a question of regaining confidence in our bodies - by rebuilding strength, mobility, balance, stability and coordination - and by relearning to notice the sensory feedback that connects us reliably to our bodies.

This is what we work with in our yoga sessions. This deep connection with the body that we live in, so that we can move around in the world as easily as possible. It’s practical and useful - and it brings us home to ourselves and the present moment.

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It only takes a reminder to breathe,
a moment to be still, and just like that,
something in me settles, softens, makes
space for imperfection. The harsh voice
of judgment drops to a whisper and I
remember again that life isn’t a relay
race; that we will all cross the finish
line; that waking up to life is what we
were born for. As many times as I
forget, catch myself charging forward
without even knowing where I’m going,
that many times I can make the choice
to stop, to breathe, and be, and walk
slowly into the mystery.

-Danna Faulds

We need to move. This is a given.

But we also need to rest, to find time to pause, to balance doing and non-doing, activity and stillness.

If we forget this, we tend to hold onto things. We carry them with us. We may not sleep well. Our worries and stresses - both large and small - accumulate. If we never find ways to put these down, we end up feeling frazzled and depleted.

In order to physically quieten ourselves, we need to quieten our muscles. Muscles relax when they are supported. Shavasana is perfect: the whole weight of the body is supported by the ground, the head can fully rest, and we start to let go.

But…

we can lie in shavasana and find the mind is not ready to put things down. We find ourselves thinking about the to-do list, the news, a problem that needs our attention.

Perhaps we then rush through shavasana - or miss it out entirely. Perhaps, instead, we collapse in a chair and read the news, or scroll…

But shavasana is a practice that offers us a quiet space like no other. To hold this space for ourselves, we must pay attention to the body, and not to our ruminatory thoughts.

So, to take time to organise ourselves comfortably into the pose is important. A body scan is helpful. Breath awareness is another tool we might use, or mental repetition of a mantra, if the mind is very scattered.

Most of the adrenaline circulating in our system will be reabsorbed by the liver quite quickly, within 3-5 minutes. The frayed feelings start to diminish. We feel a little calmer and quieter. A longer shavasana - of 20-30 minutes - can lead us into deeper states of calm and quiet.

This is not withdrawal, or escapism.

The body can only really heal when stress hormones are reduced; we can only feel resourced, awake, rooted and courageous in the face of the troubles of the world if we allow ourselves the space to rest. To give ourselves time to calm ourselves in this way becomes vital.

At its most profound, however, shavasana is more than rest.

Lying flat on the ground with the face upwards, in the manner of a dead body, is shavasana. It removes tiredness and enables the mind to relax.
Hatha Yoga Pradibika 1:32 - 15th Century CE

Shavasana is a practice: an active practice of stillness and surrender. The final pose. The word shava means corpse. In my early days of teaching, I explained this to a class and one of my students afterwards told me how shocked she was. Our culture avoids, ignores and fears death. But here is a gentle way to rehearse that final letting go. In completely surrendering the body to the earth below, we can rest in a kind of unknown space that, over time, can reveal something to us about the mystery of life and death.

In our restless world of overstimulation, we need this route into the deep, quiet heart of yoga more than ever.

As many times as I
forget, catch myself charging forward
without even knowing where I’m going,
that many times I can make the choice
to stop, to breathe, and be, and walk
slowly into the mystery.

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It’s not just me being a luddite - though I admit I do have luddite tendencies - but we are not doing too well with the impact of smart phones and the internet, and now there is this whole expanding, vast arena that none of us seems to have a handle on.

On a personal level, I worry it might make me redundant. On a societal level, I worry it might make many people redundant.

But even more than this, I am frightened of what is happening to our brains and to what makes us human.

It feels like we are outsourcing vital parts of ourselves - brain connectivity, critical thinking, imagination and creativity, deep knowledge - and, instead, dissolving more and more into screens.

And as we become increasingly dependent on machines to do stuff for us, we become more ensnared: captive to and captivated by the ease of being on autopilot, passive, seemingly powerless to resist.

It makes us easy to manipulate.

We already know that our attention is being monetised, that engagement and income are the drivers of algorithms. The goal is to keep us glued to our screens and scrolling - even if a lot of what we spend time looking at is actually pretty rubbish. Unsurprisingly perhaps, in this context, the word of the year chosen by Oxford University Press last year was “brain rot”. It describes two things - the demotivated, blank kind of “meh” state of mindlessness and apathy that comes from too much time spent scrolling, AND the content itself, which feeds our brains junk.

