Am I Doing Yoga Wrong?

1. It's not possible to do yoga wrong. Yoga is a simple thing really: just move your body, stretch a little in a few different directions and think about deepening your breath while you do that. Five or ten minutes a few days a week is enough to make a difference.

2. Yoga clothes, mats and props are just there to give you something to buy and someone else some money for selling them. There's nothing wrong with that, but you can do yoga on your carpet in your pyjamas. Sometimes its better that way.

3. The only thing to ask yourself when you are finished, is DO I FEEL A BIT BETTER? If the answer is yes, well done, you've just done yoga

4. Only modern yogis focus on yoga postures as we see them on Instagram, for centuries yoga was about sitting quietly, feeling grateful, calming your breath and being aware of yourself and your body in this moment. So if you just feel like sitting quietly, looking at your garden or favourite view and breathing calmly for a few minutes - that's yoga.

5. Are you the kind of person that doubts yourself and your abilities? Perhaps this is why you think you are doing yoga wrong ... because you often think you are missing something or that you're not very good at stuff. This is just mental chit chat. There is only one of you in the whole world and there will never be another: learning how to be you - confidently, calmly, positively you, will stand you in good stead for all of life. So when you hear that little voice telling you this isn't what yoga looks like, thank it kindly for its input, then ignore it and carry on doing your thing.

Make a commitment to yourself to try a little yoga for a few days for a few weeks and see how you feel at the end of it. Hopefully better. You've got this.

Sarah x

How do I start doing yoga from home?

One of the reasons that yoga has been around for thousands of years is that it really works - it really does make you feel calmer, stronger and more flexible in body and mind.

It doesn’t ask you to believe in anything you don’t want to believe in, it’s not a religion and you don’t even have to go to class. You don’t need any equipment, you don’t need to be bendy already and it doesn’t matter if you are fit or not, or what your body shape is.

All you have to do for yoga to work is do it.

At Oak Tree Yoga we are passionate about yoga, it’s what we do and we want to share it with as many people as possible. So we do online classes in our Facebook group every Tuesday at 7pm and we have an in person yoga class every week on Thursdays at 7pm in Wargrave, Berkshire.

If you don’t want to pay for classes, you can find sequences here for you to print out for free and do at home and guided meditations here to help you calm your mind.

You only need to move your body a little, to find out a little more about how your breathing can become more calm and centred, to take a few minutes out of every day to move your body and settle yourself.

Most importantly, be kind to yourself. When you do yoga from home nobody is looking, but you - can you accept your body as you find it? Can you let this moment be enough? Can you switch off your inner crtitic for just a little while so that you can move your body and deepen your breath and emerge feeling brighter, better and more positive about yourself and the world around you?

So how do you start yoga from home? You just begin and once you’ve begun you carry on, with an attitude of gentle kindness towards yourself and curiosity about where your beautiful life is taking you next.

Sarah x

Creating Life

It’s been easy to lose a sense of oneself during the last 18 months. 

Dealing daily with new information, processing fast-changing and sometimes frightening news and information, adapting to meet new social requirements and negotiating with our (sometimes strong) feelings when we perceive someone else to be breaking the rules, or choosing a very different path through Covid to our own. 

All of this has been exhausting and required hitherto untested levels of compassion, patience and acceptance.

We’ve all done it and coped magnificently (nothwithstanding the occasional blip or meltdown – we are human after all).

Now, as we emerge from lockdown into something freer, but not quite free, we can ask ourselves what we want the coming months and years to look like.

If lockdown life showed us what we didn’t want any more, post lockdown life is asking what exactly you would like to put back into your days.

We are all simply human, but the way in which we choose to express that humanity is very individual and wonderful: we have the gift of creation and we create in myriad unique ways.

Rediscovering this side of yourself post lockdown warrants some of your time and focus.  Who are you?  What do you need to be happy?  How do you intend to express yourself over the next few years?

I find these much more useful questions than the classic What Are You Going to Do with Your Life? as it leaves space for so much more than the grand life-changes that in truth happen to us only once or twice in a lifetime.

Asking instead how you intend to express yourself gives you much more scope for the small joyful elements that make up a fulfilling life.

So along with your day job, you might express yourself by having a stronger, fitter body.  Along with being mother to young children, you might express yourself through writing that daily journal, or swimming every week.  You get the drift. You express yourself through whatever you bring to the world, whether that is a smile on a mountain top, a knitted hat, a cake, a safe haven for others, beautiful things to look at or being a good friend. It all has value and all it needs is that you know yourself and be yourself.

Perhaps, as I discovered last weekend, the essentials have not changed and it feels so joyous and restoring to be able to embrace them again.  I love mountains, looking at art, learning and the ocean.  To express myself fully I choose all of these things.  And now I am allowed to do them again.  Yippee.