Classes Face to Face

(With home practice support)

New Term Registrations

Moving towards

Where your attention goes, so does your energy

Thursdays 6.30 p.m. Foundation

and 8 p.m. Continuers

All Saints Junior School Brownlow Rd RG1 6NP

Thursday January 8th -February 12th 2026

(6 weeks £66)

My attention has been on mince pies, mulled wine and creating solstice celebrations for friends and Christmas for family.  My energy has gone there rather than practice and listening to my body and needs.  How do I feel? Both happy; content and like my body has been on the most bizarre retreat from normal. Aching, bloated and restless!

I waved my eldest goodbye this morning, deployment for 3 months, and got on my mat with the biggest pot of peppermint tea.  Time to listen to my needs and to direct my energy there. Yoga is not a path of renunciation, it is not a withdrawal from the everyday, from our commitment to family and community. Absolutely it is movement, exercise, and that is enough, but practice consistently and for long enough and you begin to experience that it is so much more. It is not a move towards perfectionism but a contentment within the here and now whilst offering support for every aspects of our wellbeing.  As well as change.

However this morning finds you, this new year, I extend to you a call towards compassion to yourself and others. Draw up a chair to your heart and listen in.  For many of us we don’t need to know more, to be sold more, to be told more.  Perhaps what we need is to listen in to what you need with honesty, and why you are unable to do what your instincts tell you would help? It has nothing to do with discipline and everything to do with feeling safe and held in a process of change.

The practice of yoga offers you support, space and practices to listen in, recognise what once worked might now no longer support your wellness.  Less discipline, less force, more safety and care. We can’t demand change, we can’t shout at our biology for difference. We can however find practices, repeated, that create the right conditions for something new to evolve. Practices that create a deep feeling of safety in our biology, safe enough to allow change.

This term in our practices we will be using movement, breath work and meditation to move towards safety and through this arising stability and calm towards change.  Change that is bespoke to you. If you’ve never done Yoga before, please don’t worry I will look after you. Each of us on registering will be offered optional guided journaling prompts that will inform the practices, both in what is sabotaging our safety and directing our energy to what might support it. From this foundation where would we like our energy to fuel change? For example perhaps you are feel too exhausted to move, to use movement and your own body weight to increase muscle density and strength? Where does the exhaustion come from? Create honest and even difficult conversations and reflections.  Offering ourselves a different experience which creates the right conditions to recharge, and from this a natural and aligned shift towards practices that build strength.

For me personally 2025 was a hard year.  I know all the ‘things’, I do all the ‘things’ and yet all the doing, all this energy and the things I want to be different have been moving at glacial pace. I am so grateful that through my practice I can see a shift coming, a deepening of recognising what my biology requires.  One aspect of this is that 2025 moved me into post menopause and a desire for creativity and yet I had no energy for it. Entrenched in patterns of - only time for myself after all the jobs were done - only safe to be creative once everything was sorted - inevitably left me spent and less then enthusiastic.  I am beginning to learn that safety (creativity) doesn’t require completion else where that I can do it first and then the other.  Doh! Simple but the reasons for this anything but. If you’ve been feeling stuck and feeling either a flash of unsustainable action or dread of a year from now not experiencing the change you want, I hope you will join me journeying together.

Marie xx

Recent themes

Making space for Joy

Wintering through the chakras

Enhancing our energy part two the Sun

Enhancing our energy part one, the moon

SThis time of year really is my favourite time to work with people establishing their yoga practice! Everything begins to shift around us, growth is seen, the day lengthens and sunlight begins to warm us again. This energy provides a slip stream for us to practice yoga. This term we will be looking at stabilising, rising and balancing our energy as we move in to the spring. We will be using the chakra energetic model. There are seven chakras areas following the direction of the spine that can create a focus for movement to release and strengthen. To unlock stagnant energy and to create mental and emotional focus. Each week focusing on a different chakra, starting from the base of the body, working our way upwards through the weeks to create change. Through movement, pausing, breathwork, imagery and mindfulness we will go on an energetic journey of sensory discovery which will create balance and holistic integration.

In foundation there will be ample explanation and demonstration for complete beginners as well as interest for those growing their practice, in continuers more challenge and depth with be available.

Functional movement and breath

Our postural and movement patterns are the result of a lifetime‘s worth of habit, interest, injury and how we take up space in this world. This creates the landscape of our body like a map that we can zoom in and explore. We can experience gravity and alignment seeing its relationship and connection to other areas and the body as a whole. The body as a living breathing map that the breath itself creates both the bridge and the lens for this exploration.

For example thinking about our feet. How gravity and the weight of the body falls through the feet. How we become aware of that in stillness and in movement, how we shift and then that ripples to the body affecting the position of the pelvis and the shoulders which intern affects the position of the spine. By exploring and bringing a lens of awareness through movement, meditation and breath work onto the feet we can begin to explore these connections through the body and find healthy ways of standing on our feet and moving from our feet to unravel and bring the body back into harmony.

