The illusory fear of failure

I was writing a list of my deepest fears today, and noticed that most of them are based on the underlying false belief that I’m not good enough; that I’m fundamentally flawed and I will fail. My fear is so often of failure, whether this be in terms of ‘failing to be a mum’, ‘failing

Celebrating not berating

I woke up the other day with the following phrase in my head: “Whenever you want to negatively judge someone, celebrate them instead!” It’s a deceptively simple phrase. But, the more I contemplated it, the more I felt the immense punch that it packed. Think about it – if everyone literally followed this simple guideline

Love Revolution

As I write this in front of my woodburner, with snow filling the sky outside and lying many inches thick on the ground already, my thoughts briefly turn to sunny southern India, and how I could just as easily have been supping a post-yoga fresh coconut on the beach in my flip flops and sarong right

I don’t understand – but I trust

So, once again I am on the brink of leaving my ‘regular’ life behind to leap into the abyss and explore some more of what this crazy, beautiful planet has to offer. It has been such a journey getting to this point, and it still feels strange. I am a bundle of emotions – sadness

Sometimes Less is More

I’m just back from an idyllic week of teaching my summer retreat in sunny Spain. As always, I was reminded that this is something that I really enjoy doing, perhaps above all else. I love watching the journey that everyone goes on, myself included, as we all slowly release the binding ties and prescribed masks

Growing pains

Isn’t it strange that the only constant we can rely on in life is change, yet change is something that we seem to resist? If you watch animals, they seem to take change in their stride pretty naturally; they live in the moment and accept what ‘is’ rather than expending energy on thinking about how

Bringing the niyamas to life – Svadhyaya

As a quick reminder, the niyamas are five personal qualities mentioned in Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras that we’re encouraged to cultivate within ourselves, to help us on our yoga path. In this article we’re looking at the fourth niyama: ‘Svadhyaya’, which means ‘self-study’. I warn you now, I may go off on one a bit in

A Conversation Between Mind, Heart and Spirit (AKA The Holy Trinity)

So, here’s a little story that ‘fell out of me’ the other day, following a very inspirational chat with a friend, who encouraged me to get onto paper some of the crazy stuff swirling around my head at the moment. Indeed it was very therapeutic! I hope you take something positive from it… 🙂  The

Bringing the Niyamas to Life – Santosha

As a quick reminder, the niyamas are five personal qualities mentioned in Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras that we’re encouraged to cultivate within ourselves, to help us on our yoga path. Building on August’s article on ‘saucha’ (cleanliness or purity), we now move onto looking at the second niyama: ‘santosha’, which means contentment. Aah, the elusive contentment… I

Detoxifying the mind

NB This article appeared in a newsletter to my yoga students earlier this year but at the time I didn’t dare to unleash it on the internet. But, today, I realised quite how pertinent it is to the topic of saucha, which I have just blogged about, and so again I man up and speak