Hut on the Hill Yoga
Breathe
Yoga Classes, Chair Supported Yoga and Individual Tuition in Lewes. For more information, select one of the following options or fill out the contact form.
Classes
General class all levels:
Thursdays 10am to 11am – Christ Church Hall, Prince Edwards Road, Lewes BN7 1BLChair-supported class (a mix of standing and seated practice):
Tuesday afternoons: 2.30pm – 3.30pm Cliffe Hall, Cliffe High Street, Lewes BN7 2AHClasses are now in-person. They are booked and paid for in advance in 6-weekly blocks (£10 per class). It is possible to join live online via Zoom if you are unable to/prefer not to come to the hall. A Zoom recording of each class is sent out after each class, for you to use, which is useful if you miss a class/for practice during the week. You can join at any time after an initial chat and health questionnaire so that I have full background details before you begin. I do not have a ‘drop-in’ system. Each 6-week block is taught as a ‘mini-course’ with a theme and progression throughout the block.
Individual Tuition/Yoga Therapy
People opt for individual yoga tuition for a variety of reasons; a group class yoga student may wish to deepen their practice with their own home practice plan, or it may be that there is a health consideration which would make individual tuition, in the form of a yoga therapy home practice plan, appropriate.This could be for someone with experience – or none – of yoga practice.Your personal yoga practice can be developed over time to support you and reflect the changing nature of life and the challenges we face.Using modifications appropriate to the individual student, I can adapt the various methods of practice for the student, according to their ‘starting place’.Rather like physiotherapy, only if you do your ‘exercises’ (yoga practice) at home, do you achieve results! From an initial commitment of as little as only 10 minutes out of your day, we can start to build a practice which suports you personally.How it works:
Initial consultation/practice with a student – an hour and a quarter. This allows the opportunity to listen to you, take a medical history and assess movement/limitations etc and establish what you hope to achieve from their practice.At this first meeting, I design (and work through with the student) a first individual practice plan – the length being determined by how long the student feels they want to allocate to their home practice, it might be just 20 minutes, it might be longer. Ideally daily or at least several times a week for the practice to be effective.I can record that part of the session if it is helpful for the student to have that to use at home, as well.Review:
Review (an hour) is usually after several weeks, initially and then about once every 4 weeks but this can be more or less frequent, depending on the individual student’s requirement/circumstances. The important thing is for the student to establish a practice routine at home which works for them.Cost:
The fee is £50 per session. Meeting on a regular basis enables the student to establish a regular practice habit. That might be once a month for some people, more frequently for others….. you will decide this for yourself.Location
Appointments available at a small studio in the Nevill area (free parking on street/128 bus stop nearby).
The Yoga I Teach
During the 20th century, a very physical approach to yoga (with the invention of many new and varied postures) enjoyed a huge surge in popularity in the West. Yoga in the West has come to be seen by some as a system of exercises to tone and stretch the body – which can certainly be part of the objective of our yoga prace but there is so much more to yoga.We can work not only with the body but also with the breath and the mind – using them as tools to help us concentrate and lead us to a state of physical relaxation and mental clarity. By attempting to still the ‘chitter-chatter’ of the mind, we are often able to see more clearly and deal with life situations more calmly and more effectively. By allowing our movements to follow our breath pattern, the whole movement practice becomes a ‘moving meditation’.In the yoga system in which I trained, developed by the late T.K. Desikachar, we apply yoga to the individual, to respect the specific needs, condition and age of the individual student (this is why my group classes are never larger than 10 students, so that I can give each student my attention). Using the many tools of yoga, we can enable the individual to practice appropriately and safely.
My Yoga Teaching Journey
I started attending yoga classes 25 years ago at the recommendation of a physiotherapist, in order to try and manage chronic pain, a result of badly-healed neck fractures/whiplash injuries sustained in a car accident in my early twenties. Yoga brought a good deal of relief and empowered me to ‘manage’ the pain. There were times though when I found the yoga postures very challenging and not always possible. I then discovered the Desikachar tradition of yoga which teaches that yoga should be taught from the starting place of the individual – whatever that might be – with poses adapted accordingly and very much based on moving with the breath. He famously said once that no matter what limitations people had “If they can breathe, they can do yoga!”I now felt ‘at home’ with my yoga practice. I soon realised that Desikachar’s methods, modifying the practice, were extremely effective and brought immense relief for my physical condition and overall feeling of wellbeing. My yoga practice became, and remains, a vital support.In order to share this approach with others, I undertook a 2-year/500-hour (AYS – Association for Yoga Studies/Sadhana Mala) yoga teacher training course for teaching group classes. The teacher training programme, taught by Ranju Roy and David Charlton (both leading UK teachers in this system of yoga), included the skills to teach posture practice safely and effectively, study of anatomy and physiology and the study of breathing practices and their therapeutic application.A further 2-year/500 hour course in individual yoga therapy again with AYS/Sadhana Mala organisation, led to a qualification approved by the CNHC (Complementary and Natural Healthcare Council) which was set up by the Department of Health to register complementary health practitioners who meet a high standard of good practice.In addition to offering individual yoga therapy (at my small studio on the western edge of Lewes and at the Open Door Clinic in central Lewes), I teach small group classes– both general classes and chair-supported classes.I have a particular interest in working with people who (for whatever reason) are no longer able to get up and down easily from the floor and for whom a modified, often chair-supported, practice with a mix of standing and seated practice, can enable them to access yoga. I also take yoga into a local care home once a week, working with a group of residents, some in wheelchairs, for a seated practice.I regularly attend training courses to continue to broaden my knowledge of the yoga tradition and of working with specific conditions including courses on yoga for Parkinsons and age-related conditions as well as lower back problems and menopause-related conditions in women.In this tradition, we focus on the breath as our fundamental support, finding a sense of spaciousness and freedom of body and mind which comes as welcome relief from the fast pace of modern life.As well as the more obvious physical benefits of building and maintaining our strength and flexibility and improving the quality of our breath, our practice can bring us towards a greater feeling of wellbeing, offering us a support when dealing with life’s obstacles and allowing us to be more open to the joy of life.