Yoga Day Workshops

Yoga Saturdays 2026

Learning To Move With More Of Myself — Learning To Move With More Of Ourselves

Last year, during our monthly Saturday sessions, we explored “under-standing” the intelligence and wisdom of the Yoga Asanas from the perspective of the “thing we do” called “standing-up tall.”

With that in mind, we examined the classical standing poses and their variations, beginning with mountain, then moving to tree, triangle, warrior, and moon (if you know the classic asana progression).  We looked at details that lengthen and organise the legs, awaken the feet, and better relate both legs and feet to the pelvis, spine and trunk — with their tilts, bends and torsions. The concept of the “midline” helped us track, order and trust our journey toward a richer embodied sense of our own dynamically balancing verticality. 

We also began to explore, lightly, how embryology, the biology of the fascial net and the autonomic nervous system are inter-acting webs that provide key insights into the rich wisdom of the dialogue between the age-old system of yoga asanas and contemporary forms of movement and bodywork research. 

This year, we will continue with the above while attempting to extend our explorations to the more complex requirements of the seated poses without losing our perspective gained from the standing poses.

As with past workshops, we will work, first, from the ground up, as that is how we initially know ourselves—by being on the ground and coming up from there—”standing-up tall.”  Then we will explore how we “hang,” “suspend,” or “anchor” ourselves perceptually in the environment or space around us as “sky.”  Finding out how our bodies move from the sky downwards is more complex, more sensorial,  (more “psychological”), than building from the ground up.  How our sensoriality moves us is a good way to come into the domain of our suspended, sensorial head with its face, and then down into the neck and throat, heart, lungs, shoulders, arms, and hands — a way of consenting to our head leading us in the world rather than it being a heavy object we need to keep on top like a dead candied cherry on top of a muffin! 

Once the ground and space, or sky, are safe and open and deep, we find that our embodied selves want to paradoxically nest in “ground” and spiral into “space” and vice versa — pushing and reaching, pulling and throwing, lifting and dropping in all forms of touching and being touched, moving and being moved. The yoga poses have a beautiful and accurate tradition of spirals that involve backbends and frontbends, and we will continue to examine these. 

Wisdom, “who is already sitting at our gates,” brings us the tools of contemplative practice and teaches us to relate practice to principles, helping us internalise and enjoy an ever-deeper and richer understanding of self, other and the world.  Wisdom is often shown weaving and if, for example, we look at a snowflake, a fern unfurling at dawn, the waves of the ocean, the human smile as it twinkles from lips to eyes or a page from the Book of Kells we will see the utterly simple and layered web of creation that we are embodied and embedded in and which is being woven ever freshly and lovingly out of nothing.

‘Wisdom is radiant and unfading,
and she is easily discerned by those who love her,
and is found by those who seek her.
She hastens to make herself known to those who desire her.’
– Wisdom 6.12

These yoga Saturdays are for both beginners and ongoing yoga and movement practitioners, as well as for professional movement instructors and bodyworkers. 

Each Saturday workshop will include a longer morning yoga class of roughly 2 hours, a half-hour coffee/tea break, a short discussion period (if desired), a second movement session building on the first, and a period of meditation.

To book a place, please email me at gravity@rolfing-yoga.com

If you already have the booking link, you may proceed to book, noting the cancellation policy below.

      • 24 Jan
      • 14 Feb
      • 14 Mar
      • 25 Apr
      • 23 May
      • 13 Jun
      • 18 Jul
      • 22 Aug
      • 26 Sep
      • 24 Oct
      • 21 Nov
      • 12 Dec 

      • You do not need to book for all workshops.  

Time: from 12:00 to 17:00, with a half-hour coffee/tea break.

Venue: Meditatio Centre, St Marks Church, Myddelton Sq, London, EC1R 1XX.  Nearest tube: Angel, Northern Line. 5-minute walk.

— —  https://meditatiocentrelondon.org/contact-us/ 

Cost:  Please pay the non-refundable non-transferable £65 at the door or by bank transfer — see below.  No checks.  