It’s a hellish combination: our attention is both being pushed in directions chosen for us and it’s being held there for as long as possible.

We are also, increasingly, only superficially present. There’s a term for this: “continuous partial attention”, coined to describe the constant pull of our attention between tasks.

There is a lot of satisfaction to be had in becoming absorbed in and completing a task. Think of reading an engrossing book, or becoming immersed in a piece of music, or being involved in a conversation you find fascinating. We are deeply engaged in such activities. All sorts of interesting things will be happening in our brains in response to the stimulation of imagination, creativity and curiosity, emotional depth, feeling and learning. When we are absorbed in something in this way, we feel alive, connected, and we can focus.

Continuous partial attention is the opposite: it keeps us open to distraction. We are at the ready to switch from one thing to the next, toggling between things in a kind of digital multi-tasking. Our bodies experience this as stressful, as a fight or flight state, in which many people forget to breathe properly. This upregulates the nervous system further. And there are other costs too, to our cognitive abilities and our mental health: we forget things more easily, we find it hard to make decisions, and we are even less attentive. We feel overwhelmed and disconnected.

But here is something that cannot be outsourced to AI: co-regulation. This is what happens between our nervous systems when we come together in a joint activity. When we practise yoga together, eat together, sing together, meditate together, our systems interact and attune. We feel part of a group, of something greater than ourselves. We feel ourselves to be both independent and interdependent. When, for example, we chant the mantra OM together, we can hear our own singular voice, and the collective voice of the group.

We feel connected to one another.

And this is vital, for we are meant to connect with each other. It brings satisfaction. It’s a strengthened state. Rather than the fragmentation and outsourcing of ourselves that is such a danger of modern life and our use of technology, we open ourselves to human interaction in all its unfiltered, uncurated unpredictability. We remember our humanity.

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The hardest times to come to a class, or get onto the yoga mat at home, can be when we most need it - when we feel frightened, cast down, angry or heartbroken. When words feel inadequate and the darkness of the world seems to be holding sway. When we feel overwhelmed and powerless.

But this is also when we need our yoga most, to meet us where we are, as we are, without pretence or performance.

I know I am not alone in feeling uncertainty and fear at the state of our world. We are living through chaotic and hugely disorientating times, and we may feel many different feelings in the face of this: grief, anxiety, anger, and overwhelm.

This is why yoga matters now, more than ever.

Yoga is not a magic wand. It cannot simply sort things out, mend what is broken, bring about world peace, resolve injustices, or give us simple answers to suffering. If we look to yoga for quick and easy fixes, we are likely to be disappointed.

But if yoga is not an easy escape route, it can be here with us for the long haul. It offers us ways to steady and resource ourselves, so we can stay present, so that we might face life as it presents itself to us, here, now.

It also teaches that this external life, the world of activity and ego, with all its noise and distress, its joys, its sufferings, is not all there is - that there is something more that we are part of, something greater that we belong to, a part of us that is deeper, larger, wiser and older than our ego and our outer life: a centre that can hold us.

The practices of yoga help us stay connected to this centre. They do this partly by bringing us into the present, living reality of being here in a body. And they remind us that this body needs our care. They help us find moments of rest, pause, reset, repair. They remind us that our nervous systems evolved to keep us safe, but not to deal with a never-ending state of crisis, danger, and chaos. They help us steady our breathing, which grounds us and calms mental agitation. All of this helps us connect with inner stability. From there, we can also be connected to each other, our world, and our deep humanity.

In Patañjali’s Yoga Sūtras, the first line is this: Atha yoga anuśāsanam. Now, the practice of yoga begins.

The main character, Arjuna, is on the battlefield. He is required to fight. And yet there is nothing he wants to do less. He wants to give up, to abandon his duties, to step away from the awful struggle of life.

This is how the Sutras begin: in a state of despair and grief. And it is right here that the practice of yoga begins. Not when things have calmed down, are sorted out, or when we feel ready. Right now.

This is the super power we have, as yogis. That we have a practice exactly for now. Exactly for when we are uncertain, grieving, frightened, or feel we don’t know what to do with ourselves.

Yoga is a soteriology, meaning a path and philosophy that provides a means to reduce suffering. It shows us both the route and destination: a map of the journey, through the ups and downs of our lives, to the self.

