About me

I first trained as a yoga teacher in 2007, within the Anusara system. Over time, I found the practice more and more exhausting, and in 2012, a crisis in authority within the Anusara hierarchy prompted me to rethink not just my practice, but also the hierarchy, the philosophy and the pedagogy supporting it.

I was next drawn to teachers who tempered strict yoga alignment with a softer approach, such as Uma Dinsmore-Tuli and Angela Farmer among others. I taught a lot of disabled children with profound support needs, and my definitions of ‘normal’ practice were challenged further. I trained with Sonia Sumar and Jo Manuel for this specialist work, but there was still something missing.

I still believed that the world needs a practice that is more cyclical, more nurturing, and more accommodating of difference and diversity, but more and more, I realised how much our practices and the structures and communities that transmit them, were scarred by colonialism, ableism, institutionalised abuse, and all the grief and suffering of late-stage capitalism.

By then I had taken over a thousand hours of classes and workshops as a student; and taught nearly two thousand hours myself. I had explored a dozen different schools of yoga, and a dozen more somatic practices beyond it. I was curious about how we stay true to both our selves and our history, and how we keep each other safe, when we cross the boundaries of school and brand, lineage and heritage.

I had been heavily influenced by an MA that focused on community education for liberation, and also by pagan and animist philosophers and writers. I had taken in-depth courses in permaculture, seasonal rhythms, folklore, and I had over a decade of close study in both journeying practice and druidic pathwork with Tira Brandon Evans and Emma Restall Orr. One of those writer philosophers – my friend Graham Harvey – eventually persuaded me to apply for a PhD, and I joined the Religious Studies department of the Open University.

My aim was to investigate the democratisation of physical yoga practice and why it matters to the people who are most invested in it. That project grew to do two things: to tell the untold story of a unique community of yoga practice here in the UK, and to outline the processes that variously support all similar communities of practice. The term that emerged in that long research process was post-lineage yoga.

The research led me to engage in debates on some of the more difficult aspects of transnational yoga culture – the commercialisation, the standardisation, the quality of training, financial exploitation, how we support newly qualified teachers (often we don’t), and how we can ever reconcile and end endemic patterns of abuse. I was invited to consult on major projects, to speak at international conferences, and to guest on yoga teacher trainings. Thousands of yoga teachers began to follow me on social media.

More recently, my own research is now turning again. I’m asking more philosophical questions about the concepts of ‘normal’ and ‘broken’ as we apply them to human beings, about the pathologisation of distress, and the disabling of difference. I am indebted to disabled and queer theorists and activists, and I benefit from a strong and supportive community of allies. This is my heart work but it is also dark, triggering work, and so it is slow. So far you will find those reflections in my trainings, in occasional blog posts, and in the implications and the margins of my published work.

In the meantime, I have turned my thesis into a book with thanks to Equinox Publishing, and was commissioned to edit a general guide to Yoga Studies. I’m updating my understanding of contemporary yoga as things progress post-pandemic, and exploring festival cultures, alternative communities and meaning making in other ways too. Articles and chapters on some of those themes can be found below.

At the same time, I am exploring the joys and pitfalls of diagnoses, by myself, by professionals and by my peers. I am amused by the neat reflection between these three sources of insight, and the three sources of authority that I teach yoga teachers about: inner wisdom, expert advice and peer support.