For Transfers:  Barclays Bank, Sort code: 20-35-93, Acc no: 70342327.

Cancellation: bookings are non-refundable and non-transferable: once your place is confirmed via the booking link, should you decide to cancel, please  pay for the class.  I will refund you if someone takes your place from the waiting list.

Waiting list: if the day is fully booked email me to be put on the waiting list.

For Booking Link:  email me at gravity@rolfing-yoga.com

    • You do not need to book for all workshops.  

CPD: valid for 5 hours for British Wheel of Yoga continuing education requirements for Yoga Instructors. Please bring your form to sign on the day.

PREVIOUS WORKSHOPS

Yoga Saturdays 2025

“Standing Tall”    In The Ground and In The Sky

re-discovering the standing poses towards a flourishing yoga practice 

This years full cumulative description below.  

June through November

On these Saturdays, we will continue exploring and mapping our verticality and midline via the standing poses. We have been doing this primarily and quite naturally from the ground up as the weight-bearing beings we are who learn to stand tall on the ground . . . .

We will also deepen those hints emerging about a descending sensorial pathway from our heads down. This means we don’t only organise from the ground up through being heavy; we also organise from the world around us down via our sensoriality (whose captors are mostly in the head) and via meaning-making and connected social engagement.

With all that in mind, Saturday by Saturday, my intention is to connect the standing poses to the sitting, lying, and inverted variations as we take the concept of midline, as “I am here,” and explore how we then organise this further into gesture and behaviour via a rainbow of dyads: the diagonals of our arms and legs, the bridges of our shoulder and pelvic girdles, and eventually the double spirals that river up and down through us.

So come and let’s move together and enjoy listening to Vanda Scaravelli whisper why she loved to use this dynamic translation for Asana: “Grounding in the roots of the pose, I release the spine on the wave of the breath.”

March, April and May

In January and February this year, we explored how two-legged Tadasana (Mountain) and then one-legged balancing Tree (of Life) pose open us to the wisdom of how our bodies are organised in gravity around a “midline” which is both a path and a movement up and down, and which bends forwards and backwards respectively — like the angels ascending and descending Jacobs ladder — like a dynamic that is both simultaneously a fountain and a waterfall of life.

Sensing into and exploring this “fountain waterfall ladder” informs the other more complex standing poses and their variations un-veiling and teaching always anew that roots and wings, grounding and lifting, are the rhythm of life: expanding and contracting, opening and closing to heaven and earth to inside and outside to me and to you.

As we rely more and more on our heads and mobile phones, we forget that our wisdom is a gift from Wisdom Embodied, who can only share her gift from embodied person to embodied person. Wisdom meets us only embodied — life and loving and being loved is not a head trip.  Contemplative practice is not a theory.  The whole person is involved in transfiguration.

On the next three Saturdays, we will continue our explorations, beginning with the standing poses, as we have been doing, and then allow our rivering “midline” to become diagonals and spirals that involve our shoulder and pelvic girdles and our radial limbs and the whole of our beautifully alive sensoriality.  

Our practice together will take us deeper into twisting poses and on to back-bending, inverted and sitting poses.

I hope that through this frame, each of us can discover principles that encourage us to personalise our movement work, trust our own experience, and tend an embodied garden of practice with Tree, River, Fountain, squirrels, wolves, and all other created signs of Wisdom’s presence in our life.

Wisdom is radiant and unfading,

and she is easily discerned by those who love her,

and is found by those who seek her.

She hastens to make herself known to those who desire her. Wisdom 6.12

January & February description

On these monthly yoga Saturdays from January to May this spanking new year, 2025, I would like to propose a journey with you through the garden of classic yoga asanas with a focus on the standing poses.  Like gardening, cooking or going on a walk you have been on before, I hope these days will offer a blend of discovery and review as we practice together. 

For good reason, many of us play with the standing poses regularly, no matter what other asanas and movement practices we love. They — let’s call them the “standing, walking, stopping, rocking, going again, balancing and delighting in almost falling poses”— are born from movements in everyday life; they connect us and help us open up and reset the context for flourishing in simple and fun ways.

