My personal practice and teaching path lives within a framework I call Yoga Bhāvanā. This is an approach that has developed organically in my own practice life over the last three decades of practice and study of yoga and Buddhism.

This new relationship to ground helps sense how our body instinctively knows how to support us. Rather than bracing, we learn to listen, adapt and release. To let the weight of our body fall the full distance to the centre of the earth, and trust that distance to be answered and rebound. This is the oldest Bandha.

I once read about Pando, the famous quaking aspen colony in Utah. What looks like a forest of forty thousand individual trees is, in fact, one organism: a single root system that has been sending up genetically identical trunks for possibly thousands of years. Every tree entirely intertwined and dependent on the others. Not one of them standing alone.

Yesterday, one month since the accident, was the first day of my retreat in the Spanish mountains. This is where we’ve spent our summers the last fourteen years, in practice and community. Never had I imagined connecting with my Mountain Sangha on Zoom… 

In the last weeks I chose to share some of my personal experiences on Instagram, something I rarely do. I made an exception because it feels so important to be reminded of the fragility of this precious human life, and of our absolute belonging to each other. I'm now a few weeks in, and can offer slightly more here.

Mettā Bhāvanā, the Cultivation of Care, is one of the four pillars of what I call Yoga Bhāvanā. Its teachings are deeply rooted in the Buddhist practice of Loving Kindness, sometimes translated simply as Friendliness.

Zen teaches that when we look deeply enough, the heart reflects back what it witnesses without getting entangled in it. It’s a way of living with equanimity and wisdom, responding to life with clarity rather than reactivity.

In plain English, Bhāvanā can be understood as Cultivation, Becoming, or Bringing into Being - even Practice. It is said to be the word the Buddha used the most…

True openness of heart asks for courage. It requires an inner confidence that is paradoxically rooted in an undefendedness. This organic openheartedness is intuited rather than obliged, and it finds its root in our Deep Belly Centre, the Hara.

The turning of the year is such a powerful time in our practice. It’s a point of culmination where we have the opportunity to begin fresh, witnessing anew what it means to be alive in these times.