19.09.2025
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"Yin and Yang"
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What’s the Yin to your Yang?
If you are a gym goer and focus mainly on strength, if you are always on the go and your mind knows no stop, if your pace is always fast, you need a yin to your yang.
My yang is definitively handstands.
My yin is the rest of my practice, sometimes more fluid, sometimes slower, sometimes very slow.
We need that balance between “masculine” and “feminine”, between light and dark, between strength and fluidity, between creativity and analysis, between the sun and the moon.
As a close friend used to say, I came from the Yang, but I have definitively found my Yin. Both within my yoga practice.
Again, what’s the Yin to your Yang?
Carmen​​
29.08.2025
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"My kids and yoga"
When they were little my kids practiced quite a lot of yoga with me, however as they have grown older they no longer do. But you can only lead by example, right?
I started yoga when my youngest was just a baby. They have seen me practice and teach A LOT. The house is full of yoga mats and yoga props.
When they were younger they were off school and I had to teach a class, I used to take them with me to the studio and they would play in the room next door with the yoga ropes, until I finished teaching. They have practiced yoga with me and with my teacher Raj.
Now I have three teens and a young adult. I have a gymnast, an “I only like to do my own stretches”, a tennis player and a footballer. However, yoga is all around them, and I know that, if some years down the line, life catches up with them, as life does, they have this amazing tool that they may not have practiced much but they have grown up with.
Carmen​​
16.07.2025
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"In Balance - Music for Yoga by Chris Conway"
The only track I have ever played in a yoga class.
MUSIC. This is something I get asked a lot. Why don’t I play music during my classes. I will tell you how it is for me, my personal experience.
In my trainings and teacher-led practices, we never used music. We just listened to the breath.
In my self practice I can focus on my breathing more when there is no outside tune. At the same time, when I am practicing with others it’s beautiful to hear the breath sounds fill the room and I can let it be my soundtrack. Hearing someone breathe next to you will remind you to deepen your breath or to just breathe, if you’d lost that connection.
Some people may find it nicer to move through a yoga sequence with music, for me it’s the opposite.
Sometimes sound is a mood lifter, sometimes silence is peace, and other times silence is just plain hard. All depends on the state of our minds in that moment.
I remember when, during my first yoga training, we had to do the first teaching rehearsal, some trainees talked non stop, others were not saying enough, it was very difficult to judge the gaps of silence.
However, as one meditation teacher once told me, we have to learn to be comfortable with silence. He would suddenly stop talking half way through a guided meditation and would hold long periods of silence, you wouldn’t know when he was going to speak again.
On a practical note, my voice is not the loudest and sometimes I just seem to be fighting with the music.
I used to teach in a gym where it was suggested that I play background music. I thought I would try, as all other classes did.
I had it as a soft background tune to allow everyone to be able to hear me. I ended up playing the same soundtrack for almost three years. Nobody ever mentioned anything, students kept coming. Maybe they were quietly bored with it, maybe they associated the soundtrack with my class, maybe they were more concentrated on the sequence than the music. I never asked neither did they. The students just kept coming to that class with the same music track, week in, week out.
After that I thought, no more. Back to my roots, just listen to the breath.
Carmen​​
18.06.2025
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"Yoga is the practice of non-attachment to the outcome"
I practiced and trained with my American teacher John for several years, until he moved back to the US and then I found my Indian teacher Raj.
Raj took my practice to the next level.
He was/is a very dedicated and demanding teacher with the kindest of hearts.
He would often demonstrate an impossible pose and then say - “Try” - if he saw doubt in your eyes he would say - “Trust yourself” - and for a moment doubt would indeed creep into my mind - “I know I can’t do it, surely he knows I can’t do it “ - but then those thoughts would vanish and I would always, always try.
Those are important lessons that apply on and off the mat.
Yoga is the practice of non-attachment to the outcome. You do your best and work towards your goals but with no attachment to the results. At the end of the practice, you are just as content whether today you managed to touch your toes or not. That in itself is the actual practice.
Raj would always pick a few students after each of his teacher trainings and give them the opportunity to start teaching in his studio; I was one of them. I often think to myself, I am not sure why he chose me, but I never dared to ask, in case he changed his mind. I was honoured to try.
His teachings will forever stay with me and inspire my own teachings and my love for the practice.
My own practice also remains a great teacher.
I feel the deepest sense of gratitude to Raj for always inspiring me on this journey.
Carmen​​
21.02.2025
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Myth No. 3 - "Yoga is for women"
Yoga was primarily a male practice in India for thousands of years. Nowadays the element of flexibility puts men off yoga, but actually in general men come to yoga with more upper body strength and they find inversions and arm balances easier. Yoga is a lot more than being able to touch your toes. Yoga works on strength, posture, breathing and on a deeper level the mind, that’s why it’s so valuable for mental as well as physical health. In general men like to work on strength, but it has to be balanced by flexibility, otherwise you will surely and progressively lose range of motion.