The practices, in guiding our attention and energy inward, help us regather ourselves from a place of steadiness - not so we can avert our gaze and avoid suffering, but so we can meet it with more skill and courage.

The body is a great place to begin. Simply to notice how we meet the ground below, where in our bodies we register feelings of pressure and weight. To return our attention to the body in this way is fundamentally steadying. To feel how the outbreath connects us a little more to those physical sensations of weight and presence is also so very helpful in anchoring us to the present.

We don’t practise yoga to have flat abs or to escape from difficulties. We practise so we remember we are part of the world, and so we stay engaged with it: awake and aware, and capable of doing what we can, from a place of compassion.

Our struggle is the path.

Atha. Now is the time to begin.

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My mum used to take an absolute age to do the washing up after dinner. She would put some music on, light a ciggy, leaving it to burn in the ashtray by the kitchen window, and tap her foot along to her chosen tunes as she ever so slowly worked her way through the bowl of dirty dishes.

As a teenager, I found this intensely irritating.

As an adult, I have come to see it in something of a different light - as perhaps a form of resistance to being hurried along by other people’s agendas and timetables.

She is long dead, and so I can’t ask her about it now. But, increasingly, I feel there is a lot to be said for taking your time, in small and larger ways.

Modern life has instilled in most of us a deeply-engrained habit of hurrying, of rushing forward, of striving to meet pressing deadlines, of getting ever more things done, and of moving swiftly on to the next thing.

Zen teacher, Thich Nhat Hanah, describes it as the habit energy that pushes us to keep running, in the belief that it is only in the future that we can find happiness.

Many of us are accustomed to juggling numerous tasks and responsibilities, to feeling under pressure, not having enough time to do everything we need to do but nevertheless trying to fit something else in. We feel we need to be productive to be of value.

And all this is reinforced by modern life, with its 24 hour news cycle, the relentless march of technology, and the increasing noise around us.

Living at this pitch and pace can feel feverish.

Unsurprisingly, it has consequences: we feel jangled, never quite on top of things; our nervous systems twang, the to-do list is never completed. Society’s rising levels of anxiety - free-floating or specific, mild or extreme - bear testament to how difficult it is for us to live at this speed.

In Thich Nhat Hanh’s community in Plum Village in France, one day a week is set aside as a day of not doing anything. It’s known as Lazy Day, and it is a shared practice, for the whole community. This is how Thich Nhat Hanh explained its rationale:

Lazy day is a day when you refrain from doing anything; you resist doing things, because you are used to doing things. It can be a bad habit…You cannot bear the thought of doing nothing… when you do not do anything, you suffer.

The lazy day is a kind of drastic measure against that kind of habit energy… On lazy days… you try to do nothing. It’s hard…but we have to learn. We have to open up..because we have the tendency to think in terms of doing, and not in terms of being. We think that when we are not doing anything, we are wasting our time. That is not true. Our time is first of all, is for us to be. To be what? To be alive, to be peace, to be joy, to be loving. And that is what the world needs the most – so, we train ourself in order to be.

For most of us, a lazy day a week is not realistic…but here is something we can all do: take time to exhale. This is because in situations where we feel we need to hurry up, our breathing will also hurry up. It becomes shallow, and the outbreath is often cut short: we start breathing in before we have finished breathing out. And this both reflects and reinforces the sense of not being able to take things at our own pace, or to complete one thing before we start the next.

So, try this simple practice:
Focus first on the outbreath - allow it to take its time. Simply that. Do not force or push it, but let it to continue to its natural end, so it can finish by itself. Slowly start to recognise the feeling of a relaxed breath out: unhurried, soft, easy, a sense of the completion of a breath cycle.
Breathing out is associated with a slight slowing of our heart rate and a down-regulation of the nervous system. It’s important not to struggle though, or force the breath in any way - as this has the opposite effect. If it feels difficult, try sighing, or yawning - both are things we do spontaneously and they naturally help us breathe out more fully.
This is a practice of taking your time, and of allowing the breath to take its time. There’s no need to breathe deeply. Focus instead on the feeling of unhurried breathing. Each breath is different, sometimes longer, sometimes shorter. Step back as best you can from control, and let it be.

As this starts to feel easier, bring awareness to the inbreath - and notice any impatience to breathe in..to grab at the breath or to start breathing in before you have finished breathing out…see if you can simply allow the inbreath to come when it is ready.

