This mid-week email is because the eclipse is tonight. Come if you have no other plans to watch. Birds will all go to sleep and, minutes later, start their dawn chorus. Then, in the early morning hours between midnight and dawn, is the meteor shower. In case we spot a shooting star, come with your wishes ready.

Yin is slow medicine. It is the absolute opposite of (yang) Ashtanga and I wish I had studied them both at the same time. The patience of Yin might have counselled against the ego-encouragement of the Ashtanga practice and the almost inevitable injuries that come.

Wimbledon season… and I want to suggest to online yogis that you buy a couple of tennis balls for our stretchy and restorative yoga sessions. Friday’s class will be a combination of myofascial release (hence the need for pressure-point balls) and pure restorative postures. A perfect wind-down to the week. In stretchy classes (Mon, Tues and Weds) we can look at the typically tighter areas with the pressure-point release approach.

I’m doing a push to get more yoga in the workplace. (Pop me an email if you’re interested). Office work is our most static experience and we know that the body needs movement. I have much more appreciation of how the body move or why it finds some postures impossible, and you’ll never guess why.  I spent an hour last week looking at cadavers, bones and body parts (at King’s College Anatomy Lab).

I was checking my notes from my recent training with Anna Ashby and she said some profound things about the value of a Restorative Yoga practice. “How do we find deep joy and worth in a time of change? The practice allows us to free ourselves and create space for something new to arise”. Nice, eh!

‘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.”