03/04/2026
My Practice over Winter contemplating a personal Winter.
It's been a long time in an asana context, that I had fully flipped things on their head. Recently I managed to get some solitary float time in this space.
Everything in Yoga is symbolic. 2 years ago, sitting in my own personal Winter at the loss of my Mum, I could not look at my mat for the first 6 months. The mat is somewhere I meet the truest version of myself. Working at a soul level. The self.
In loss, getting on my mat meant facing the loss and moving directly into the abyss of bereavement. I wasn't ready for that, as death came unexpectedly. Everything hurt. Everything felt cold and barren on the surface, but with a searing fire of love raging at it's core. The love is the torch in a dark, cold and barren underworld of apparent loss.
After 6 months, I could practice with a chair as support, symbolic of the sturdiness my Mum once gave me, missing in the physical realm. It was enough of a practice at that point.
2 years in, I have grown in grief and started to learn to stand on my own 2 feet (or head) again.
Like headstand, life can turn on it's head. But we come out slightly different, shifted, a new perspective. Not necessarily fixed or ready, but a new feeling in the unknown.
Sure I needed a wall to journey to headstand, to help me balance on my own. I still needed support. But growth does not happen without support, neither does growth happen without the transition of a death. Old gives way to new.
There is a beautiful stillness in headstand. A stasis and a world that can be sensed.
I wrote a simple Yogic poem/writing that sums up this sentiment to me and in honour of the turning of Winter, personal or Seasonal.
The Inward stillness of Winter:
The journey of Yoga, as the journey towards the soul, is an inward one.
Contained in you, is everything.
Like the seeds, dormant underground in the depths of Winter,
some still, some stirring within the darkness.
they wait,
rested, patient, knowing.
Containing all the cosmos, held within the stasis of the soil,
the dark, the cold.
Their time will come, when ready.
As will yours.
The journey of Yoga goes in, to find all.
For you are all that is.
Lx
