Threads

It’s been way too long since I wrote a blog post! Like many of us, I have been in a transformative cocoon over the pandemic period, but we are today at summer solstice in the northern hemisphere, the peak of the light at the wheel of the year, and I am feeling ready, after a lot of hard work both externally and internally, to start to take concrete steps forward.

In the yoga tradition, these key points in the revolution of the earth around the sun, such as dawn, sunset, midday, the solstices and the equinoxes, are called sandhyā, or ‘sacred junctures’. The ancients would honour them with Vedic prayer. In fact one such prayer, the Gāyatrī mantra, dedicated to Savitr, an ancient Sun deity, was originally written down in the Rig Veda, the most ancient of written yogic texts, between around 1500 and 1200 BCE, for the purpose of honouring the sunrise. This prayer is still chanted and sung today, and as such is probably the oldest continually used prayer across the whole of civilisation.

And a version of that prayer (by Deva Premal and Miten) was being played during a beautiful ceremony a group of us co-created and wove at the weekend, during which were shedding everything energetically that no longer serves us, allowing our essential nature to rise and shine like the sun. I made a promise during that ceremony to do just that: I am weaving together all the threads of the physical and spiritual learnings I have integrated to evolve my offering and the Nartana Yoga School teacher trainings at the beautiful venue my partner and I are co-creating here in Wales (read more about that here).

Our first Goddess Mandala Yoga retreat and CPD offering will be happening here in September. Sign up for my newsletter or follow me on Instagram to be first to hear updates.

If you are interested in reading more about the history of yoga, you can read an article that I wrote for Amrita magazine about the significance of āsana, or physical yoga postures, in the evolution of yoga here.