The Yoga of Faliure

Dear Yogis

How’s the New Year Resolution going? Many people don’t like them because they are associated with failure. What a pity, especially as yoga postures teach us a lot about failure and trying again. Almost every posture is like this. There are some postures that feel like a failure for years, decades, and that’s the part of the practice that we learn the most from.

Many business leaders talk about the importance of hardship and failure in their eventual success. Anyone who has experienced tensions over Christmas might reflect that hardship creates self-analysis and we learn about who we are, where our inner strength lies, how we interact with others and how to try to bring balance, or at least employ tactics to bring peace. The consequences of not learning and improving are injurious. We injure ourselves.

There’s a climber called Conrad Anker who talks about climbing in a very yogi way! He says of climbing: ‘you're in a situation where all the consequences of making mistake are injury, so you have to focus on that. And that takes away the noise of day-to-day living in this oversubscribed society we are in, there at the moment. And that to me is my form of meditation’.

The best climbers fail to summit difficult mountains. Some die. Some try again. Anker says: “I have plenty of ‘no successes’ I could look back on, but I don’t want to live life in reverse.”. “We can avoid risk and we just sit on the sofa and watch TV and eat convenience food OR we harness risk. And by understanding that, we can see what risk allows us to do with human potential – both intellectual and physical standpoint – by pushing us out of our comfort zone and having to evaluate the cost benefit that each moment really opens up intellectual curiosity in a way that has allowed humans as a species to progress to the point where we are today.”

It isn’t so much the fear of dying but of not actually living’.

Yoga Retreat

Our Magical Yoga Retreat to the little paradise of Kapsali Bay will be on the third week of September – travel on Sunday the 13th September and back the following weekend. Let me know if you want to come and I’ll start booking rooms and transfers. (See our photo gallery from previous years.)

Training

This Sunday (5th) I’ll be doing ‘A Yin Yoga Workshop: Exploring Inner Landscapes with Norman Blair’ 13.30-16.40 at Indaba in Marylebone. Norman Blair is a top Yin yoga teacher; his teacher training courses for 2020 are already booked up with waiting lists! Fancy coming?

With a triumph of hope over experience I’ve booked three Friday evening inversion workshops with Anastasis Tzanis called ‘headstand to handstand’. The dates are Fri, 10 January (Alignment), Fri, 7 February (backbending) and Fri, 6 March (transitions) at Triyoga Chelsea, 19:45 - 21:45. Come with me! When that’s done it will almost be clocks forward time!

Home Studio

A really sweet thing this season has been the amount of people wanting yoga gift tokens for their partners for a birthday or Christmas present. See attached if you’re still short of a present. Anyway, we’re back to normal next week with classes. There’s plenty of availability; only one class is completely full. See attached for the week’s class availability. For those of you who have been coming for a while, please click here to write a small review.

Yoga in the News

The Telegraph has New Year, New Yoga — take Adam Husler's challenge to go deeper in these 'simple' yoga postures. It’s always time well spent to revisit the postures we think we know well. Goal-setting usually refers to the difficult postures but it’s worth looking at familiar postures for their subtleties.Home Studio