It sounds simple, but it is not necessarily easy. Do it for a bit, leave it, come back to it. Try it often - but at the same time, remind yourself there is no hurry, and nothing that needs to be done…keep watching the breath, as the cycle repeats itself: relaxed breath out, unhurried breath in…

You may find a pause between breathing out and breathing in - a very quiet place, where we can register a small space of not doing. With practice and patience we can learn to resist the need to race ahead, for the next breath, or towards whatever it is we feel we should be doing…

These little pauses signal to our system that slowing down is possible, that taking our time can happen in any moment - and that every breath gives us another chance.

“Smile, breathe, and go slowly.” – Thich Nhat Hanh

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Sthira and sukha are two concepts found in Patanjali’s writings on the theory and practice of yoga - the Yoga Sutras. They are Sanskrit term denoting opposing qualities: steadiness and ease. These are fundamental to the practice of yoga, and we spend a lot of time exploring their relationship and how we might find balance between effort and ease, strength and flexibility, support and relaxation, stability and openness, doing and non-doing.

In terms of the pelvic floor, we are looking for exactly this balance between steadiness and ease, between sthira and sukha. The network of muscles that make up the pelvic floor provide a structure of support to contain our abdominal and pelvic contents. These muscles literally contain us, keeping our organs in place, and allowing us to control the need to urinate and defecate. But, as with all muscles, we need them to be pliable and responsive too, to allow for opening as well as closing; release as well as containment; mobility as well as stability. It’s a fine balance between control and surrender.

In terms of our more subtle experience of ourselves, the pelvic floor is also deeply involved in the feelings of safety and groundedness associated with the root chakra, and with the fluidity and freedom associated with the pelvic chakra. Not surprisingly, we may find that one aspect of their function is better developed in us than the other: we may be good at holding on and not so good at letting go, or vice versa.

Although the pelvic floor is so central to our bodily functions and the way we experience ourselves, most of us have not actually been taught how to sense this part of our body. What’s more, many women delay asking for help when they become aware of problems, and suffer in silence.

I’m offering some more workshops this spring to help empower women to learn about this part of the body. They are suitable for all women. There is no need to wait until problems arise.

We will learn to feel the pelvic floor, relax it, and to integrate it into both breathing and movement. We will learn how to reduce load on the pelvic floor from above, how to strengthen it, and how we can fully embody this amazing part of our anatomy.

In the process we will, I hope, learn to better love the beauty of our bodies.

Just contact me if you’d like to find out more, or book yourself a place. I will also record the sessions, so you can catch up if the date/s don’t suit you. You can send me a message via the link below, email me, or give me a ring.

If you came to these workshops last year and would like to refresh or deepen your knowledge, you’d be most welcome. Don’t hesitate to get in touch.

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I love this theme. It is central to our practice, and is found other philosophies too, notably Zen Buddhism.

A Zen master asks his student,
“Without thinking good or evil, in this very moment, What is your original Face?
…. Show me your Original Face, the face you had before your parents were born.”
“Quickly, quickly, without thinking right and wrong…”

In our yoga practice:

we endeavour to improve the stuff we do: the practice of asana is an on-going refining of movement - which we can only do when we pay attention.

otherwise we can only act from our past and what we have done before, what we already know and can already do, what’s familiar. It means we run on autopilot, with the brain running in full predict mode.

And so…

we also practise noticing what we do without meaning to, realising, or needing to. In terms of our bodies, this will be recruiting muscles that are not required for the job at hand - maybe the jaw, the eyes, or maybe an over-engaging of the muscles we are using to move, which means we are putting in too much effort.

We ultimately want to be able to let go of these old stories: this is the not doing part
WHILE
getting more skilled at the doing part.

We often find it easier to do. We live in a world that emphasises our value based on output, effectiveness, productivity. We judge ourselves and others on the basis of this. We think of ourselves as an acting human, rather than a human being.

And so we this is the practice: the repeated enquiry, the on-going noticing, the modifying.

We practise paying kind relaxed attention to all of this.

Our bodies are our testing ground, our laboratory.

We can then bring these same enquiries into our behaviour - the habits we have formed of thinking and feeling, the inner voices we recruit, and even our familiar ways of paying attention.

We pay kind relaxed attention.

We try out different things, noticing where we get caught, the old triggers - what we are doing, what is useful to do, what we are able to let go of, and no longer do.

