Time Travel With Meditation

Dear Yogis

For a while now I have been starting my Friday 8.30am Ashtanga class at Eden Fitness with 10 minutes meditation. I know some find it really hard and some love it. Some think we’re not really doing anything and some come in late and noisily. (Better to wait outside, I think.) I found this great You Tube called Debunking the 5 Most Common Meditation Myths by Light Watkins. I think he might help us all persist with the practice.

Meditation, he says, has a reversal effect on biological ageing. We have a chronological age and a biological one. Chronology stays the same but we can speed up or slow down our biological ageing depending on how much stress we have. Meditate and become younger! It will refund the time you spend on it, busting the myth that we don’t have time to meditate. (Dr Martin Luther King Junior was assassinated at the age of 39. How old do you think the pathologists in autopsy thought his body was? Check out Light Watkins’ You Tube for the answer. They concluded that the age they gave his body was the result of a highly stressed career.)  

Light Watkins concludes that meditation repairs some of the wear and tear on the body and brings orderliness and efficiency to the mind. Meditation will cultivate inner peace and happiness and that’s what you in turn put out into the collective consciousness. I will add that yoga practice is meditation! Teachers introducing a new practitioner to meditation will tell them to watch the breath! Hmm! Sound familiar!

Home Studio

Some yogis in my lucky Home Studio are making the trepidatious move from Stretchy Yoga on Mondays and Tuesday to Ashtanga Yoga on Wednesdays and Thursdays… It’s going down well! Some are doing both. Come and have a go! Half the classes next week are fully booked, half are not. You can see what classes are available on my website. Also attached on this email.

Training

If you missed David Swenson last weekend, he’s in Cambridge for a Sunday evening class this weekend. It’s a privilege to know him and learn from him.

Tomorrow morning I’ve booked Aerial Yoga, 10.30-11.30 with my teacher, Valentina Candiani at COCO YOGA - 1 Dalling Road, W6 0JD. Come with me! Next weekend she starts her 40hrs Aerial Yoga Teacher Training which I’m signed up for. It’s the only Aerial Yoga Teacher training in the UK for Yoga Teachers. Come with me!

Yoga in the news

Eurek Alert publishes this press release which is widely covered today: £1.4 million grant to research benefit of yoga for people with multiple chronic health conditions. Northumbria University will study the clinical effectiveness and cost effectiveness of a specially-adapted yoga programme for older adults with ‘multimorbidity’ -  two or more long-term health conditions. Two thirds of people over the age of 65 in the UK have multimorbidity and account for 70% of NHS expenditure.

The Times OF India tells us that Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi is in Buenos Aires for the G20 summit and the first thing he did was address thousands of Argentineans in a yoga class. Why can’t our Prime Minister do that! Modi said: "Yoga is bridging the vast distance between India and Argentina”