Yoga Day Workshops

Yoga Saturdays 2026

Learning to Move With More of Myself

full description coming soon…

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

Myddleton Square, London, N1

      • 24 Jan
      • 14 Feb
      • 14 Mar
      • 25 Apr
      • 23 May
      • 13 Jun
      • 18 Jul
      • 22 Aug TBC
      • 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 £60 at the door or by bank transfer — see below.  No checks.  

Cancellation:  once your place is confirmed, should you decide to cancel, you must pay for the class.  I will refund you if someone takes your place from 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.

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“Standing Tall”    In The Ground and In The Sky

re-discovering the standing poses towards a flourishing yoga practice 

Wisdom is not knowing more, it is knowing with more of your self.

This retreat is for beginning and ongoing yoga students and for those interested in deepening their movement practice, but who may not have done any yoga before.  It is also for those who are curious about the relationship between our embodiment and meditation practice.

The movement teaching style will combine the ancient practice of Yoga Asana with Rolf Movement and other contemporary movement research modalities.  Some sessions will be offered for those wishing to deepen an ongoing movement practice.

As we spend time over the five days in silence, moving, and meditating together, we will explore among other themes: the dynamics of rest, recovery and repair as wisdom skills; what it means to be “wired for connection” to self, other and Spirit, and what our embodied relationship is to creation.

“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. The person  who rises early to seek her will have

no difficulty,
 for they will find her sitting at their gates.”

– Wisdom 6.12-17

“Wisdom is not knowing more, it is knowing with more of your self” – Cynthia Bourgeoult

With that in mind, we will explore the meaning of questions like:

How can I deepen a movement/yoga practice that nourishes my health and sense of wholeness?

What are some of the tools for contemplative living?

What is the relationship between wisdom, creation and embodiment?

What can be meant by wholeness, transformation, integration and repair?  What is trauma, and can it be healed?

Who is my neighbour? How do we love and serve our neighbour?

*******

Each day there will be Meditation, Lectio Divina and Yoga / Rolf MovementTM sessions and suitable instruction will be provided on all.

We will use the standing and balancing poses in yoga as a frame to understand how the other yoga poses develop. We will use movement theory, anatomy and art to explore principles like “ground and space,” “midline”, “posture as a potential for action,” and “spirals,” to name some. Standing up tall will provide the springboard for looking at walking and standing poses; as well as the sitting poses, back-bending, twisting and spiralling movements.

We will also look at ‘the hearth’ of our embodiment — our autonomic nervous system — and how it works closely with the heart and face to bring us out of protecting ourselves and into connection with others and the creation we are intimately part of.

Each day we will enter a contemplative rhythm – the morning will be in gentle silence from the first meditation session till lunch with conversation opening up into the afternoon and evening.  There will be 3 Meditation sessions, Lectio Divina – a quiet reflective time with texts from the Wisdom tradition and Yoga/ Rolf MovementTM sessions.  Ample time will be given for discussion and journaling. Tracking insights from our practice sessions will be encouraged so please bring a notebook, coloured pens or pencils to explore this way of working. There will be time for rest and walks in the beautiful woods of Bonnevaux and its landscape of rolling hills, ancient trees and waves of vibrant birdsong.

Bonnevaux is an interfaith Christian community living in the spirit of Saint Benedict and his monastic tradition. Through the practice of meditation, the community is open to all people in search of a spiritual path for healing self, the world, and peace.

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?

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

Cost :  £60 for each day.  18 people per class.  Cash payment at the door or by bank transfer.  No cheques, please.  I will send payment details for transfers with your confirmation.

Cancellation:  once your place is confirmed, should you decide to cancel, you must pay for the class.  I will refund you if someone takes your place from the waiting list.

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

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

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.

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

Previous Workshops

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’
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  • 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