Greetings from wonderful Bali! (Well sort of – I am actually on the plane home).
Having just spent a week assisting and teaching yoga on Mel Wells’ Goddess Retreat my heart (and my cup) is feeling very full right now. For those of you who don’t know, as well as teaching yoga, I am fortunate to work alongside the lovely Mel as her Community Manager. Mel has many strings to her bow including actress, health coach, bestselling author and most importantly – Chief Goddess! She oozes with self-love and body positivity and her bestselling book The Goddess Revolution is an absolute game changer for those who struggle with their relationship with food and/or their body. Seriously – it changed my life!
So, take thirteen pretty spectacular women, add in a whole lot of self-love, sisterhood, body confidence, manifesting, delicious vegan food (shout out to the absolute culinary genius that is Jay Halford) tattoos, surfing and skinny dipping in the most breath-taking villa in Bali and that pretty much sums up the week I have just had! What an absolute privilege to spend a week with these gorgeous, brave women who inspired me and amazed me every single day. From sharing their emotional stories, to facing their fears, to absolutely blowing their limiting beliefs out of the water, this tribe of Goddesses marched to the beats of their own drums, and I was right there marching alongside of them.
As the retreat was all about self-love, I was honoured to lead the Goddesses in a daily self-love yoga practice. This is a style of yoga I have been practicing for a couple of years now, mainly thanks to my yogi inspiration Sasha Ford (also known as @thatyogamum on social media – go check her out because she is an absolute GODDESS!) Through developing my own practice and taking my own yoga teacher training journey, self-love yoga is something I have whole-heartedly adopted into my very being and given it a very special Sarah twist. I eat, sleep and breathe self-love and it lights me up every single day to be able to practice it in both my personal yoga and with others in the classes I teach.
Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that by the abundance of self-love in my practice there is an absence of it in other styles of yoga – quite the contrary. I’m sure any yogi will agree that self-love should be and is present in all yoga. However, for me, when it comes to yoga, this is what it is all about. This is my bottom line, my golden nugget, my big secret, my super power, the light that shines from me, the thing that resides in my very core, my very soul. It all starts with self-love.
So why? What is it about self-love that just calls to me? I guess in the simplest terms, we only have one body. Our body is truly the only place we can call home during our time on this planet. And our bodies are so freaking clever! Just think about what they have to do to keep you alive? Breathing, pumping blood around the body, digesting our food, sending a gazillion signals around the body in every moment, moving, blinking, getting rid of waste, distributing nutrients. The list goes on and on! They do all this and more at every moment of every day, most of which we don’t even notice. Why wouldn’t we want to look after them and give them constant love and nurturing? They are so precious and what’s more, they are carrying precious cargo. As amazing and beautiful as your body is, YOU ARE NOT YOUR BODY. You are not your weight, your dress size, your skin colour, the colour of your hair, your blood type, your BMI, your height, your eye colour, your body shape. These are all beautiful things about you, but they are not you. YOU ARE YOUR SOUL. That place deep within you where everything resides, that 100% authenticity that is just bursting to be seen, that place where you feel free and at peace. And where does that soul reside? In your body. That’s right, your body is a vehicle carrying precious cargo throughout your life. Think of a parent who is driving their car with their precious baby on board. Do they drive like a lunatic, crashing into everything and damaging the car? Of course not! It’s exactly the same with our bodies. They are carrying this precious life of ours, so we need to protect them to make sure we get safely to our next destination.
Now, bringing this into yoga. For those of you that follow me and my yoga on social media (@selflovesarah_), you’ll know that I do like to post the odd picture or two of me in one of my favourite yoga poses because it just brings me so much joy. It is one of my creative outlets and I just like to share that with the world. However, I am a firm believer that yoga should be about how it feels, not how it looks – and it should feel pretty damn good! That’s not to say that I don’t love to see an inspiring photo of a yogi doing an advanced pose in a picturesque setting, because I do! I am so curious and in admiration of the human body and I just love to see what it can do for both myself and other people – it’s a thing of beauty. So in my classes I really do not care whether you are doing the full variation of the pose or not. I do not want it to be cookie cutter yoga, where everyone looks the same. As another one of my yogi inspirations Adriene Mischler says “Find what feels good”. As long as you are safe and protecting the body, and as long as it feels good for YOU and YOUR body, then you go for it my friend! Take from it what you need and leave the rest.
Self-love is the main reason why I prefer to practice in spaces without mirrors. Although I do get to practice and teach in some gorgeous spaces that do have mirrors too! Obviously, alignment is really important to get the most benefit out of the pose and keep the body safe, however I know for a fact that there are some poses where the correct alignment just does not feel good for me. Virabhadrasana III (Warrior 3) for example – if I were to keep my back foot/leg in the “correct” alignment, I would really hurt my knee and therefore I choose to listen to my body and take a gentler high lunge instead. I truly believe that when we move the body in yoga, we should move it from a place of love and care. We should keep a constant communication going with him/her, continuously asking how he/she feels and moving to reflect this. This is where embodiment comes in. By embodiment, I mean really feeling into the body, going inside, listening and following that intuition; getting out of the head and into the body. I have had students in my classes that have spent the whole hour in Savasana, because they listened to their body and recognised they needed to rest. How amazing is that? What a way to give yourself some self-love! And at the end of the day, it’s all just yoga!
So, I guess the bottom line of what I am trying to say here is that self-love is so important in the practice of yoga. We do not practice yoga to punish the body or force it to lose weight, we practice yoga to celebrate the body and the amazing things it can do. We do not hate the body for how it looks or what it can’t do, but instead we love the body for how it feels and what it can do. We do not push the body into poses that do not feel right for us, but instead we listen to the body and only do what is right for us on that mat in that moment. And this is just the physical practice of yoga, the asanas. I would need at least ten more blog posts to explain the relevance and importance of self-love in other aspects of yoga – don’t worry I’ll write/keep those blog posts just for me……. for now.
Self-love is the greatest gift you could give to yourself and your body……….. go on reader, treat yourself!
Be True. Be You. Be Kind.
Love & Light,
Self Love Sarah x