Strong & Spacious Hips: A movement practice that focuses on multi dimensional care for your hips. Starts on the ground with tiny movements to hydrate tissues, opens into a floor sequence to find spacious release through the hips, and moves into creative hip strength work to play with balance and stability. Progresses into a flowing sequence that requires the hips to articulate in a variety of contexts and directions to stay spacious, strong, resilient and adaptable. An important practice if you are sitting a lot!
Drop into the Pulse: A class exploring the pulsation of heart beat, circulation and fluid movement through a varied sequence that moves around the whole body and introduces key philosophical themes around the relationship between the micro and macro via your felt experience. Starts with some sound, and progressively builds into a flowy, stretchy yummy movement practice before resting with your legs up the wall to close.
Feel good circulation flow: Bring awareness to your vascular system with this fluid flow that alternates between more dynamic movement to get our heart beating and moments of quiet stillness to rest into the pulsation of our fluid inner world. A feel good, full body stretchy flow to revitalise and refresh ourselves, with a yummy legs up the wall rest to close. 40 Minute practice. Props: Optional block
Settle, move, integrate: A short practice to settle your nervous system and find balance through pranayama, movement and awareness practice. Begins with alternate nostril breathing to support a sense of balance through both sides of our brain and nervous system and then moves through a practice that focuses on contra lateral movement to highlight our senes of centre and inner spaciousness. A great practice to self regulate when we are feeling out of balance.
Self Practice Inquiry - Axial and Appendicular Integration: Exploring the relationship between centre and periphery as established embryologically and how this relationship unfolds into our adult movement patterns, and can echo through into our underlying sense of being.
10 Minutes of Movement: Short and sweet. A 10 minute movement snack to gather and recenter, playing with eagle variations in a variety of contexts and getting our blood moving in a short amount of time. A perfect pick me up & focus for stagnated or scattered energy.
Into the Stillpoint: A return to centre. This practice explores gathering towards where feels like centre, and how our sense of centre can shift and morph during our practice. What does it mean to abide with our awareness in the innermost? Through postures that gather to midline such as eagle variations and tree pose, we play and move through a vinyasa flow practice that begins slowly and warms up into a strengthening standing sequence before returning to the ground for a big chill and chanting. A great practice to focus scattered energy or agitation.
Moving meditation - a floor based flow: a nurturing, somatic, floor based class. Woven throughout is an awareness practice that can be particularly helpful for working with strong emotions, supporting us to go underneath the story/thinking and into the sensory, to hold space for ourselves to process, digest, and come back to presence.
Moving into winter: A practice to support transitioning into the colder and darker portion of the year, that focuses on allowing tiredness and slowly builds into a steady practice with some longer holds to deeply ground and soothe the nervous system to support nature’s call to hibernate :). A good one for if you feel tired but still want to move.
Touch into Presence: A short practice to touch into presence and come home to ourselves. We start with a somatic meditation and continue on to explore contra-lateral movement patterns and integration through the diagonal planes of the body. Open into variations of diagonally oriented backbends with options to play with balances, and quietly build strength whilst cultivating whole body awareness and building our capacity to be present. 36 minutes. Props: Maybe two blocks
Soft Axis - The Gut Tube: Our gut tube runs along the front of the spine, gently tethered and offering support for spinal movement since we were just learning to move in the world. This fluid practice brings awareness to this relationship and explores a variety of movement contexts to find freedom and space to spinal/gut tube movement; not only to facilitate ease in the gut tube, and digestion but so that we can truly open into clear listening of our gut instinct and bodily intelligence.
Weight & Levity: A return to weight to find levity. This practice starts on the ground with practices to release holding and tension from the tissues and opens into a circular flow exploring backbends, side planks, lunges, and strong leg work to find a sense of rootedness as we find expansiveness through the spine, lungs, heart, chest and arms.
Freedom in Backbends: A thorough exploration of spinal extension and twists. We look at the spirality of the upper arms as they come over head to find depth in the armpits and appropriate constraint around the joint as we lengthen the front of the body with arms overhead! Play with over head backbends, twisting balances and wheel pose towards the end. Props: Two blocks if you have them.
Balance, Inner Ears & Awareness through Listening: How does awareness of our inner ears affect our movement? In this practice we start on the ground and move towards progressively more challenging balancing explorations that will offer our systems new patterns to play with. Woven throughout are opportunities to hone awareness as we tune into the sensory experience of receiving outer and inner sound, and how this can open a space in which we can truly hear ourselves.
Creative backbend flow: This creative, slow and steady practice explores the specifics of arms moving overhead for backbends, finding the natural spiralling of the upper limbs, with just enough space and constraint for optimal join articulation! We release shoulders and upper back, and intersperse backbends with grounding warrior variations, whilst also weaving in a beautiful awareness practice to cultivate a grounded sense of presence. Props: Strap
Side body, side planks & whole body listening: Starts slowly and unfurls into an intricate and creative sequence of side planks, side body openers and tree pose variations, exploring ‘whole body listening’ as we play. Closes with a lovely rest and one of my favourite chants.
Whole Body Core: A creative and challenging practice that cultivates supple strength from the centre outwards towards the periphery and back again. It’s a fun and varied flow of functional core work (i.e applicable and supportive of our every day movements) that will probably get sweaty and will challenge you to move in many directions and to play with balance.
Being with & Processing Anger: If you are feeling angry, this practice will give you some tools to work with seeing, being with and processing the emotion in your body. When we get into the raw sensory experience of emotion (energy in motion), it can give the emotion some space to be fully acknowledged and worked through. We will sit with it, get granular about finding where it lives in our body and will move, shake and use breath work to allow some pathways for the anger to move through.
Self Practice Enquiry - Xyphoid and Tailbone: A short class introducing a movement enquiry for you to then explore in your own practice and/or teaching. We explore the relationship between two small bones, the xyphoid and the tailbone. I find this exploration so rich, and it can really support us to cultivate a wonderful middle ground between space and containment through the torso as we move and breathe. Enjoy!
Xyphoid & Tailbone Inversion Flow: A fun exploration of the relationship between the front body and back body via the skeleton and two small bones: the xyphoid and tailbone. This practice cultivates awareness of these two bones as we move and breathe, to find a sense of containment and space through the torso. This can hugely support all of our movement as we find a sense of a ‘middle place’, and is particularly helpful in inversions. Starts slowly and builds into a challenging flow with inversion options to play with (or not!).