With that in mind, we will explore all the classic ones: mountain, tree, triangle variations, warrior variations, moon variations, and standing front bends with legs together and apart — and with ample time and repetition to find out how best to suit each asana to our individual structures and so have more confidence to keep learning week-by-week at home.  

Alongside a rigorous morning practice session, we will review and apply principles, some of which Vanda Scaravelli and Mary Stewart gave us, and some from the Rolf Movement (TM) and contemporary science of anatomy and our autonomic psychobiology which I hope will encourage and free you up. 

General Structure of the Day:  

A) The longer morning session: rigorous yoga asana class.  

We will review or learn 

— a gentle somatic supine sequence to help us connect with safety and the here and now and re-orient the patterns of contraction or collapse that a turbulent world and being on our social media creates.

— standing poses 

— other poses and counter-poses to help us perceive our patterns and things that are helpful and not. 

B) Half-hour break.

C) The afternoon session will be a time for more practice, review, principles, discussion

D) Meditation. 

To start us off, we will cover all the classic standing poses in both January and February.  We will also review variations of squirrel, dog, ekapadarajakapotasana;), simple backbends, spiral floor work, shoulder balance (and head balance where and if desired and appropriate to you) et al.  

March to May Saturdays will see us reviewing and deepening the above, exploring how much can be learned from chair work and variations in kneeling work, and introducing sitting poses, deeper front bends and back bends and all 12 x 144 variations of wagawaga asana. . .

I want to use these Saturdays to help us build a supple, oriented strength and aerobic capacity while we look at how support and ground are a good, bony, easily gettable starting point for then stabilising, strengthening and mobilising the spine, which is the engine for standing and walking.  The legs should be the supports and the tributaries, not the rulers over the extraordinary richness of the river of the spine and its dirigibles, dynamic waves, ripples, and other surprising micro-movement monkey qualities.  Usually, the legs dominate the river of the spine like too many crocodiles or too much algae in the Nile.  

As we play and explore and sweat a little, I hope we can start to see how the legs can support the upper body without dragging it down — allowing the upper body to lift through the sensitive sensoriality of arms, hands, neck and head on the wave of the breath and the scent of lemon or jasmin. 

Of course, starting with one direction from the ground up is an oversimplification.  We could also start from the head and work down to find our feet.  That said, the ground up is simple and known to us.   We wake up and stand on our feet to make coffee, read wisdom texts slowly and silently before dawn and then meditate. We humans flourish as weight-bearing beings on and from the ground, and it is from here that we eventually feel safe enough to explore growing wings, and noticing depth, perspective and horizon on our way to transformation and transfiguration. 

And, of course, we will also take time to be swallows and albatrosses or Masai giraffes and enjoy the sky-to-ground direction.  It must be so because the standing poses, right from the beginning, open us up to sky and space and backbends and spirals and teach how eventually we discover that our heads can find new places and that our necks and spines and visceral spaces are a lot freer than we thought. And that these delicious freedoms are making our knees, shins and ankles freer — and what a joy then to discover that our nose and our toes are connected and even with each other’s noestoeses.

Thanks for reading to the end.  I hope this has made you chuckle and got you interested in a good workout, and lots to learn together! And . . . what could be more fun than standing tall and true?

———————————

22 June & 20 July 2024

‘Diving Into The River Of The Spine’

