Deep breathing and yoga is a really effective way of stimulating the parasympathetic nervous system, also known as the rest and digest response. This will help to decrease your heart rate, stimulate digestion, inhibit adrenaline production, and help you relax.

Many people have a misconception that yoga is just the physical stretching practice, however yoga is more than just the movements, that is only one of the 8 limbs to yoga. The breathwork, philosophy and mindfulness is a huge part of yoga. Mindfulness is the simple act of noticing the moment, what your doing, how you feel, what senses you notice, the nature of your thoughts.

The benefit of this is when you are triggered, stressed, overwhelmed, etc. you can mindfully notice the thoughts and sensations in your body and use the breathing techniques to help you move through that moment. This has huge, tangible impacts on your relationships, choices, thoughts and feelings.

Take cloud gazing as an example. When looking at clouds it is easy to imagine different shapes and figures forming. Similarly, when we practise mindfulness we are able to observe our thoughts arising and instead of letting the thought take over we are able to acknowledge the thought and let it pass, returning our focus back to the present. This allows us to not get sucked into a narrative that we may or may not need/want. Some days our mind can feel like a storm, with heavy grey clouds and be full of thoughts. Other days we may have occasional non intrusive thoughts with pockets of blue sky and overall feelings of peace.

Yoga and mindfulness will not make it so there are never times of difficulty but your ability to be resilient to those challenges will improve with the tools you learn with us.

Most people think the practice of yoga is difficult and requires a great deal of time and expense. While you do need to commit to your practice to get the most out of it, we teach yoga that can be incorporated into your everyday life and done when it is convenient to you, even if you only have 5 minutes. We can guide you so that your practice feels: relevant, accessible, and enjoyable.

Gone are the days when you needed a full wardrobe of leggings, only consume drinks that taste like freshly mowed grass, or be super bendy to be considered good.

Yoga is more than stretching and poses. Yoga teachings can, and should, be used everyday and extend beyond the mat and into your life. Think of it like this, if you are a football player you learn many skills during your practice – coordination, working as a team, and improving fitness. These are wonderful but even the most physically fit person experiences stress and no amount of muscle mass will help combat that. Yoga will support your sports practice by supporting your personal development, teaching you how to increase productivity, improve sleep, and remain calm under pressure through breathing techniques and mindfulness.

Regular yoga practice is proven to increase your attention span and neuroplasticity. It becomes easier to notice when one’s mind is wandering and teaches how to use the senses as a focus point to anchor our thoughts back into the present. This type of work will actually improve your sports abilities, not to mention release tight hamstrings and prevent sport injuries!

While there are types of yoga that are more physically demanding than others, the type of yoga that we teach is rooted in using more accessible physical movement with mindfulness principles. We can teach to all fitness levels including chair yoga and supportive prop yoga.

We recommended restorative yoga like ‘yin’, chair yoga snd yoga therapy. It’s a good idea to let the instructor know about injuries or any concerns so that they can modify to make yoga feel good for you.

Yoga can also be a nice alternative to traditional sports, as it is non-competitive and adaptable to all physicalities. If you’re not a fan of sport, or unable to participate in regular sports, it is worth trying yoga.

We like to think of the practice of yoga, like brushing your teeth. If you don't brush your teeth daily, you feel icky – not to mention all the health problems that follow and expensive dentistry bills! Yoga is like basic hygiene for the mind.

The more frequently you can practice yoga the better, as it will help create a good, healthy habit, aswell as developing your strength and overall flexibility. Mentally it will help develop neural pathways which make it easier to be present more often and it will also tone your vagus nervous system helping you go from fight/flight to rest/digest faster.

Therefore, think about doing a shorter more frequent practice over a longer, once in a while yoga practice!

The mind, body connection means that our thoughts, feelings, beliefs, and attitudes can positively or negatively affect our biological functioning.

Thankfully western science now acknowledges that the mind and body are connected, we’ve always known this deep down… take the common phrase ‘butterflies in my tummy’ referring to when people have nervous thoughts, they then feel nervous and get tightness in their stomach, this may be because if you’re nervous you often take shallow breaths which increase your heart rate and make your muscles tighten.

How often have you heard the mind and body spoken of as one unit or thought about solving a mental issue by focusing on your bodies needs and visa versa?

Body example If you go to the gym to work your body, why not work your mind also? A healthy mind is part of a healthy body, and a healthy body is part of a healthy mind! Yoga helps to strengthen that connection between mind and body.

Mind example In schools they often require students to sit still and focus and concentrate, requiring good mental but how often do we get someones focus by getting their physical bodies active, focused and awake first?