In foundation class the practice will be accessible for all offering supportive demonstrations and modifications so that you can enjoy the practice at every level. In continuers class there will be an assumption of connection to the breath and the body to allow us to explore deeper.

I look forward to exploring with you!

Good Space

I need space. We all do. Especially now. Let me support you to move and breath into a better space through a yoga practice.

Our relationship with yoga is underpinned by some key vocabulary and philosophy which can be really fruitful to explore on the mat to create change and well being.

This term we will be exploring sukha and dukkha in relationship to the context and feeling of space. Sukha: good space and Dukkha: restricted space. Bringing into awareness and then challenging space that is unpleasant within the body, breathing and mind. From there being guided and supported to create an alchemy of good space through yoga practice.

What is your experience of space and how can we in our yoga practice move towards cultivating good space and reducing restricted space? When there is tightness and reduced range of movement in the body; pain and restriction, influence how our body is held in space and how it’s internal space is experienced. This holds a key to how we move through the world. Holding tension, muscular and joint pain, influences our nervous and endocrine systems and in turn our immune function. Our bodies posture, through habit and lifestyle, adds to this internal experience but also communicates something valuable about how we occupy space to those around us and in turn influences how they interact with us.

How space is experienced in our breathing and the restoration of it, in both the rhythms and stillness around breathing, has a profound effect both on our body and on our thoughts.

We will work to explore specific parts of the body and create awareness and connection there. Discovering where the restrictions are to our space, and shift it so it supports good space both there and for the rest of the body. Challenging habits and patterns creates a deep feeling of openness and ease in the body. Whether that be unlocking our shoulders or freeing space between our toes. Using breath work will will ease the boundaries around our breath and restore functional breathing and through this explore the different parts of the cycle of a breath to sustain good energetic space. Through this practice and focus, though mindfulness, we will create an opening of space and reflection around our thoughts so that clarity and compassion become more readily available. As we move and breath into the right space for us.

In foundation this experience will be supported by learning in a clear and accessible way the core skills of a yoga practice, with simple explanation and demonstration. Whilst in continuers there will be room to develop and take the practice deeper.

Past themes

Spring

The Sap is rising and the seasonal shift calls us to open the windows, let the air in on our practice and begin the work of renewal and change. Both growth in the physical goals for our bodies but also in how we support our energy through breath work. These conversations and practices around growth and change on our mat, in turn are guided by meditations to support attitude and vocabulary. This is key.

We will explore adventuring in our variations of asana as well as trying new postures. Breath work that reduces apana to open up and create a vacuum for more prana to come into our bodies. Bhandas (energetic locks) that support an intensifying of this energy work. Exploring this interplay between prana ( life force), Agni ( fire and change) and apana (detoxification). As always this work is best supported by our knowledge, understanding and respect for aryuveda. We come as a group of individuals to our practice and the more we understand what our constitution or dosha type needs, in this seasonal shift, the more we can reflect on our yoga practice, diet and dinacharyas ( self care practices) that can support us to leap, with energy, into this new season and year. All the more relevant for us now. Just as nature shakes of winter to harness energy we can work towards rebalancing and clearing our bodies from what we have experienced. In foundation this will be explored with teachings to understand the fundamentals of this seasonal shift in our practise whilst in continuers there will be more appropriate physical and mental challenge from this foundation already being in place.

Wintering

This term our practices will honour the strength of slowness and rest, deeply exploring the shedding of tension using the breath in held asana. In held postures we will focus on strengthening the core with bhandas to sustain this stillness and in turn allow risks in our movement to come with the spring. There will be an emphasis on energy work, translating wintering into the breath both in asana (postures)and pranayama (breathing) practices. The discipline of a slow cook in our practice to nourish deeply. Recognising that our own particular constitution and dosha types support or create risks in wintering and becoming sensitive to that. I will guide meditations for daybreak and dusk, practices to move by candlelight, recipes to nourish and abhyanga to preserve our bodies. Let’s winter together as a community.

Pause the body, slow it down and hollow out a space with the breath, a space for knowing and a spring for adventure to bubble forth. Wintering is hearing, listening rather than talking. Simplifying into here, now.

Stripping back our breath work without distraction, learning both to sensitise, recognise and stabilise our breath.

Whether you are a beginner, establishing a practice or working to deepen your longstanding yoga practice, teaching will create what you need to take us from here now, in winter, to spring. Learning both the core skills of a yoga practice whilst keeping it alive and relevant

Touchstones

This term we will be using the different aspects of a yoga practice as Touchstones. A Touchstone is an element of how our body, breath or mind works that holds the key to finding stability. Change is a challenge and an opportunity. When we navigate it from being firmly anchored in stability we can find well-being.

Soma. Our body. We will explore coming home to the 'ground beneath our feet', 'the courage of our heart' and 'space within even when we are without.'

Prana. Our lifeforce, energy. The breath. We will explore coming home to the 'stability offered on the exhale', home to the 'stillness in the breath that supports strength'.

Citta. The mind. Coming home to moving from 'fear to Here:Now' and the 'Gratutude of the heart'

putting together the jigsaw of good posture.

Pelvis

Heads Shoulders Knees and Toes