What is your original face - is a puzzling but beautiful riddle. What are we, really, in this moment. Can we drop the old doing: our expectations, habits, stories, anticipations. Can we step back past those and into the freedom of the present. And then respond from there.

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When you have been distant from yourself for some time, coming back into your body is alarming.

It brought to mind something that Buddhist teacher, Tara Brach, emphasises a lot in her teaching: the attitude with which we return - from distance, distraction, agitation, or whatever has taken us away - informs the next moments: judgment hardens us, like a no; whereas kindness, care, and appreciation are like a yes.

Later in the book, the novel’s character finds her way back to her body:
“Sometimes at night I dance in the kitchen. It is a new kind..the best kind when I lose myself and stop thinking. It is my body welcoming me back. I have missed you, she tells me…”

The immersive experience of movement, and the absence of thought. These bring her back. And her body is happy to have her home.

In our yoga practice, a simple hand mudra - Prayer position - also known as Pranam Mudra - where we bring the hands together at the heart - can be used as a means of quiet, gentle welcoming back to our ourselves. Touch grounds us back into our bodies, reconnecting us with ourselves. The palpable sense of contact between the hands and the body is steadying and centring.

In India and other parts of Asia, this gesture is a form of greeting, or of thanks, often accompanied by the word “Namaste” - meaning I greet the divine in you. What a lovely thing to say to a fellow human being!

It’s also an expression of reverence, prayer, or offering.

But there is deeper symbolism here, too.

In yoga philosophy, the hands are ‘organs of action’. We use them to reach, to give and to take, to hold, grasp, manipulate and create. They are our main means of engagement with the world - and they occupy a lot of brain space.

When we bring our hands together in prayer position, joining them palm to palm and finger to finger, we reverse their usual direction: instead of reaching outward to act in some way, energy is drawn inward. We bring peripheral parts of the body to the centre. We join the two sides of the body. We connect with the heart.

When we use this gesture to start or end a yoga or meditation practice, it can also become a way of marking a boundary: the threshold of our practice. And, as with all things, if we practise it with awareness, it’s no longer just a shape we make with the hands. It can support a quietening and steadying of attention, and become an offering of our practice to something greater.

It can be particularly powerful if we accompany our prayer hands with a bowing of the head, in acknowledgement of the heart as a space of intelligence and sensitivity. As we developed in the womb, our hands and arms began as tiny buds, close to the heart; the foetal spine, skull and face all orient towards the heart. To centre our attention here is a gentle but profound way to bring us home to ourselves - and to remembering what really matters in life.

It’s a simple gesture, but it says so much.

Namaste. I greet the divine in you.

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Many of us feel wobbly and unsettled at all the uncertainty we face, for the ground is shifting on so many fronts. We face huge economic and political instability; we are living with the reality of a changing climate, and the anxiety that provokes; we face social division and the rise of the far right; and we are confronted with the rapid and profound disruption from the rise of AI.

It can all feel pretty frightening and out of control.

When the outer world feels so very unstable and uncertain, how can yoga and meditation help us find something reliable, something resembling solid ground? What difference can having a practice make?

I think it makes a difference on a personal level - which is the main arena of our control - and this, in turn, influences those around us in a positive way.

Here’s how:

A regular practice helps us build a steady inner foundation, one we can use as an anchor to help stabilise ourselves when the outer world feels so unpredictable. It does this on a few fronts:

• Firstly, through the body and the physical practices. Our physiology shifts when we ground ourselves through awareness of our physicality. Our muscles are one of the very few things in life that we can learn to control with more skill and agency. Mindful movement, and connecting to our felt sense of the body are powerful ways to signal safety to our nervous system.

• Next, through the breath. Simply bringing awareness to our uncontrolled, natural breathing can act as a kind of reset button. But we can also change the breath to have a calming effect: lengthening the outbreath relative to the inbreath is another way to actively soothe the nervous system, and bring us back into “rest and digest” mode.

• More tricky, for many of us, is the mind. States of anxiety are driven by our perception of danger, and our attempts to prepare to face it. There are many meditation practices that can help, but for those of us who worry a lot, and over-think, there is one in particular: Antar Mouna - Inner Silence - a mindfulness practice from the yoga tradition. In this meditation, we practise witnessing: seeing our worries and anxieties without actively thinking about them. We learn to let thoughts come and go. We start to develop a more spacious perspective. The challenges we face do not go away, but as we free up energy from thinking, we can become more creative and adaptable, and we are less likely to confuse our thoughts with external reality. All this helps us feel more stable and clear.

