If you’d like to chew any of this over with me, please reach out. I welcome feedback and questions at any time.

Overall approach

There are some approaches that underpin all the work – whether sharing yoga, facilitating discussions, coaching or collaborating with partners. They include ways of working that are:

Embodied: if we take seriously the idea that the body is an integral part of a person, then to work together effectively we must include the body fully in that work.

Relational: each person contains (and is part) of many worlds – for instance  inner, interpersonal, social and natural. Within each world are many relationships. The quality of these relationships goes a long way towards explaining our unhappiness, and our potential for wellbeing and flourishing.

Agile and questioning: every theory is a map, and not the territory. Fundamental truths are vanishingly rare, and show up very little in my work. All models are wrong – but some are useful. My work is a shared enquiry and I don’t have all (if any) of the answers.

Consensual and trauma-informed: you are the expert and the boss, when it comes to you and your body. Everything I might suggest is an invitation, and you remain free to participate or not, to suggest or do something different, or to stop at any time.

Movement for Change yoga sessions involve steady, fairly slow movements, often repeated in sync with your breathing. The session follows a predictable pattern of warm-up movements, lying-down practice, then standing shapes followed by some seated or other floor-based movements, before relaxation.

It is not an aerobic practice (although you may get stronger) and there is no emphasis on achieving particular shapes (although you are likely to develop your balance and flexibility). I mainly offer guidance as exploration, with little focus on alignment or the way you look.

My intention in sharing yoga is to create a time and place and set of tasks that enable your embodied experience to be primary. While students often report that their back or neck pain reduces, their mobility increases or that they sleep better after practice, the focus is mainly on your steady embodied attention, a little like a moving meditation. You can see an example of this in action in this video.

I completed teacher training with Barefoot Body Training, led by Beverley Nolan, and am also influenced by J Brown, Frank Jude Boccio and Pete Blackaby. My teachers’ yoga influences include T.K.V. Desikachar, Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen and Vanda Scaravelli.

One thing I’ve noticed about the teachers who have had a strong impact on me is that they are synthesisers – bringing together yoga with other practices such as Body Mind Centring, embodied anatomy or osteopathy. This makes them part of a long tradition of innovation and enquiry within yoga.