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A picture of a woman in a flowy white dress standing on top of a mountain. She's twirling a strand of her hair and the sun is setting behind her.

September 2024

Undone

It’s 2024 and our worst nightmares are coming true. Every dystopian sci-fi sketch plagues our news feeds. Every cautionary biblical apocalyptic fable is outside our windowpanes. In so many ways we’re navigating a living hell and it’s a gut-wrenching journey to take.

Multifarious layers of uncertainty and division fold to overshadow the now seemingly banal biblical allegories of fire, famine and pestilence, which have been a permanent fixture since the dawn of modern history.

In the UK, we’re seeing a stark and sharp increase in murders – with women and children as the victims. Across the Middle East, denigration towards women bears a hefty weight also, and that’s set against the backdrop of war raging on. Our siblings in the US are experiencing serious political unrest, with a tremblingly tight campaign trail causing testable concern across the globe. A new wave of self-expression pops up in the guise of protests but it feels like we’re all crying louder but drowning out each other’s voices; our messages lost in the cacophony of collective cries and our separation stark.

It's hard to comprehend exactly how the moral fabric of society has come undone. Frayed at the edges and ripped at the seams, the time has come to wonder how much longer we can go on like this. We’re faced with whispers of everything we don’t want to hear. The internet and social media amplify the noise, riddling the airwaves with discordant dis-ease. So, with toxicity precipitating through the essence of our souls, I can’t help but wonder: will we ever stitch back together a society that has come undone? The world is divided, and, by the laws of the universe, we can only reach a point where we’re so far apart we’ll have to come together again.

Where we repel, we must attract.

And for yoga philosophers and students alike, this is all we can hope for and continue to work towards. But we’re increasingly finding the world is pressing on us for resolution. Yoga isn’t a sticking plaster for fixing the world – but it can support us in redirecting our understanding of society at a basal level.  The raw beauty of yoga is that it’s meaning is individual to each person who practices. Stemming beyond the mat, yoga provides you with the tools to rediscover who you are and re-adjudicate your values.

Yoga is replete with unity, as we discussed in our blog ‘What actually is yoga, anyway?’ – literally meaning to yoke, or to join, it isn’t just about connecting with people around you. It starts with reconnecting with yourself. Once you peel back the layers, excavate external noise and retreat inwards, you can determine what’s important to you. Values and ethics realign. The fog lifts and you return home to your heart. Sure, there’s an underlying moral compass and philosophy for good living with yoga, but that will always translate to something different to each of us. It’s subjective. We’re non-partisan practitioners who eventually change. Everything we’ve known before comes undone and, as we watch it unravel vertiginously across the floor, we find change. That change is manifold. We make amends with what once irritated us, we find peace in things that frustrated us and we modify our lives, so we no longer participate in those things. Subsequently, we change how we interact with and react to the world around us.

And that’s how yoga changes the world. Not by organised mass meditations (even armies do those), that act alchemically on people’s personalities, but by shifting priorities and challenging what we think is right in this world. Yoga pants its roots deep within one’s soul and elicits change that reverberates right to the very core of who we are. Once we’re free to embody the love and compassion society’s told us is subversive and anarchic, then we can actually start to change the world.

With love and light, 

Kate 

Free People FP Movement .jpg

Reconnect:
FP Movement by Free People

Sustainable clothing brands scatter social media but few manage to channel the insouciance of the bohemian spirit quite like Free People. Engendered across the pond by our American siblings, Free People lead the way in modern alternative fashion. Contemporaneous with a lust for embracing the wild and unleashing our souls, their sub-brand FP Movement encapsulates the bodies desire to move, frolic and run free across all terrains. Supporting all ranges of dynamic movement and disciplines of exercise, their A/W 24 collection includes a dedicated ballet barre fusion collection and climate tolerant pieces designed to withstand the elements and encourage you to dive into nature - whatever the weather. 

Reflect:
The Best Year 

Human nature means when we make changes, we want results and we want them right now. But changes originate in habits and making small shifts in the way we think, behave and respond. Keeping journals or records to identify our idiosyncrasies and inclinations is a simple way to make the incremental adjustments that have big results. Day-by-day observations introduce us to a ritualistic approach, where we set time aside for ourselves to reflect, write, and regroup.

 

We love The Best Year by Intelligent Change. Acting as a portable portfolio for CEO-ing your life, the chic journal encourages you to achieve balance between productivity and pleasure, set achievable goals, cogitate an action plan and track your progress. Paired with inspirational quotes and passages by eminent psychologists, such as Carl Jung, and this truly is the modern intellects tool for introspection and change.   

Introspection:
The School of Life

How well do we ever really know ourselves? The Know Yourself deck of cards by The School of Life offers a unique approach to self-exploration. An elegantly curated deck of 60 cards provides prompts to help you uncover who you really are and why you do those things you do.

 

Each card provides a prompt and an exercise on one side, and an analytic piece on the other, formulated to support you in discovering the slipperiest concept of them all: who you are.  

Focus:
Parigotte | Wild Rituals 

Endorsing change through the power of nature, Parigotte present a collection of herbal applications to assuage the attenuations of modern life. Calling on you to embrace your raw environment and recharge through the ritual of nature, their own brand collection of herbal topicals offers specially blended preparations to transplant your mind and spirit in nature, regardless of where you really are. We love Parigotte's Organic Calm Balm, replete with soothing tones of  lavender and chamomile, blended with uplifting notes of citrus. The ideal tonic to sink your soul into deep relaxation. 

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