fajitas and flow

Good evening dear readers and thank you for all your lovely comments about your experiences of dorm rooms!

Sorry I've been MIA most of the weekend, I've been busy moving the blog over to its own URL.  Well I say "I" it's mostly been Himself who should be thanked in abundance!  I would hate to lose any of my dear readers so if you scroll down to the bottom of this post there are instructions on how to keep following.  The new webpage is still a bit of a work in progress but over the next week or so there will be all sorts of fun things appearing over there so do keep an eye out.  I'll be posting both here and there for one week and then moving over completely.  Do come with!!!

We did also find time to cook fajitas for Ma and Pa Yogini at their house.  Here is my second chef hard at work at the chopping board....

....and not much liking having his photo taken!

Unfortunately, soon after this he had to be sent out for salsa which I'd forgotten to bring with me - I also forgot my camera so do forgive poor quality camera phone piccies.

Nearly ready....peppers of all colours, onions, leeks, mushrooms and Quorn pieces.

.....this was demolished in seconds!

For dessert we had another of my many vegan cupcake recipes.  This is my current favourite - lemon and orange with lemon frosting and a few grapes to pretend to be healthy!

After too much food on a Saturday night what more could you want for your Sunday morning than a nice short flow sequence.  I'm sorry this is a bit late but I'm sure it works on Monday mornings too!

1.  Tadasana - stepping the left leg back into wide legged stance
2.  Turn the right foot out coming in to Virabhadrasana 2 on the right.
3.  Inhale into Reverse Warrior
4,  Exhale into Parsovokonasana (left arm stretching up to the ceiling)
5.  Inhale left arm alongside the ear.
6.  Exhale over the right leg into Parsvottanasana (keep that right knee bent!)
7.  Inhale into Virabhadrasana 1
8.  Exhale into Virabhadrasana 2

Repeat steps 3-8 between two and four times and then repeat the whole flow on the left hand side.

Finish with a nice relaxed Padottonasana.