Putting it all together

  • On each of these two Yoga/RolfMovement days, we will be nourished by the movement wisdom of the yoga poses and illuminated by details from contemporary movement science on how we orientate and regulate our nervous systems.
  • Each day stands alone like the previous two, and each also feeds into the others to help you develop your practice by revisiting and refining principles for moving.
  • Using the “spine” as an organising verticality principle, which is bony, neural, and visceral, we will connect up the explorations of the previous movement days: on feet, legs and hips — and hands, arms and shoulders.
  • The June day will take us from the dynamic of support and its structures into the spine as a curving, bending, supple, stabilising river that is beautifully capable of micro-movements.  As the microbiome needs fermented foods the spinal engine needs the ripples, judders and waves of movements from vertebra to vertebra.  Along with squirrel and wolf tailing, we will look at the triangle, warrior, and moon poses as we make our way into twists and spirals in standing, sitting and lying.  We will notice how posture is a potential for action between ground and sky, past and future, you and me.
  • The July day will continue our explorations and take us further up the spine — into the upper ribs, neck and head relationships, and then into our breath and our sensoriality.  We will look more closely at the spiral dynamic of the spine and how front-bending and back-bending twists complement each other.  We will explore how posture = breathing and is so intimately woven into our sensorial reality and attitude in the space (Am I safe? Is this going to be a creative empowering moment? Do I have agency? Am I attracted towards that, or do I want to move away?  Where are you? Where am I?)
  • With all this in mind, both days will look at grounding and opening to space — as Vanda Scaravelli prophetically taught, “the spine makes a revolutionary two-way movement on the wave of the breath” —  like a tree making roots in the ground and branches towards the sky and the sun.
  • Attention to the detail of our articular reality will inform each day. Joints are spaces where anything can happen, spaces of expectation.
  • As usual, there will be time to take notes, track and journal and for asking questions as we go along.

25 May 2024

‘Soaring Inside and Out With Shoulders, Ribs, Neck, Arms And Hands’
.
  • We will explore, through the wisdom of the ancient yoga poses and contemporary movement science, how our beautiful, sensitive, primarily gestural, expressive, and “behavioural” upper body is a wise and intelligent bridge across which our inner being and outer world communicate as rich co-“creators” of each other.
  • When we override this embodied wisdom, we run into dis-oriented movements and states of being that lead to pain in the articulations and with others.
  • For example, we feel stuck, stiff in the shoulders or neck or unable to allow strength to follow all the way through from the spine to the whole arm and hand; we become tired of being upright or unable to fold deeply across the ribs; strain appears at elbows, wrists and fingers.  We lose connection with ourselves.  We lose connection with others.
  • With that in mind, we will explore welcoming the sensorial world through adaptability in the thoracic basket and shoulder, arm, and hand wing-bridges.
  • We will begin with key somatic explorations that we learned in the April class (review if you attended in April and delightfully new if you are joining in May).
  • We will work in sitting, kneeling and lying to explore how the curves of the river of our spines can come alive as we find safety and orientation between ground and sky.  This will give us a chance to use embryology and early life development as images for richer playfulness with an otherwise rigid and limiting concept and embodied sense of the spine as a pole or column out of which the head and arms emerge.
  • The day will also be a chance to review and deepen our work with “squirrel” and “wolf” tails and “antlers” as we reach, push, balance, and strengthen our upper bodies.  This always touches on the classical sun and moon asana cycles.
  • Later in the day, as we take things into spirals we will listen into the hidden life of ribs, lungs, diaphragm and heart. Skin and all our sensoriality will help us map these deep insides via this friendly organ of sight-touch, which is the mother of all the other senses.
  • We will play with frontbends, backbends, balances and spiral asanas.

13 April 2024

‘Olive Oiling The Hips, Pelvis, Legs, Feet and Spine’

  • When fear gets support stuck
  • When fear becomes too much support
  • When fear becomes over support
  • Healing immobility: when fear and support get stuck

— — Fight, fight and freeze happen in the whole of us.  Primarily, the deep flexors on the front of the spine can lock us into pelvic torsion, which becomes uncomfortable and difficult to undo. These days, we are all being overwhelmed by too many images that are not constructive of a world where beauty, goodness and truth fill us with hope.  Support is not immobility — it is a fluid, plastic, dynamic balance that nourishes us through a sense of a ground we can trust with its landscape of rich natural irregularities, providing an everlasting and everchanging springtime of wobbles, surprises and delicious accidents of perception.

— — — combining yoga asana and rolf movement explorations we will explore the inner world of the lumbar/pelvis/femur relationships how the natural spirals can become twists and torsions that are stuck

— — — we will look at stading and sitting poses along with crouches, front bends, back bends and twists