Hello lovely humans
It’s exceedingly grey and miserable here in the ever-glamourous Wolverhampton. This feels to me the perfect excuse to stay home and ignore the plaintive sounds of Rebel the Golden Retriever, who sits across from me as I type, occasionally offering her paw as a gentle signal that I am not, in this moment, providing her with what she would like. Sigh. I will go out in the freezing drizzle and mud to walk. It’s a must for Rebel and for me too, I never regret it once I am out. A good opportunity to practise Breath of Fire, too. Doing Breath of Fire on a cold dog walk is quite a thing. A great way to get to grips with the breath and a good way to ward off the advances of strangers who will usually assume you are a little strange when you are rapidly pumping your navel as you walk!
We have a week off from homeschool. Hip hip hooray! We’re all absolutely thrilled about this. The kids are still in their PJs today. They’ve been eating cookies my mum made for them for Valentine’s day and generally doing very little else. It’s so quiet in the house. I love it. At least I love it until I go intermittently to check in on the silence and find some kind of horrifying calamity in the bedrooms upstairs that’s come from over enthusiastic Minecraft role-play.
Minecraft has been in my life now for at least 8 years. I must admit that I haven’t ever truly engaged with it until recently but I was very touched when my youngest child this week crafted a restaurant for me and his dad to have a virtual dinner in. I was a blue Power Ranger and his dad was Luigi. The youngest child was the waiter – Super Mario in a cat costume. And, as well as creating an entire restaurant, he’d made virtual menus for us to choose meals from and prepared an assortment of dishes. Unfortunately, my Minecraft skills were not what they they could’ve been and I inadvertently caused quite a lot of damage to the restaurant as I looked around. The entire experience was very sweet until the final moments of our meal when he announced that we would all ‘battle to the death’. It was actually highly amusing and a memory I am unlikely to forget. As I had absolutely no idea how to control my weapon I was killed extremely quickly. The amount of effort he had put in to the whole endeavour was admirable and we were all crying with laughter.
I am finding that it is becoming more challenging to stay present as the weeks pass in lockdown. I have to notice so often that my thoughts have begun to gallop off to the future… bringing with it an activation of a propensity I have toward being somewhat impatient. I find the thing that does really help with this for me is to practise gratitude. In this specific case writing out lists of what I am grateful for right now. Gratitude is a wonderful way to trick the brain and the stress system in to being more present. And I really do have much to be grateful for.
Classes This Week
Yesterday I ran a 3 hour workshop via Zoom where we explored creating safety – becoming safe enough to experience the magic of the yoga mat. We went in some depth in to the individual elements of what, in Kundalini Global, we call the magical equation:
Intention x Breath x Posture = Transformation
It was the first extended workshop I have run this year and I am hugely grateful to everyone who joined me. It was a great experience and I look forward to running it again soon.
This week I teach a free class at 8am on Wednesday morning. The link for that goes out to everyone on my email list on Tuesday evening. If you do not yet receive my weekly email newsletter you can sign up for that, and the free classes here:
I also teach at 7pm on Thursday evening and 10am on Friday morning. Both of these classes are 75 minutes long and can be booked here:
Everything that was broken…
I haven’t allowed myself to read much over the last few weeks as I have had a to do list longer than my over-long arms (I really do have long arms) that I needed to get on top of. One thing I have been picking up to enjoy, in quiet moments, are the poems of Mary Oliver.
Mary Oliver was an American poet who won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. Her work was largely and hugely inspired by nature rather than the human world, and came from her lifelong passion for solitary walks in the wild. She did, though, write a book of poems about love. The collection is called Felicity and despite being a human who has never, ever, considered themselves to be a romantic by nature, I find them to be extremely beautiful. In a sentimental moment this particular one even made me cry:
Everything that was broken has
forgotten its brokenness. I live
now in a sky-house, through every
window the sun. Also your presence.
Our touching, our stories. Earthly
and holy both. How can this be, but
it is. Every day has something in
it whose name is forever.
–Mary Oliver, “Everything That Was Broken,” from Felicity
Consider my sharing of that a little Valentines gift to you all. Do get in touch. Let me know how you are. You can leave a comment below or email me. I always love to hear from you.
Sending you love. I should go for my walk now, right?
(edit: I did and it was lovely. If a bit damp!)
Sara-Jayne
xxx