Why do I practice Yoga, Focusing and why and how do I share it...

My yoga journey began in 2002 and teaching in 2007. It gently crept into my life opening not just my body but a new way of living in, through and from the body.  To some degree felt like a homecoming. Wherever I could open my mat I felt home. As if something was waiting on the inside to be recognised, engaged and  moved without words, but through simple presence, breath, movement and touch.

A bit like in Nayyirah Waheed words:
"And I said to my body softly: ‘I want to be your friend...’
It took a long breath and replied: ‘I have been waiting my whole life for this' ..."

So, after a few years of practice when my beloved teacher Agnieszka Oleksyn asked me to teach in her yoga school, I had a big yes for it, and yoga emerged into the foreground of my daily life. I began with Iyengar Yoga and the value of alignment and clarity but as the teaching began revealing to me our individual uniqueness, rather than doing something to the body, I began inviting myself and others to move from it, engage with it, sense inwardly into it, receive it and be received by it, and that brought more meditative and inward oriented practice of Yin Yoga. 

Since then I dived into many yoga training courses and workshops connecting threads across different traditions (Hatha, Iyengar, Scaravelli, Sivananda, Yin yoga, Restorative yoga, Ayurvedic perspective on yoga) and different perspectives on embodied practices (anatomical/fascial, psychosomatic approaches). Also the beautiful art of skillful touch through the practice of Thai Yoga massage. So rather than attaching myself to one particular perspective, style or tradition, I began allowing them to inspire the practice in the belief that all philosophies are useful, all philosophies are incomplete, do not be attached to them.

I was blessed to be able to learn from teachers like Richard Miller, Donna Farhi, Judith Hanson Lasater, David Frawley Alan Finger, Paul Grilley and Angela Farmer who have been influencing my practice and teaching.

In 2008, I opened the YogaTree school here in Rickmansworth, (now also Chesham and Watford) offering weekly classes, workshops, and yoga retreats. And that is being now surrounded by a network of beautiful people joining us here, which I am deeply grateful for.

As for Focusing practice, it emerged from the meeting between yoga and my background as a Psychologist. I realized that through the field of my body, I am in touch with the information that cannot be entered through intellect alone. I wanted to engage with it, to make that felt knowing more palpable, translatable and relevant. Focusing made it possible and pointed to how to let the unclear bodily felt sense "open" into a whole field of intricate detail from which new steps of thought and action emerge.

My sense is that lots of practitioners gravitate to the yoga practice as a way of retreating from the grip of their everyday life, to open up to a more alive and grounded place beyond the grips of their minds, life circumstances, and life stories. Yoga and Focusing offer space for the body to be itself, uncramped and as Gendlin says:

 " If you want the bigger system to work with you, we have to leave it some room". In that way, the body becomes a source of knowing " Once you come into this literal body here then you find a space that is much bigger than your literal body. It's quite clear that's it is note exactly your literal body, but that is where the entrance is".

 So both Yoga and Focusing become a door into my sense of innate embodied knowing, a bridge  between inner and outer, subtle and gross that inspires, orients and informs my personal journey and teaching. So my personal focusing journey continues to unfold and I share it with others, supporting their inquiry in individual sessions and teaching the skill of Focusing during the BFA certified Focusing skills course.

"Your body is not a machine, rather a wonderfully intricate interaction with everything around you, which is why it "knows" so much just in being" G. Gendlin