Yin Yang Yoga retreat

Last weekend, I treated at a Yin and Yang yoga retreat in the countryside, offering Shiatsu sessions to the participants.

The retreat’s rhythm - flowing between dynamic movement and deep stillness - created a powerful space for inner work.

Witnessing and supporting this process reminded me of the essential intertwining of Yin and Yang: how rest gives meaning to action, and how movement is grounded in stillness.

How our foundation is ever present in our day to day upward/outward rising, expansion and activity.

How it seaps into all aspects of life.

How we are the very foundation to ourselves.

How our foundation needs honoring.

We, not as the doer of things, but the being of things.

Being immersed in that balance, surrounded by nature and open-hearted, curious and courageous women invited me into deep reflection.

While supporting them through touch and presence, I found myself reconnecting with my own sense of purpose, calm, foundation.

As well as those places that lack inner support. Where my foundation feels unstable.

How allowing to sink through it, wide, soft and heavy, allowed me to enter into me.

A sense of broadening and wider base that's not found in the upward rising of our minds and spirit, or expansion of yoga poses. Rather a sense of the integration of spirit in a deeply sacred body that in its essence knows connection with itself without striving.

Knows it in dropping into the earth - essentially into "things" too. In leaning into what presents.

And it's a very physical proces.

One that oftentimes may come with pain, vulnerabilty, a sense of destabilisation.

Though it may feel challenging or even scary at times I can only warmly invite both myself and us over and over again, to allow the dropping of ourselves.

A sentence arrived during one of the treatments.

"It is life letting life be."

And our body is the physical vehicle through which it guides alongside spirit and through which we may become aware of the process unfolding.

The retreat seemed to be equally healing for us all.