Elijah and I travelled up to Findhorn to stay with my teacher, Louise, in her cosy loft, immersing in yoga and all that this beautiful place has to offer by way of wildness and beauty.

I love Findhorn. This is the fishing village, albeit I love visiting what was the Foundation, which is still a community, but not in the way that it once was! The whole area there though, just has this incredible energy. It’s difficult to explain, there’s a certain lightness and clarity, an ease, something restful, magical, healing. I always find it hard to leave.

It’s funny how life happens. We can put all our time and energy into manifesting, but sometimes things just come to be, and often there have been signs, but we don’t know that until much later when life choices and insights begin to make more sense.

For example, I had always been keen to visit Findhorn, but it felt so far away and while I looked at the Foundation and how I might stay, it never really felt the right time, and then by chance I met Louise through a yoga teacher who knew a yoga teacher with whom I attended a class in the little village of Uig in the Outer Hebrides, and eventually I realised that visiting her in Findhorn was actually rather easy, a plane to Gatwick and another to Inverness, and this cosy space and this mind blowing yoga, and well, Findhorn is becoming a home away from home.

And this has made me question manifestation. Because what is meant to happen, tends to happen. Maybe we need to follow the intuitive nudges. But somehow the universe seems to take us to the people and places where magic happens.

For me being connected with Louise really is magic. She is the most inspiring yoga teacher I have had the privilege to meet and the practice this time, especially, really blew my mind in so many ways. There is a depth to the Scaravelli approach that is difficult to explain in words, and it comes in waves, which is sometimes how it is felt in the body too. I felt my spine in a way I have never felt it before, and I realised the beauty of the sacrum, which is so exquisite, I was awe-struck.

I am inspired to keep sharing what I learn so that others may experience this too, because of the freedom it brings to the mind, the absence of thought - this is perhaps one of the greatest gifts, let alone the feeling of aliveness and clarity.

I realise now how much my 16 years of active yoga conditioned my mind in unhelpful ways. How it tightened and hardened my body and restricted my breathing. How it fed my perfectionist tendencies. How it made me rigid in so many ways. Obviously it helped me enormously too, but had I continued in that way, I wonder how much my life would have been stuck in that same programming - push, do, stretch, extend, all the time trying to be anything but where I am right now in this moment and accepting.

It’s not easy to let this go. To unschool myself from the notion of how a class should be taught, its structure, the breath, rest, all of this - all the ways I have been ‘doing’ this, which have been normalised and programmed into me - so that even now I have to let go of what I thought yoga is to allow yoga to show me another way, and the key it seems, is to allow my body’s natural intelligence. It’s radical. But I have deep trust.

Thus, I’m having to slow down again. Step back. Go deeper in. There isn’t a choice. I have been teetering for a while. But I can no longer sacrifice what is sacred by continuing in old ways. Always there is another layer and another opportunity to trust deeper.

The changes in heart this brings means that things will change. This practice is sacred - ‘gold dust’ my teacher calls it - and it is not for everyone, too radical, too poetic, too different from the norm. Yet for many, it is exactly what is needed as an antidote to the increasing chaos and degradation of this world, caught as we are in Kali Yuga.

I am increasingly conscious that it is pointless teaching breathing exercises until we have found the deeper breath. And this takes time - I am still finding this 22 years into practice. The practice is enough. It takes us to the meditative state we seek, through the body - it’s entirely embodied and that, I feel, is the antidote to the disembodied world we now live in, where so many are simply ‘a mind for hire’, or disconnected, online.

Thus, I want to make it easier for those of you who would like to explore more of this way of practising and experiencing yoga, beyond what you have been told, or thought, or have experienced thus far. I realise that yoga does allow us to fly, to experience true freedom, to break free of limitation. Truly, it is a gift. And Louise and her sharing of her practice is also a gift. So from December, I will be teaching another regular Scaravelli-inspired class on a Tuesday evening.

I am also going online, so that those off you who are not physically present can still connect in. You never know, I may start teaching a weekly class online too…watch this space…

Aside from the yoga, Elijah and I kept busy and here’s a few photos:-