Yoga Somatics

My 22 years of yoga practice and nearing 10 years of teaching experience, leads me to interpret yoga as a process of union between all the dimensions that contribute to my existance as a body-mind-being; contextualised within a family, culture, society, environment and the wider cosmos. In essence, I experience Yoga as an organising principle that supports me in developing congruence and harmony between all of these different facets. For me that’s the ultimate union, that’s the yoga. It’s the cultivation of, and movement towards peace, acceptance and compassion.

Working through the body was and continues to be my entry point into yoga; only when I first started out yoga didn’t equate with the word ‘union’, it was a purely physical pursuit, with the sole aspiration to become more flexible, strong and accomplished. I experienced glimpses of the more esoteric phenomena such as ‘spaciousness’ and ‘integration’, but thinking back, it was like I didn’t know what to do with those unfamiliar feelings, so I just categorised them as some sort of condiment that occassionaly enhanced the flavour of my physical practice; they were certainly never the focal point.

Over the years my practice evolved, I found new inspiration through different teachers, but most significantly I became pregnant with my first child and that changed everything. My body revealed itself to me as an extraordinary intelligence, this sentient substrate (not that it ever wasn’t) which incubated and gave rise to life, adapting over time before showing itself completely, in all its glorious-animal-nature through giving birth to my daughter.

As a result of pregnancy and birth my soft tissue architecture changed, as did my psychological relationship with my body. The gap between my body and mind had somehow narrowed, in that these realms felt more intimately connected. That in turn inspired me to seek out different yoga, one that prioritised a more integrated practice of body and mind, and preferenced listening over imposition. I was fortunate to discover an approach known as ‘Scaravelli inspired’. yoga Just like craniosacral therapy, it’s a deeply subtle, implicit practice that isn’t bound to a methodology; quality of attention is the central axiom of the practice. When you really start to listen to your body, it lets you in and the relationship you start to cultivate with yourself through gesture and movement is extraordinary. The adage ‘how you attend to the world changes reality’ is an embodied truth that I’ve come to realise through this practice.

First principles of the practice include how you to attend to gravity, force and counter force, moment to moment attention, beginner’s mind-set, curiosity and inquiry, a listen-respond dialogue, slowing everything down, and experiencing yourself in all your multi-dimensionality - a gestalt, rather than fragmented parts. These are certainly the principles I work with, yet every Scaravelli-inspired practitioner or teacher will have their own particular emphasis and style.

Yoga postures are secondary to the experience of observing yourself unfold in present time. It’s fabulous to work with yoga forms, but the intention is never to ‘achieve’ the posture for the sake of the posture; instead, their role is one of a useful framework in which you can explore the deeper, richer, more subtle, nuanced experience of your mind and body moving together - and when this is done in an attentive, compassionate way magic really starts to happen. You become really skilled at tracking your sensations and responses, training your attentional field so that you can focus in and sustain broad awareness interchangebly and simultaneously. You distinguish and develop agency through the physical play of yielding, resisting, and inhibition. Over time I’ve noticed how this ability to pause and choose my next move has become a mindful resource that I can call upon in life.

Movement has become my medicine. I use yoga postures as a soft structure to my practice but I also work a lot with archetypal movement patterns such as rotation, flexion, extention and side-bending in an explorative approach that is less attached to a specific form, and more centred around essence of movement. Movement is a tool for noticing yourself, noticing the pleasurable sensations you feel as you find ease and glide in motion, as well as noticing areas of tension, holding and discomfort. The real art is being able to stay present and tolerant of everything that you feel, whilst continuing to challenge your assumptions and be willing ‘to not know’. In the not knowing, the beginner’s mind, we open up space for new possibilities to arise. It’s my role as a teacher to point towards those possibilities whilst you do the inner work.