Back from our Women's Nature & Yoga Retreat in Cornwall last week and 4 days later I still don't truly have words for the experience of our retreat last week. Settling back into domesticated life with so much love and a lot of growing pains. When women come together in the forest magic happens. When our skin comes in contact with wild forest air we soften and open. We sink into primordial memories of homecoming and begin to feel the masks slipping away, the layers of protecti

As a society we are afraid of wildness and the wildness from which we came is now regarded as an obstacle to be overcome and a problem to be solved. The flowers and grasses that grow wild and free, no matter how beautiful, are deemed ‘weeds’ to be tamed and trimmed because they do not fit with the socially acceptable, perfectionist vision of what a garden should be. To let your garden grow wild and free, the way nature intended is regarded as laziness and poor garden manageme

‘What we are doing to the forests of the world is but a reflection of what we are doing to ourselves and to one another.’ ~ Gandhi We can suppress our true nature, ignore our seasons and cycles, override the calls to rest and plough on with our busy, productive lives but we all know how this story ends and this is the story playing out on earth. Dominion over nature can only work as a strategy for so long before earth gets exhausted and angry and rebels. Just as dominion over

One day my Dad sat my siblings and I down and asked us to write out a list of all of the things we felt we couldn’t do. He then took our lists to the bottom of the garden with a spade, dug a whole in the ground and buried our ‘I can’ts’ in there. He proceeded to conduct a funeral service to the word I can’t and then banned us from using the words ever again. Trivial yes but incredibly important and symbolic for a young child and in fact adults alike. It’s so easy for us to ge

Isn’t it funny how life often sends us just the messages we need, exactly when we need them. This month life sent me one of the most important and life changing messages yet. Each month I try to set myself a sadhana project to help me to stay focused on my growth as a human and as a yoga teacher. A sadhana project is a project for spiritual growth, a kind of intention, often set at the start of a new moon cycle, to be incorporated into all areas of life for the duration of th