February Theme —Grounded in Motion 

“Between the head and feet of any given person is a billion miles of unexplored wilderness.” — Gabrielle Roth

I love this line, both for its imagery and for its subtle pointing to a rather uncomfortable truth: we spend a great deal of time in our heads. We are always planning, evaluating, and anticipating, while the body, with all its sensations, intelligence, and emotional truth, becomes something we manage rather than inhabit. 

Gabrielle Roth, an American dancer, musician, and author, often spoke about turning the body into a spiritual path by learning to listen to the vast wisdom it offers. She believed this was done by allowing movement to become a language and by experiencing life as energy in motion, rather than analysing it from a distance. I absolutely adore that way of looking at the chaos of the human experience and what it means to be at home in a body. 

This month’s theme, Moving From the Ground Up, is an invitation into that wilderness.

From inversion to integration

January’s focus on inversions asked us to change perspective in a very tangible way. Turning the body upside down quickly reveals how we relate to effort, fear, and control, and how sharply the mind craves certainty when orientation shifts. Just as when we are confronting change off the mat, inversions rarely reward force; rather, they require patience, humility, and a willingness to adjust rather than dominate the shape.

In February, we integrate those lessons into all types of movement.

Rather than leaving inversions behind, we allow them to inform how we move when our feet return to the ground. We will explore what it means to organise the body with the same intelligence inversions require: distributing effort rather than concentrating it, and staying responsive to the fact that balance is not static but alive.

Effort and ease in conversation

“Sthira Sukham Asanam”

The above is an oft-quoted line from Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras. Sthira, usually translated as stability or effort, encourages us to find steadiness and strength in our postures. This involves engaging muscles, aligning joints, and fostering mental focus to establish a solid foundation.

On the other hand, Sukha, translated as ease or comfort, complements Sthira by advocating for a gentle and mindful approach. It encourages practitioners to move with fluidity, respect their body’s natural range of motion, and foster a sense of comfort in their practice.

Too much effort, and movement becomes rigid and exhausting. Too much ease, and we lose clarity and direction. Somewhere between the two is a place where strength feels buoyant rather than heavy, and balance feels responsive rather than fragile.

This is something inversions teach us very clearly. You cannot sustainably muscle your way into balancing upside down, but you also cannot collapse and hope for the best. You learn to listen, to refine, to stay present in the conversation between action and release.

Over the month ahead, I’d like to bring that same conversation into flowing, dynamic movement. When the feet feel connected and awake, when the legs know how to receive weight and transfer it smoothly, the rest of the body can soften. 

Balance in motion

In daily life, balance is always about adapting to how things are moving, shifting, and changing. This is why this month we will place less emphasis on holding poses and more attention on transitions, weight shifts, turns, and twists. Balance becomes something we move through rather than something we arrive at and freeze.

As we transition from one shape to the next, there is an opportunity to notice how balance reorganises itself, how the body adjusts, how our breath responds, and how the mind reacts when things feel momentarily uncertain.

Celebrating dance and fluidity 

My hope is that the practice will also begin to feel more fluid, and in some ways, more like dance. Not in the sense that we are trying to perform a set choreography, but because the movements will start to have more continuity and rhythm, with one action informing the next. 

Dance reminds us that movement need not be symmetrical or static to be intelligent. The body naturally organises itself through curves, turns, and subtle weight shifts. When we allow that intelligence to guide us, strength becomes something that travels through the body rather than something that locks it in place.

As February unfolds, my desire is to facilitate movement that allows strength to support motion. You can trust that the legs will become more reliable, the centre body more responsive, and the arms and upper body will be strong enough to express rather than compensate.

For me, learning to adapt when balance wavers and to recover without panic when things feel momentarily off has been the key to gaining the confidence to explore new shapes on the mat and new concepts off of it. 

An invitation for the month ahead

This month, I’m asking you to listen more closely to where movement begins, how effort flows, and what happens when you trust rather than force. Expect very flowy flows, with lots of little ‘enhancements’ that ask the body to adapt in ways we might not be used to 😉 

You can look forward to lots of slow weight shifts, rotational transitions, and dynamic balances. We will be moving in and out of shapes, working through lots of spiral patterns in the legs, hips, and spine, and building whole-body coordination. 

It will be playful, challenging, and will offer plenty of space to explore ❤