• And lastly, there’s the philosophical underpinning to yoga, sometimes referred to as the wisdom teachings. These teachings remind us that beneath all the chaos and uncertainty, confusion and fear, there’s a place in us that remains untouched: silent, calm, steady, unchanging, uncomplicated. It’s sometimes symbolised as a bright, clear light, dwelling in the heart space. It is absolutely unwavering in its steadiness, and completely unaffected by the winds and storms of life.
  As we learn, through practice, to identify more with this part of ourselves, and to trust it, we can - perhaps just briefly and intermittently at first - sense that we are fundamentally ok, in a way that does not depend on the ups and downs of our individual lives, or on the upheavals we collectively face.

While we cannot control life’s uncertainty, we can acknowledge the effect it has on us. We can meet ourselves and others with compassion. And we we can cultivate genuine inner steadiness through practice.

And all of this ripples outward, in ways both seen and unseen…

Weekly classes restart Monday 5 January.
First monthly meditation of the year Friday 9 January.

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It is said that before entering the sea
a river trembles with fear.

She looks back at the path she has travelled,
from the peaks of the mountains,
the long winding road crossing forests and villages.

And in front of her,
she sees an ocean so vast,
that to enter
there seems nothing more than to disappear forever.

But there is no other way.
The river cannot go back.

Nobody can go back.
To go back is impossible in existence.

The river needs to take the risk
of entering the ocean
because only then will fear disappear,
because that’s where the river will know
it’s not about disappearing into the ocean,
but of becoming the ocean.
Kahlil Gibran

In the yoga-tantra tradition, pure Consciousness - which we might also call Awareness, Presence, Knowing - and which is known metaphorically as Shiva, is seen as the ground and origin of everything.

This fundamental Consciousness is in a metaphorical, eternal dance with Energy, known as Shakti. Shakti is the primal energy that makes creation possible. Through her, the formless can take form.

Together, this all-pervasive, creative pair - Consciousness and Energy - are responsible for all of the manifest universe.

According to this understanding, we are all a mixture of consciousness and energy, and we have all come from this infinitely vast, dynamic consciousness. Just as a wave is an inseparable part of the ocean, we are each an inseparable expression of this greater consciousness.

Consciousness in this context is understood to be a single, unified whole.

It’s a profound teaching: consciousness is innate to all beings, not apart from the world, not separate. It means we are fundamentally a part of this, and that our true nature is one of expanded awareness.

And yet… our day-to-day experience of ourselves often mitigates against this. We feel ourselves to be separate entities, distinct and limited. Many people feel not just separate, but lonely. It’s a source of suffering, of isolation and of mental distress.

One way to understand this is to see that our thinking mind is at the root of this sense of separation: the very process of thinking contracts us into particularity. It excludes what is different. It limits us to defined points of experience, or to designated objects in time and space.

Wisdom traditions teach that this sense of limitation and separation is illusory, and we feel it because we fail to recognise who we really are.

Neuroscience research explains that this may be due to filters within the brain that work to exclude the sense of a vast, expanded self. Filtering happens at all levels of the brain, and is complex, so I won’t get too bogged down in the detail here, but one simple example is sensory filtering: we know, for example, that dogs have a far more sensitive sense of smell than we do, that birds of prey have a visual acuity way beyond ours, and that lots of animals can hear better than us. All our senses are limited. They are fantastically useful, but it’s clear they don’t give us the whole picture.

We also have narrative filters: the stories we tell about ourselves and others in daily life. This is part of the way we create a sense of self, and of how we fit into the world - which is vitally important. But the more involved we are in our stories, the less we can really see of the world. And, when overactive, this type of filtering can create unhelpful states of rumination, and excessive preoccupation with or worry about the self. We experience ourselves as painfully isolated.

Another we way we filter is by actively suppressing information. It’s useful at times - it means we can narrow our focus, and attend to something specific (such as a friend talking to us in a noisy cafe) without getting overwhelmed or distracted by everything else that’s going on. But it also means that current thoughts can become more powerful than input from the world around. We have probably all had the experience of going for a walk and realising that we have not actually noticed our surroundings at all - we have been completely lost in thought.

