Yoga, Creativity, Anthropology.
Brains. We’re all working with brains. I started to write this at the beginning of this year, for Purple Day (international epilepsy awareness day), but I gave up because it felt too personal. And I have written a little about this before, but that was for a popular yoga blog and their editors sort of…edited […]
Read More“I understand nothing”, he said. He hadn’t recovered from the wonders he had just seen. He never would. “Retain your bewilderment,” said the voice, his guide. “Your bewilderment will serve you well.” – Ben Okri, 1995, in Astonishing the Gods. Bewilderment. In yoga and in art, bewilderment is valuable. In yoga, you’ll often hear people […]
Read MoreOver the last few weeks I’ve been planning a workshop with a fellow yoga teacher, Namita. It’s a workshop all about a specific asana, Natarajasana, with a physical and meditative practice that draws inspiration from the mythology behind the pose. And it got me thinking about how the myths and stories that sit – often […]
Read MoreMovement helps us to think. You’ve probably experienced this in lots of different ways, consciously or unconsciously – maybe staring at a page/screen trying to work and getting frustrated with nothing happening, and then getting up and moving around a bit and finding that the idea which was just out of your grasp before takes […]
Read More“Biting my truant pen, beating myself for spite: “Fool!” said my muse to me, “look in thy heart, and write.” (Sidney 1591) ‘Writer’s block’ is one of those phrases that people argue about a lot; debated and often disregarded, plenty of people – writers included – don’t like it, or don’t believe in it. For […]
Read MoreIf you practise yoga for a while, you’re likely to find out that sometimes things come up that you weren’t expecting at all. Time and time again, fellow yoga students and teachers tell me about “this weird thing that happened” while they were in their zone, using their physical practice to work into the depths […]
Read MoreAs promised…time for some action! I’m working on a video to share with you, which will be a whole yoga class for you to try, with the sequence, pranayama (breathing exercises) and meditation exercises specifically geared towards creating space for ingenious ideas to appear in your mind (in theory..). But for now, while the full-class-planning-and-video-logistics-working-out […]
Read More“Art, like ritual, is associated with the cultural realm of ideas, symbols and aesthetics; both have a social and a collective dimension and take place in the subjunctive mood, a realm of pure possibility in which experiences generated could introduce innovations into the social structure.” (Jones 2013: 126) There isn’t a lot of research out […]
Read MoreThis is the beginning of a project that has been a little while in the making; its seeds are scattered across pages in notebooks, documents on my computer, notes on my phone and in conversations and musings that have taken place over the last couple of years. There’s no particular goal; like a yoga […]
Read More