Beginning again
It's been a while and there's a retreat in the pipeline
Meandering
It's been five months since I last did a Substack. How are you? I really hope you're well. This time last year my daughter came into the world along with another version of me who is trying to keep things together but inevitably things fall through my hands, such as writing here.
Sometimes I worry I'm letting things slip away, things I've worked hard to create, a shaky feeling that everything I've done is going to be irrevocably erased by not constantly working on my business. And at the same time I've never felt more myself and connected to the people in my classes, retreats and workshops. Being self-employed, especially so as a Yoga teacher, brings a pressure that I have so often bowed to such as trying to put myself out there and 'build' a base, a brand, a following. It starts as a necessity to put food on the table, then quickly tapped into insecurities to become a chore that chipped away at my confidence, so that the very thing that brought peace, Yoga, became the currency of recognition and value. Honestly, Yoga for a time became contaminated for me.
The last year with my ‘variable’ hormones, work, psychotherapy training, sleep deprivation, and a little human to keep alive at whatever cost, has left me too exhausted for pretty much anything other than Yoga. The one run I tried a month ago I bitterly regretted in the evening when baby refused to sleep and I was livid I’d spent my energy coins running 5km in the midday sun. Hats off to any new mum who has the energy for strenuous physical activity, I sincerely don’t know how you do it.
Consumed most of the time by the needs of a little one, any time on the mat is an achievement, just as it was when I started practising nearly two decades ago. I notice my ragged breath, and take a deep breath in and long breath out. I feel my pram-pushing wrist injury and avoid planks. My mind is all over the place, and accept this is just how it is. I’m a beginner again, but this time the teacher is within me. Yoga is once again my sanctuary. What a relief.
***
Last week I visited a beautiful organic Yoga hotel in the Austrian Alps, it was utterly divine. With panoramic mountain views from the sauna, plunge cold water pool, and Yoga room, I was so enamoured by the place that I’m making the next Senses Beyond retreat here in Easter 2025. If you’re interested, just reply to this email or send one to hello@sensesbeyond.com and you’ll be amongst the first to find out in the next couple of weeks.
In the meantime, Embodied Yoga is still happening every Saturday - not on the 8th June though - I’d love to see you there.
I wish you well and I’ll be in touch soon.
Warmest wishes,
Charlene. Xx
Wonder
This is a breathing meditation from Danny Porter, the Gestalt Therapy course director at Manchester Gestalt Centre. It’s simple and you can do it pretty much anywhere.
Bring yourself into a comfortable position, close your eyes if you wish and become aware that you’re breathing. As you breathe in, silently say ‘Here’; feel how it is to be where you are. On your exhale, silently say ‘Now’; experience how it is to exist now. Inhaling, you are here. Exhaling, you exist now. Here. Now.
Reflection
I can run rings around myself with worry if the conditions are right, fretting like a fearful bird. In this poem I sense miraculousness that is nature, life more precisely, that keeps on going in spite of the walls of anxiousness, we can so often build around ourselves.
Reasons to Live
by Ruth Awad
Because if you can survive
the violet night, you can survive
the next, and the fig tree will ache
with sweetness for you in sunlight that arrives
first at your window, quietly pawing
even when you can’t stand it,
and you’ll heavy the whining floorboards
of the house you filled with animals
as hurt and lost as you, and the bearded irises will form
fully in their roots, their golden manes
swaying with the want of spring—
live, live, live, live!—
one day you’ll put your hands in the earth
and understand an afterlife isn’t promised,
but the spray of scorpion grass keeps growing,
and the dogs will sing their whole bodies
in praise of you, and the redbuds will lay
down their pink crowns, and the rivers
will set their stones and ribbons
at your door if only
you’ll let the world
soften you with its touching.