Hello lovely humans

We’re a month in to 2021 and it’s been… an experience(!) already. Lockdown 3, if you’re in the United Kingdom, has really pushed at my buttons. Buttons I wasn’t entirely aware were still functioning. The pandemic has come closer to home than ever for me, this month, with many people I know and love suffering from the virus and some of them very seriously indeed. That’s been very humbling to me as I take on what has been, by comparison, a much lighter battle through having my 3 children at home full time as I do my best to still work, to provide them with all of the support they need and to somehow also still play my part in keeping our home functioning at an acceptable level. I don’t think any of us have had a matching pair of socks for about a year now. But we’re all well. And for that I am enormously grateful.

However humbled I am by the experience of others, homeschool has meant that my sense of humour has had to remain very much activated. I have been aghast at my lack of working knowledge in the realms primary school mathematics and, like many parents, perplexed and amused by the insanity of the jargon that’s infiltrated KS2 Literacy. Fronted adverbial confusion abounds. Turns out that English degree and 20 year career in publishing taught me nothing.

How incredible it was, after the first 3 weeks of post-Christmas homeschool, that I was able to take the time to attend a week-long training with Carolyn Cowan called ‘A Path Out Of Hell: Mastering The Addictive and Anxious Nature.’ This week can be undertaken both a personal experience but is also a certified teacher training that, on passing an exam, means you are able to teach yoga for anxiety and addiction recovery in prisons and rehab centres. This training is a truly life-changing experience. Carolyn walks you through, with great care, the ‘whys’ of both substance and process addiction, stepping away from (but with much respect toward) the 12 step model, the disease model, to consider addictive behaviours having routes in shame, abuse and trauma. It’s not a light topic, an intense 7 days, but the transformation that takes place in the room is quite something. Plus we get to do lots of very very lovely yoga.

I have actually done this training before but I felt, at that time, I was not in a place to truly begin to consider how it may fit in with how I move forward as a teacher. Ever since I made the decision to train my hope has been to become a specialist in how yoga may aid us in managing and moving through anxiety and other forms of suffering, and taking on this training for a second time has really lit a fire in me and inspired ways I may move forward.

I AM: SAFE

This coming Thursday (4th February) is the final day that bookings will remain open for my upcoming workshop that explores posture, breath, intention and affirmation through the lens of creating a sense of safety. The workshop takes place on Saturday 13th February, but I need time to post out the package of little gifts and tools that come with bookings.

I’m really looking forward to this 3 hour workshop, the first in a series I plan to run this year. Some really excellent people have signed up already and I feel it is going to be a lovely experience we will share as a group.

The Soul Of An Octopus

I am still very much on the non-fiction train, it is what I am finding works for me in terms of reading for soothing the system… I think it is just how my brain is wired. I do go through phases with non-fiction, and have the most wonderful experiences of getting lost in stories, but non-fiction has my heart. Or my brain. Both, I think!

I needed something light to read in the evenings this week, to fascinate gentleness as the masses of information I took on and processed during the training settled, and I read a really lovely book called The Soul of an Octopus: A Surprising Exploration Into the Wonder of Consciousness by Sy Montgomery.

It’s not the best book I have ever read, but it did its job – sent me to sleep and dreaming of cephalopods! It’s a little like a long love letter to Octopuses. And it is, as I had hoped it would be, a very gentle book. I already loved octopuses, and reading this book added new layers to that. I took on some new information on their hormones, on how they use these tentacles like conveyors belts to feed, how they show displeasure. They are such clever creatures and wonderful escape artists (can relate!) The book allows for the reader to begin to question notions of consciousness and inter-species communication. I consider myself to be something of a Dr Dolitle when it comes to non-human animals and so I enjoyed this aspect of reflecting on the book.

If you’d like to check it out you can find it on Amazon here (of course you don’t have to do Amazon, I know it’s contentious!) or ask and you can borrow my copy.

Free Classes Wednesday at 8am GMT

I continue to teach my free classes every Wednesday morning at 8a.m. I send the link out to everyone who is signed up to my email newsletter each Tuesday evening. If you aren’t already on that list you can sign up here:

I also teach this week at 7pm on Thursday and 10am on Friday. You can also come to those classes for free with the code FINDSTILLNESS when you book via this website. In these challenging times I do not want money to be an obstacle to anyone coming along to experience the magic of Kundalini Global.

If I see you on the mat this week or not, I hope you have a magical week and do get in touch and let me know how you are. I love to hear from you.

Sending love

Sara-Jayne