Yoga provides excellent cross training for any sport.​
Carmen​​
16.01.2025
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Myth No. 2 - "Yoga is slow and boring"
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To be honest with you, that’s exactly what I thought about my first few yoga classes. Gave up for years until eventually yoga found me again.
Let me just tell you, yoga is HARD. It takes a lot of work and discipline to learn and improve. It takes time. Having said that, yoga is not a destination. You will feel many of the benefits of yoga almost immediately.
However, sometimes you just have to start slow because there is so much to learn. You need to learn how to breathe (first remember to breathe, which a lot of people who first come to yoga forget, once you remember to just breathe, you need to use a different type of breath depending of what kind of yoga you are doing and how fast you are moving), you also need to train strength and flexibility, you need to learn the poses, you need to learn to transition in between the poses, you need to learn to use your hands and your feet effectively as well as your core, the list goes on … Isn’t it better to take it one step at a time, so you can later put all the pieces of the puzzle together?
Or you could do it the other way, go through many fast classes and eventuallly figure it all out. That is not safe, the first method is far better. Once you know what you are doing, you can go through a fast demanding sequence, but you will be able to do it properly and most importantly safely.
The other question is what do you want to get from yoga?
If yoga is your cardio workout, then you will want to go a bit faster or a lot faster, hold each pose for one or two breaths and move onto the next, if you want to relax and restore, then by all means go slow. Yoga can be practised in so many ways, it depends what you want to get from it.
Last but not least find a teacher that you connect with. There are no two teachers the same. Enjoy your practice.
Carmen
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15.11.2024
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Busting myths about yoga
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There are many myths around yoga: it’s just stretching, it’s for women, it's for flexible people, it’s slow and boring (this was me), etc, etc. Having practised, trained, and taught in Asia, I was shocked upon coming back to the West as to how yoga is sometimes misperceived here. Over the next few posts, I will share my thoughts on some of these myths. Enjoy!
“Yoga is just stretching”
Just as an example, you can’t hold a headstand without strength. Most yoga postures - even seated postures! - require a perfect balance of strength and flexibility.
Flexible practitioners need to learn how to correctly engage muscles to protect and stabilise the joints and not get to the final version of the pose just with flexibility – that would not be yoga, apart from the fact that you would be just waiting for an injury to happen. Practitioners who are strong need to learn to use the correct muscles and the right amount of strength to allow the body to stretch and open.
Everybody must learn proper breathing techniques to be able to get to and hold the poses efficiently and progressively for longer periods of time.
Yoga has many balancing postures that train core strength and develop focus, and as mentioned, proper breathing. Some of the more advanced balancing postures require you to be able to lift your entire body weight. This requires strength, flexibility, and correct breathing too: you can’t separate the three in yoga.
Yoga combines different elements of fitness into a varied workout and therefore offers countless benefits. You will develop strength and stamina, learn to stabilise your core, improve your mobility, deepen and control your breathing and of course increase flexibility. All of these will enhance your performance in any sport.
More importantly, aside from the physical benefits, yoga will also, undoubtedly, improve your mental resilience and therefore benefit your mental health.
In other words, no, yoga is NOT just stretching.
Carmen
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5.11.2024
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My Teaching Style
I just wanted to talk a bit about my teaching style as yoga is so vast, both in the number of poses and styles and there are so many kinds of teachers. My way is certainly not the only way or the best way, it’s just my way. It won’t resonate with everyone and that’s ok. I will tell you what you can expect from practicing with me. How I teach is how I like to practice and how I like to learn. For me teaching is a self practice out loud.
If you are looking for a very gentle and straight forward class, that’s not me - I like to play with poses and sequences, give you a little bit of a challenge, keep the class reasonably dynamic and I always always change my sequences.
If you are looking for someone that tells you to relax and expect it to happen, again not me - I don’t play music, I will get you deep into the movement and the breath, relaxation will come as a by product. I try to transmit what I feel when following through a sequence.
If you want to just get the job done, do poses without understanding what you are doing - again not me. I like attention to detail. I feel you will get so much more out of your practice if you feel and understand where the poses are trying to take you. The more complex poses are rooted in the basic poses. Don’t try to build the roof before the foundations are solid.
If you are not humble/accepting of what your body cannot do yet, I am not your teacher - like I said many times, yoga is hard, it requires practice and discipline. I am a very caring teacher, however I will try and take you a little bit out of your comfort zone.
The poses are complex and we all have limitations, work with them. If we struggle, we don’t make excuses, we don’t get bruised egos, we just keep showing up.
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The yoga practice is all about the path, never about the destination.
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​Carmen
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