Tool Box For Your Healing Life

Dear Yogis!

Have you heard of the yoga teacher, Mary-Jo Fetterly who had a skiing accident and became a quadriplegic? She became paralysed but immediately ‘transformed injury into inquiry’ with her yoga toolbox. She used mantras and pranayama to retrain herself and has been breaking all records of recovery from quadriplegia ever since. That’s the Toolbox!

Mary-Jo Fetterly says this on her website: ‘We all have a unique journey and “body-story”, a tapestry of many moods and modalities which we’ve embodied throughout our lives. Our body, the vessel of our consciousness, wears these stories or beliefs until given instruction to release them. That is your Healing Life’.

Do you know the story of Stewart Gilchrist? I’ve written about him before because of his tough, demanding, challenging classes and workshops I’ve attended. You may not know that he had been flat on his back in a North London hospital bed for years because he had fallen and broken his spine on a drunken night out in Camden. There was no reason he should ever have walked again but he used breathing to wilfully move his body. Toolbox.

You don’t need massive accidents and life-altering conditions to know that yoga is to help you, not to clone you. Use whatever you need in the toolbox: asanas, meditation, pranayama, mantra, and more. I also hope that the extreme contortions practiced by the street yogis of old India (when yoga belonged to vagabonds, vagrants, contortionists, and circus performers smoking ganja, eating opium, covered in funeral ash and begging for alms) don’t impress you so much that you try. I’ve been in a studio where a yogi was learning Mulabandhasana (where you sit on the outside edge of your feet!). It’s not pretty.

Zoom Classes 

Plenty of people who are totally new to yoga contact me to ask about starting… very few do unless introduced by a friend. I can only encourage by saying that you don’t have to turn your camera on. Try in the privacy of your own home and we can talk after the class or later in the day. It’s useful for me to see and yogis for many reasons but it’s totally fine if you need anonymity. For all classes and especially today, you can book here. (And do any of you fancy a run tomorrow afternoon? I could do with a run!)

Yoga in the news 

The Irish Times has: I had to apologise to the friend who had told me yoga makes you cry. I once signed up for a yoga workshop and asked a friend to come along for moral support. She refused, saying yoga made her cry. I had never heard such rubbish in my life and I told her so, scoffing at her melodramatic womanly ways. I went to the yoga workshop alone, and by the end of the class I felt like someone had opened the top of my skull and all of my feelings were flying out through this newly discovered sunroof. I stepped out of the yoga studio and promptly burst into tears.

Brighton & Hove Independent has: Brighton Yoga and Well-being Festival 2021: When is it, where will it take place and what will the programme include? It’s on July 24, and 25, and digitally available with 14 classes and a discussion via Zoom. Teachers and speakers announced include Norman Blair, Julie Martin from Hawaii, Esther Ekhart from the Netherlands and Arenze Fischer-Olsen from Denmark.

The South China Morning Post has: Amputee yoga instructor, lawyer and mum Fiona Callanan on overcoming 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami – ‘Just keep going’.