Filtering, then, has a profound influence on our perceptions, our experience of ourselves, and our ability to feel connected to something greater.

The practical methods of yoga and meditation are a brilliant antidote to this.

Practising asana and pranayama doesn’t just benefit our bodily systems, it actively expands our conscious awareness. One way this happens is through our improved interoception. As we get better at feeling the internal sensations of our bones, muscles, organs and all of our body’s internal signals, we learn to trust interiority and intuition more. This responsiveness and connectivity are symptomatic of a more embodied and integrated brain.

Our brains are constantly being shaped by our experiences and thoughts, and when we regularly turn our awareness inwards, its structure changes. Not surprisingly, the more we practise, the more these changes become embedded. Over time, there is permanent transformation as our brains become stronger: memory capacity and attentional control are greater in those who practise hatha yoga than in those who do other forms of exercise.

Meditation takes these brain changes further, for one of the explicit aims of a meditation practice is to expand our individual awareness. Even after a single meditation session, we see short-term brain changes. In long-term meditators, these changes become permanent. The architecture of the brain is remodelled: rather than thinning with age, it thickens and grey matter increases. How good is that?!

Establishing a meditation practice means, then, that we can empower ourselves to make fundamental shifts in our conscious awareness.

Over time, and with practice, we learn to quieten the mind, and to close the gap between a diminished sense of self and the more expansive awareness of interconnection and interbeing.

Stilling the mind’s narrative networks means we are more open to the subtler perceptions that are normally filtered out. This changes the way we view the world in profound ways. We get better at regulating emotion, we feel more compassion towards others (and ourselves), and the attentional areas of the brain become stronger and more flexible. Our sense of being separate and limited decreases as our egoic boundaries become less rigidly defined. We know ourselves to be part of something greater, an indivisible part of the great ocean.

Why does all this matter you might ask…beyond the benefits to each of us in our lives?

I think it matters deeply, because all of this means we can actively promote a movement away from polarisation to unity, away from disconnect to connection, a movement towards cooperation and compassion.

It means we can play our part in making the world a better place.

If you’d like to practise with others, or learn more about yoga or meditation, just get in touch.

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
There is a field. I’ll meet you there.
Rumi

If you’d like to join a meditation class, just send me a message, or find more info on my website here.

yogafrankie

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At a class I attended recently, the teacher did just this. We were standing quietly, and she asked a simple question: are you standing still, or are you waiting?

In the context of a yoga class, it’s an old riff, to check in with ourselves to see if we are in a state of anticipation, thinking ahead, planning, predicting. The brain is, after all, always anticipating what will happen next, using what we’ve learnt before in order to keep us safe. And so, if we are not mindful, we are easily taken somewhere else, somewhere other than here, now, in the experience of this moment. We know this to be true.

But there was something about the way she asked, and those simple words: are you standing still, or are you waiting?

Was I? Was I simply standing quietly, feeling the experience of my own stillness, truly present and in the room…Or was I waiting? Was even a small part of me waiting - consciously or unconsciously, for something to happen, for the next thing to come along, somewhere else? It was the immediate juxtaposition of those two different words, two ways of being, phrased so simply - waiting, or still?

It was such a great question.

And when I allowed myself really to be in a space of not waiting, not subtly preparing to move or to be somehow readying myself for the next thing, I found it to be a profoundly quiet moment.

A moment is only a moment, of course, and we did move on to something else. Life doesn’t stop its flow. Our brains have evolved to be anticipatory, our minds chatter, our hearts are always beating, our breath continues to move in and out. But a moment of stillness is nevertheless different from a moment of waiting. And in that moment I felt it deeply.

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vanaspatayaḥ śāntir
viśvedevāḥ śāntir
brahma śāntiḥ
sarvaṃ śāntiḥ
śāntir eva śāntiḥ
sā mā śāntir edhi ॥

oṃ śāntiḥ śāntiḥ śāntiḥ ॥

Peace Invocation
Om.

The sky: Peace.
The air: Peace.
The earth: Peace.
The water: Peace.
The little plants: Peace.

The great forest trees: Peace.
All the gods: Peace.
The cosmic soul: Peace.
Everywhere: Peace.
Peace, truly, peace.
That peace – be here for me!

Om. Peace, peace, peace.

