Nataraja Yoga

10/08/2026

Sanctuary Retreat ꩜
Blowing up balloons for games 🙃

Bookings are open until the end of this month folks - head to my profile links for more info ❤️

Sanctuary Retreat ꩜
Wild swimming at the waterfall…

Bookings are open until the end of this month folks - head to my profile links for more info ❤️

Sanctuary Retreat ꩜
Outdoor cooking for dinner…

Bookings are open until the end of this month folks - head to my profile links for more info ❤️

Sanctuary Retreat ꩜
Basically just hanging out together…

Bookings are open until the end of this month folks - head to my profile links for more info ❤️

Sanctuary Retreat ꩜
…and enjoying nature 🌱

Bookings are open until the end of this month folks - head to my profile links for more info ❤️

02/08/2026

🔺I’ve fallen in love with Trikonasana again these days….

Also leaning into whimsy, daydreaming in nature, reading old books, and clarity 🥂

Happy SUN-day loves ❤️

26/07/2026

What does your yoga practice teach you…?

Over 25 years I’ve learned:

🧘🏻‍♀️ Asana didn’t help my mental health. Obsessing over 3x practice each day solely distracted me from what I should have been dealing with. I was more acrobatic ten years ago than I am now, but addicted to performance, continually pushing to achieve…

⏭️ Stepping back, not forcing, focusing on dedication, discipline, and using asana to improve my physical (gross and subtle) wellbeing has been superb for my mental health. Asana isn’t just about progressing in shape-making, it impacts the important systems of our bodies. Returning to the same asana and movement created knowledge and understanding of myself and how life outside impacted me.

🧘🏻‍♀️ Reading scriptures wasn’t always helpful. Again, sometimes it was. The Sutras, as useful as they are, encourage transcendence of the body and I needed acceptance. After years of racial and physical abuse, understanding my body was what I needed to learn, not repeatedly being told it was something to be cleansed and dismissed.

⏭️ I had to find what resonated, through continuous learning. I’m a Bhagavad Gita kinda girl. And the steps in the Sutras do encourage engagement with the body - but there’s a lot to unravel and it’s not a one-stop wisdom shop…

🧘🏻‍♀️ Meditating led to spiralling thoughts. For people who’ve been through traumatic events, being still sometimes has a negative impact. My first Buddhist meditations were 30 years ago and were magical. Taoist meditations also. But unguided sitting, and my mind wanders off into overthinking, despite returning again and again to my breath.

⏭️ Guided meditation and/or mantra allows me to return to presence. When my mind is occupied with anxiety and trauma, it guides me to FEEL and acknowledge fluctuations. It shifts my brain out of ‘fight-or-flight’, replacing stress with calm. Your brain struggles to differentiate imagined experiences from reality, so this practice physically rewires your neural pathways to boost focus, alleviate pain, and reduce anxiety [NIH neurobiology paper].

🧘🏻‍♀️ The best part of yoga for me

18/07/2026

An excellent post from Eddie Stern, concisely and clearly explaining the chemical soup of our bodies… Highly recommend his blog and his book! 🙏🏼🌸✨

“We are a soup of chemicals, cells, molecules, atoms, and an unknown force that impels it all into an organized system we call a living body, that exists in the organized body that we call the world. How it is all held together in space, we do not know.”

Thinking about our chemical nature

13/07/2026

🍂 Only 12 weeks until this year’s retreat….

Also: this is not an audio - genuine nature sounds 🥰

The history of the place.
The wild nature and the moon.
The nearby waterfall and the way the forest hugs you…
And the sauna.
And the fire ceremony.
And the barefoot Qigong.
And the yin in the cottage.
And the food…. The food!

Easy to get to, easy to slide into stillness, for a magical long-weekend.

Easy to just, be.

Find more retreat details on my profile 🕸️👁️

08/07/2026

Is yoga really “more than asana”…? 🧘🏻‍♀️

What does this mean?

Meditation
Chanting mantra
Finding your flow….?

💫 It means all of these things 💫

But even WITHIN asana practice, yoga is so much more than making shapes with your body

Here’s why:

The Physiology:
❤️ Cardiovascular system
🫁 Respiratory system
⚛️ Endocrine system
🫧 Lymphatic system
👀 Proprioceptive system
🦄 Nervous system

In order to remain healthy and fully functional, we don’t just need to use our muscles.

We need to use all of these. And using them fully equates to FLEXIBILITY.

Our bodies are so much more than muscle and bone, and the external aesthetic often obsessed over these days.

⏭️ Our bodies function properly because of a bunch of systems on the inside, which we never really think about.

⏭️ When we move our bodies in yoga asana, the poses are often not just about using our strength and increasing our heart rate through a high-power cardio class, but building resilience in these internal systems.
> The ability to breathe properly under pressure.
> Using our eyes and ears in order to understand where we are in a room, in a situation.
> Moving our spine so that out lymphatic system detoxifies the body effectively.
> Testing ourselves so that we can burn off or stimulate excess or deficient hormones from our endocrine system; adrenaline, cortisol, seratonin - the things which add to stress or depression.
> And, with all of this, creating an ADAPTABLE nervous system. Having a nervous system which is flexible, resilient, adaptable, is much better than being “regulated” - in my view, regulation means stuck, controlled, that’s not what we want, we need to know how to handle stress.

Life throws things at us which may “dysregulate” our systems, physically and emotionally. Being able to handle life, to be resilient and able to adapt, is key to remaining balanced. And that notion of balance can shift and change depending on where we are and what we do and who we are surrounded with.

So… Yoga, creates adaptability, flexibility, resilience, strength, and the things we need to handle LIFE.