Green Deva

Get More from Your Yoga Practice This Summer

Take your mat outside and see how it changes the quality of your practice.

Go out early
Early morning is the sweet spot - cool air, low light, the garden still quiet. There's something about practising before the day has properly started that feels less like exercise and more like reclaiming something.

Let the ground do the teaching
Standing poses are where outdoor practice really earns its place. The moment you take a one-legged pose onto grass or uneven ground, the body has to work in a way a flat studio floor simply doesn't ask of it. The ankle makes small, constant adjustments. The hip stabilisers engage. The knee finds its alignment without being told to. That's proprioception - the body's quiet, continuous conversation with the ground beneath it - and it's one of the most valuable things we can maintain at any age. Not flexibility, not strength, but the simple ability to adjust, respond and stay upright. The wobble, in other words, is not the problem. The wobble is entirely the point.

Face the sun for your breathing practice
Sit facing the morning light, close your eyes, and spend five minutes with a slow extended exhale - longer out than in. The warmth on your face and the moving air make the breath land differently outside. It's a complete thing in itself.

Leave the timer inside
Outdoor practice has a way of naturally releasing the grip on time. No mirror, no clock on the wall, no sense of what you look like doing it. Just the body, the breath and whatever is happening in the garden around you.

Ageing seems to be the only available way to live a really long life.

A Beginner's Guide to Pranayama: How to Start Working with Your Breath

Most people discover pranayama by accident. A teacher cues a breathing exercise at the start of class, something shifts, and afterwards you think - what was that?
Here's how to begin exploring it on your own.

Start with what you already have
Sit comfortably. That might be a chair, the edge of the bed, or the floor with a folded blanket under your hips - whatever allows your spine to be reasonably upright without effort. Close your eyes or soften your gaze downward. Just notice the breath as it is before you try to change anything. This is already practice.

Try a simple ratio breath
Breathe in for a count of four. Breathe out for a count of four. Keep the breath smooth rather than forced - you're not filling a balloon, you're just giving the breath a gentle structure to move within. Do this for two or three minutes and notice what happens in the shoulders, the jaw, the space behind the eyes.

Extend the exhale
When you're ready, try making the exhale slightly longer than the inhale. In for four, out for six. This is one of the most straightforward ways to activate the body's rest response - the part of the nervous system that allows joints to soften, muscles to release, and the general sense of bracing to ease. It works. It's not complicated.

A few things worth knowing
You don't need to practise for long. Five minutes of conscious breathing does something measurable in the body. You also don't need silence or a special space - though both are lovely if available.
If you feel lightheaded at any point, return to natural breathing. That's not failure, it's just the body adjusting to more oxygen than it's used to.

When to practise
Morning tends to work well - before the day has fully arrived and claimed you. But the honest answer is: whenever you'll actually do it. Before bed works beautifully for the extended exhale practice. Three breaths before you open your laptop is a legitimate pranayama practice.

Start there. See what you notice.

You Don't Need Another Coffee - You Need a Better Exhale

There's a particular kind of tired that coffee doesn't touch.

You know the one. It's not that you haven't slept. It's more like the body has been running on alert for so long that even rest doesn't quite reach it. The energy is there somewhere - it just feels inaccessible.

This is where the breath becomes genuinely interesting.

In yoga, prana is often translated as life force or vital energy - the animating quality that keeps everything moving. The ancient texts suggest that we take it in through food, through sunlight and most immediately, through the breath. Which means that how we breathe isn't a small thing. It's one of the primary ways we resource ourselves.

Most of us, by mid-afternoon, are breathing into about a third of our lung capacity. Shallow, chest-led, just enough. It keeps us functional but it doesn't exactly light us up.

A few minutes of conscious breathing - particularly breath that emphasises the inhale and uses the full depth of the lungs - genuinely shifts something. Not in a vague wellness way. You can feel it: a slight warmth, a clearer head, the sense that you've arrived back in your body after spending the morning somewhere slightly above it.

In class it’s that moment when the belly finally releases and the breath drops all the way down. It takes a little practice to get there. But when you do, there's usually a small, quiet surprise at how much space was available all along.

You don't need to overhaul anything. Three conscious breaths before you make the coffee is a reasonable place to start.
See what happens.

Ageing is not ‘lost youth’ but a new stage of opportunity.

Why yoga leaves you feeling more like yourself, not less

There's a version of exercise that takes something from you. You know it - the kind that requires recovery, that leaves you wrung out for the rest of the day, that you have to talk yourself into because the alternative feels worse.

Sometimes a yoga class will ask something genuine of you and you'll feel it afterwards but in a good, quiet way - the way that means something was worked and released rather than leaving you depleted.

Over time, a regular yoga practice, starts giving something back - and it usually starts in the most ordinary places.

It improves sleep without effort
This one surprises people. A regular yoga practice - even a gentle one, even twenty minutes before bed - tends to improve sleep quality noticeably over time. Not because it's tiring in the conventional sense, but because it genuinely settles the nervous system before rest. And better sleep is the most straightforward energy intervention available to any of us. More restorative than any supplement, more reliable than any routine.

It teaches you to breathe properly again
By midlife, shallow chest breathing has become the default - functional but not energising. Learning to find the full depth of the breath, to use the diaphragm, to extend the exhale - these things increase oxygen availability and activate the body's rest and repair functions. It's not a metaphor. You can feel it happening.

It tends to show up first as small things. Sleeping better. Moving more freely. Noticing you've been holding your breath - and choosing, for once, to let it go.
And that's just the beginning.

Q: “WILL YOGA HELP ME FEEL MORE CONFIDENT IN MY BODY?”

It’s a question that comes up often. Usually a little quietly, sometimes at the end of a first class. Not always said directly… but it’s there.

The short answer? It can. But maybe not in the way you expect.

It’s not about becoming a different shape. Or reaching some imagined version of “good” at yoga. What tends to change is your relationship with your body.
In a class, there’s less emphasis on how things look and more on how they feel. Where is your weight? Can you breathe here? What happens if you soften that effort, just slightly?

It’s a different kind of attention. And over time, it can interrupt that constant habit of judging from the outside.

There’s no gold star for pushing through in yoga. If anything, the practice tends to reward the opposite - noticing when to ease off, when to rest, when to try a different approach.

That kind of listening builds trust. And trust tends to feel a lot like confidence.
In a room where no one is performing for an audience — different shapes, different ranges, different starting points — something quietly shifts.

Other bodies… just being bodies, can quietly dismantle the idea that there’s one “right” way to have a body. Everyone is simply… practising.

“Will yoga actually help me feel more confident in my body?”

It’s a question that comes up often. Usually a little quietly, sometimes at the end of a first class. Not always said directly… but it’s there.

The short answer? It can. But maybe not in the way you expect.

It’s not about becoming a different shape. Or reaching some imagined version of “being good” at yoga. What tends to change is your relationship with your body.

In a class, there’s less emphasis on how things look and more on how they feel. Where is your weight? Can you breathe here? What happens if you soften that effort, just slightly?

It’s a different kind of attention. And over time, it can interrupt that constant habit of judging from the outside.

There’s no gold star for pushing through in yoga. If anything, the practice tends to reward the opposite - noticing when to ease off, when to rest, when to try a different approach.

That kind of listening builds trust. And trust tends to feel a lot like confidence.

In a room where no one is performing for an audience — different shapes, different ranges, different starting points — something quietly shifts. Other bodies… just being bodies, can quietly dismantle the idea that there’s one “right” way to have a body. Everyone is simply… practising.

"Sthira Sukham Asanam" ~ Steady. Comfortable. Present.