Happy Sunday!
~~~~

As I mentioned, I'm moving the blog over to its own URL and I would love it if all of my dear dear readers came with me!  So here's how.


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early memories (an extract)

(mum and dad c. 1978 - apologies for lack of framing in photo, I was only 4)

My mother used to go to a yoga class once a week. I would have been about 4 or 5 and I remember watching her get ready thinking how elegant she looked in her leotard and footless tights, her long hair hanging down her back. It must have been Thursdays because I used to stay home with my Nan and watch Top of the Pops in my personal favourite evening attire of red dressing gown and Adidas trainers. This yoga, I thought to myself as I danced along to the music on the television imagining what my mother was doing at that moment, must be a beautiful thing. When I grow up I want to do that.


(me with my Nan outside Kings College Chapel, Cambridge c.1978 - check out my tree pose!)

I didn’t have to grow up by much. I went to my first yoga class alongside my mum when I was about 7 or 8 years old and I don’t really remember a time when yoga wasn’t a part of my life.

I wasn’t what you would call a sporty child at school. In fact I was rubbish. Everything always hurt, everything always seemed so difficult. I remember one summer practicing backward somersaults in the back garden all weekend just so I wouldn’t be the laughing stock in gym class the next week, as usual. I never really questioned my bad co-ordination, I just thought we can’t all be good at everything and left it at that. After all I had something that my classmates didn’t. I had yoga.

When I was 15 and working for my Duke of Edinburgh Bronze award, I chose yoga as my “sport” module. When I was 18 and I was doing a lot of performance art alongside my A Levels, I found yoga helped me stretch, breathe, relax. When I was travelling, yoga was a talking point with other backpackers. When I was at university, the Tuesday night yoga class became the hub of my social life, although looking back I suspect I had quite a sedate university education in comparison to a lot of my peers. Yoga was just there. It never felt like a sport, or a gym class. It just felt like my body moving in the way it needed to move, powered by my breath, as my mind stilled and my stresses, my tensions, my worries fell away.

Despite all this it was years before I considered teaching yoga for a living. I still remembered the little girl who couldn’t do a backward somersault to save her life. Who wanted to be taught yoga by her? But then the strangest thing happened. My dad qualified as a yoga teacher.

(dad and me on his 70th birthday - November 2008)

Now I love my dad very much, but if you saw him, you just couldn’t picture it. He’s a slightly overweight accountant who does love a glass of wine now and again (well now really). I guess somewhere along the line mum must have dragged him along to a class too and, like me, he just had to keep going back. Before he knew it he was signed up on a teacher training course.

I talk about how yoga is for EVERYONE a lot, but this was my turning point. This is the point when I realised that yoga isn’t about how strong you are or what you look like. It isn’t about how “perfect” your postures are, or whether you are wearing the right clothes. It isn’t even about austere living and strict rules. I realised that most aspiring yogis and yoginis are just ordinary folk like me with bad back, dodgy hips and podgy tummies, with ordinary jobs that on some days they can't stand, and ordinary families who, on some days, can’t stand them. And I realised that maybe I could share my experiences of yoga with other people too, just like my dad.

Yogi(ni) readers, what are your earliest memories of yoga? Where did they take you?

Non Yogi(ni) readers, what is your passion, and what are your earliest memories of it?

god bless us one and all!

Seven Mile Beach, Tasmania

The magic of Christmas Eve is upon us and in just a few hours I will be leaving work and not returning until 4th January 2010 (twenty ten still sounds so far in the future to me!). Bliss! Unfortunately I am succumbing to a cold so I'm not sure what our plans will be over Christmas now but be sure there will be plenty of reading, plenty of films, plenty of good food and a lot of sleep. And my daily yoga practice of course!

This time of the year always makes me nostalgic for Christmasses past, especially those I spent in Tasmania. I love Christmas in the summertime (even if there is something very bizarre about walking down a street in Sydney in 40 degrees of heat hearing the sound of sleighbells coming from the shops). I received an email from my cousin on Monday just as she was off to catch her flight from Melbourne to Hobart for Christmas. I wish I could be there with them.

Christmas is a special time of year no matter where in the world you are or who you are with or what you believe. Even if the whole Nativity story isn't your thing, it's good to look at this time of year as a rebirth of sorts, in which we can turn our lives around, live more fully, more mindfully, more in tune with the world around us.

So I wish you dear readers old and new a wonderful holiday period. And keep practicing yoga wherever you are. All you need is the corner of a room and towel after all!

Namaste Everyone x

Swan Lake

"[A] description that is often used to describe it is 'homo-erotic' ... but surely just erotic would be a better way to view it. Are my male swans erotic only to gay men? I think not!"
-- Matthew Bourne



I was lucky enough to spend my Saturday afternoon out of the freezing damp streets tucked up cosily at Sadler's Wells Theatre watching Matthew Bourne's Swan Lake (again!). A treat for my mum who hasn't seen it before.

I cannot tell you how much I love this production. Acts 2 and 4 are, to me, the most beautiful, erotic, ekphrastic pieces of art I have ever seen. Dance, more than any other media is constantly moving, changing, in flux. Like the universe around it. Like yoga.

And by casting male swans we are shown their power, their resentment and anger at their situation, their bestial quality in a way that their tutu'd female counterparts never could.

Plus of course it helps that they are hot. Chippendales for the thinking woman!

Reasons to be Thankful

"So who wants to live forever when these moments will only come the once?" -- Justin Sullivan




This week I saw the best band in the world. Every time I hear Vagabonds live my heart bursts. Dancing to NMA for 2 hours is worth feeling as though my sacro-iliac joint is on fire the next day. Never, ever stop touring. Never. One Family. One Tribe.