Translator: Alexander Koslowski

Translator's note: This peace invocation is from the 36th chapter of the Yayurveda (36:17). It is grammatically unusually simple: until the final few words, there are no verbs or adjectives, and all words are nouns in the nominative, which makes the reading soothing and hypnotic. The Yayurveda was mainly formed 1,200-1,000 BC.

But rituals matter.

Halloween has its origins in the much older Celtic festival, Samhain, seen as the start of winter. It heralds the final death of summer and reminds us to ready ourselves for the journey into the darkest phase of the year: the dark will continue to expand now, and the days to shorten, until the return of the light at the Winter Solstice in December.

The Celts believed that the veil between our world and the spirit world dissolves during this time, and that we could access the hidden parts of our own unconscious. In this blurring of worlds, we can communicate with those who have died, so that we can honour and acknowledge our ancestors, and celebrate the most powerful and important rite of passage - death.

It is a ritual in which we are called to embrace the encroaching cold and darkness, to enjoy the space it creates, to integrate all that has happened, and is happening.

In a death-denying culture, we prefer to forget that death is a part of life, and instead to dress up as vampires and zombies, and eat lots of sweets.

But the message is that have not come from nowhere. We have ancestors. We have roots. We are full of those ancestors. We are part of a lineage or stream.

As Thich Nhat Hanh says: there is no separate self.

”Even when you think you are sitting alone, your ancestors are sitting with you…Acknowledge them, and invite them to breathe with you…You can invite all your ancestors to enjoy breathing with you. You are not an isolated being. You are made of your ancestors.When you breathe out calmly all your ancestors in you breathe out calmly. When they were alive they might not have had the opportunity to sit mindfully and breathe peacefully. But now, in you, they have that chance. There is no separate self. We are a current. We are a stream. We are a continuation.”

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As the world speeds up, as technology constantly pulls our attention hither and thither, teaching us to swipe and scroll and to expect everything instantly before we even knew we wanted it, before we then move swiftly on to the next thing, there's something radical - even rebellious - about resisting that…

Learning - or remembering - to slow down, to give yourself time and space to go deeply into your own experience can become a way not only to look after yourself, but to remember your humanity.

The practices of yoga and meditation help bring us into the present, into presence. They help us resources ourselves, recharge our batteries, and to remember what it is that really matters.

And they also help us get to know ourselves.

The ancient Greeks were interested in science and democracy, but they were also interested in philosophy and how to live a good life, as the simple but profound advice “know thyself” illustrates. Yoga philosophy, too, stresses the importance of self-awareness beyond the ego and our material identity.

Art, music and poetry can connect us to a deeper part of ourselves as well. As Rumi said: There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.

If modern technology - not least our smart phones - did not actively train us in trivia, in distraction and absence, in the scattering of our attention and in impatience, we might find it easier to stay present.

And so we all need reminding, over and over, to come back to this moment, to soften with this breath, to attend to the experience that is arising in the here and now. It’s not a quick fix, but a practice that asks us to repeatedly return to ourselves. It doesn’t have to be flashy or look good. It just needs to remind us that the body and breath can be a portal to something greater in us.

One of yoga’s greatest lessons is that this is a practice - the act of paying attention - and it therefore takes practice; one of its great gifts is that there is something for everyone to practise. So, it isn’t that we have to learn and master every asana, pranayama or meditation technique - but to find what suits us, and practise it for as long as it does.

“Submit to a daily practice. Your loyalty to that is a ring at the door. Keep knocking, and the joy inside will eventually open a window and look out to see who’s there.” Rumi

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They say every ending is a new beginning - but we may need to spend time in the departure lounge first…my beautiful big girl is starting university and I can’t quite believe she’s going..going..gone.

Right from the first moments a baby learns how to roll over, it can explore moving away from us as well as towards us. Of course this is what is meant to happen. We grow in skill, confidence, resourcefulness and courage. Until, eventually, we are ready to forge a path of our own making, away from our parents.

She’s delighted here, in her mastery of the potty!

And here she is, this summer on our hols. I am super proud of her. And, at the same time, I feel really very sad. I will miss her a lot.

It’s another lesson in letting go. I can’t remember who it was who said that being a mother is mainly about learning to let go.

But all of us, parents or not, are confronted with many losses in life, both small and large. Being alive is, in some ways, a repeated cycling through arrivals and departures.

I love these words of Jack Kornfield’s, which sum it up so well:

In the end, just three things matter:
How well we have lived
How well we have loved
How well we have learned to let go.

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