Yoga in PJ's

When folks think of yoga they’ll often think of a skinny, impossibly bendy woman in some jazzy leggings doing a fancy pose. That’s a very impressive, and often beautiful image. Perhaps it is a great image to encourage people to try to do yoga, as an aspirational image, to try to make ever-more-complex shapes.

In my 20s and early 30s, I was exploring more complex poses, becoming more bendy, practicing faster vinyasa, more complicated transitions between poses. It was exhilarating, fun, an adventure into the limits of flexibility and strength.

But I was lucky enough to experience an immobilising car-crash in my 30s — this stopped my search for increasing complexity and flexibility in its tracks. Instead, I was forced to learn how to move again, slowly and gently, through therapeutic yoga. And when my heart was broken into pieces after my husband left me shortly afterwards, I learned the healing power of breath.

Now, in my late 40s, I’m happy to say my practice is slowing down, in a world which demands ever increasing speed. My practice is a practice of caring and attending to my inner world, so that I can make better decisions and respond with wisdom to life’s challenges.

My physical practice is calming and regulating my nervous system through movement, meditation and breathwork. A refinement of the art of knowing myself, becoming more sensitive to my own body, and keeping my nervous system less jangled and stress-levels controlled. It’s getting to know my body better, feeling it from the inside out. It's a coming home practice, coming home to my true self.

That sense of home-coming is done in the comfort of my own home. In a cosy nook in my front room, in front of the fireside on chilly winter nights, and in front of the view of trees, to remind me of the expansiveness and beauty of nature and consciousness.

I mostly practice either first thing in the morning, to gently yawn my body awake. Or in the evening before bedtime to release and calm the day. I wear my PJ’s. Because they are comfortable, because I feel cosy, supported and nurtured and it’s just what I’m wearing in the morning and evening.

I mostly practice either first thing in the morning, to gently yawn my body awake. Or in the evening before bedtime to release and calm the day. I wear my PJ’s. Because they are comfortable, because I feel cosy, supported and nurtured and it’s just what I’m wearing in the morning and evening.