‘Extra’ is what modern yoga has always looked out for. Sadly, when we adopt one kind of yoga, we are somehow encouraged home in on one style without recognising how many different practices existed all over India before Krishnamacharya and his student Pattabhi Jois invented modern yoga.

Summer is here! Yoga in the garden this morning. Finally! Ashtanga today and tomorrow but please don’t be put off if you can’t touch your toes! How is it that this became the metric of whether yoga class is for us or not? (Goodhart's Law says: ‘When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure’)

A wonderful guy comes up on my socials promising me neuro hacks for negative thoughts and all kinds of ways to ‘UpSpiral’ my life. His name is Michael Hunter from UpSpiral Life (@upspiral.life). He started my day today with the steps to take when a negative thought is in reoccurrence mode:

The sun is warming up the air and classes are empty. I get it! I recently did a weekend of workshops with Eddie Stern – (I have written about him before). He said: ‘we are all here because there is something wrong. How do I know we all have those problems? Because we're all here in a yoga class. If we didn't have those problems, we'd be fine. We'd be happy. We'd be eating gelato in the sun. And we wouldn't even think about standing on our heads’. I don’t know – I quite like standing on my head!

My lucky home studio held its first Friday evening Kirtan and Restorative class. Raising the vibrations of the room was Bina Patel with her harmonium, teaching us and leading us in chanting. After that we had restorative postures for relaxing, melting, softening and, as one participant said, “After a long long time I managed to balance my busy mind with my tired body.”

Did you ever stop to think about how the once humble yoga mat turned into a multi-billion dollar industry? How can mats cost way over £100?

I love teaching Ashtanga. Friday and Saturday morning classes are so joyous. Interesting that before he died, the head and the global epicentre of the Ashtanga movement Sharath Jois was making changes to the sequence and calling it ‘The Active Series’ to make it more accessible.

Families are funny things, eh! Christmas shines the brightest light on all the characters, the flaws, the histories, genes… the soup that is the get-together of Christmas.

Steal a march on your New Year Resolutions by starting now, don’t leave it till Jan 1st to decide. I’ve given up coffee (again) and duly went through a weekend of coffee headaches and torturous body ache. Ticked. And I’ve finally given up oat milk, tired of additives, tired of trying to make my own, tired of feeding the results to the thirsty drain. Swimming lessons is the final New Year Resolution.

Something seismic and awfully tragic happened in the Ashtanga world this week. Sharath Jois, inheritor and the senior-most authority on the Ashtanga system, died suddenly of a heart attack in the US. Many people reading this will have practiced with him and will be heartbroken.