Also this week I am grateful for:-

* Poetry
* Foo Fighters on VH1 Storytellers (even if they did bleep out all the "fucks" - meanwhile Jay-Z is allowed to call women "bitches" without being bleeped!)
* Desperately needed days off work
* Donating blood (another one off my list). Having needed blood myself in the past I always swore when I was well enough I would give it back.
* Yin Yoga
* Cooking for my family (which included British wine. Yes that's right, British wine! And it was nice!)
* Sunday morning power walks followed by curling up on the sofa
* Reading a whole book in a weekend (I used to do this a lot, I just haven't found the time in the last couple of years)
* Things to look forward to

Reasons to be Thankful

It's been a rollercoaster of a week and on this Sunday afternoon in November I feel somewhat drained by it all. But the rollercoaster has brought with it some amazing things. The two most important are somewhat interconnected and need some backstory.

Learning to Love London Again and the Return of my Writing Mojo

It only took two and a half months of living elsewhere. On Wednesday night, for a moment, I missed London. Don't get me wrong, moving out of London was the best thing I've done in a long time, but I guess it's natural I will miss it occassionally - I lived there for ten years after all.

On examination however it wasn't London per se that I missed - it was a specific part of London. A part I haven't visited for a long long time. A part, I'm sorry to say, I have never visited with Himself.

When I first moved to London as a wide-eyed 25-year-old the Ex and I lived in a gorgeous flat in a beautiful Georgian house conversion in Highgate. It was like my dream of what London should be. We had parks, we had Coleridge's house, we had a cemetery (where EVERYONE is buried), we had Hampstead Heath just across from us in which we had Keats House. My writing muse had never been stronger than it was there. I wrote all the time. I wrote for the Ham and High paper. I wrote for the local magazine Buzz. I wrote my first (unpublished and will undoubtedly remain so) novel. Looking back it was wonderful (I look back with rose coloured spectacles here of course, it wasn't that wonderful as my health was diabolical - but isn't nostalgia and hindsight all about forgetting the bad stuff?).

We were there for just under a year - then we moved and everything started fucking me off and my hate-hate affair with London began.

Over the last week or so my writing muse has returned for the first time in ages. To put this in perspective I have written two mediocre poems in the last twelve months and that's it. No magazine articles, no short stories and the only thing I've added to my in progress novel is a comma, which, like Oscar Wilde, I later removed. (Please note the only resemblance I have to the genius of Wilde is my constant input and output of commas, nothing else. I would never assume such arrogance!) This week I have written the first draft of a poem and a short story which just may amount to something and have sent off a little something to a magazine.

And so I remember Highgate. And I want to go back and take Himself. I want to show him my past. It feels important and necessary. We're going before Christmas and I'm excited.

Other things to be thankful for this week
* Being given two weeks' worth of cover teaching for a yoga teacher I hold in very high regard.
* The latest nephew being born without a hitch and absolutely perfect apparently! :D
* Doing a presentation at a sixth form open evening for work and making lots of good networking connections. This also made me feel nostalgic for my years at sixth form and especially the Latin stall at open evenings. I ran the A Level Latin stall two years in a row. Hardly anyone ever came :(
* Solo Acoustic Everlong.
* My new Foo tshirt.
* A day off with Himself, drinking Christmas flavoured soy latte in Starbucks and discussing the future.
* Yoga with my mum.
* Walking with my face against a November storm.

Last Post

Mum sent me this poem today by Carol Anne Duffy, our newest Poet Laureate.

In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
If poetry could tell it
backwards, true, begin
that moment shrapnel scythed you to the stinking mud ...
but you get up, amazed, watch bled bad blood
run upwards from the slime into its wounds;
see lines and lines of British boys rewind
back to their trenches, kiss the photographs from home -
mothers, sweethearts, sisters, younger brothers
not entering the story now
to die and die and die.
Dulce - No - Decorum - No - Pro patria mori.
You walk away.
You walk away; drop your gun (fixed bayonet)
like all your mates do too -
Harry, Tommy, Wilfred, Edward, Bert -
and light a cigarette.
There's coffee in the square,
warm French bread
and all those thousands dead
are shaking dried mud from their hair
and queuing up for home. Freshly alive,
a lad plays Tipperary to the crowd, released
from History; the glistening, healthy horses fit for heroes, kings.
You lean against a wall,
your several million lives still possible
and crammed with love, work, children, talent, English beer, good food.
You see the poet tuck away his pocket-book and smile.
If poetry could truly tell it backwards,
then it would.

Reasons to be Thankful

Thursday Night was lovely. The firework display for Guy Fawkes Night was awesome and it was so nice for the whole family to get together for food and laughter - it's so hard to get everyone together at the same time! I felt horribly under the weather all day on Thursday, tired and washed out, and I didn't really feel like going but it turned out (as is so often the case) that it was exactly what I needed. So I am ridiculously thankful for my hilarious family this week. Other things that have made me smile with glee this week:-

* Himself making me vegan "cheeseburgers" for tea on Friday night.
* The new Foo Fighters Greatest Hits, Dave Grohl being on Jools Holland's TV show and also him saying that a Greatest Hits does not mean the Foos are over. Hurrah!
* Becoming a redhead again.
* Having the photos taken for my new yoga website (coming soon!) and actually liking all of them.
* Buying spring bulbs with my mum.
* Planting spring bulbs and reminding myself that winter may be bleak but it doesn't last forever.
* The new Flight of the Conchords album (laughed until I cried).
* Purple stripey wooly tights - winter was invented for them!
* Yoga, yoga, yoga, yoga.

ETA: I can't believe I forgot one - this week I have "met" a whole bunch of lovely new people on the blogosphere and for that I am grateful :D