Julia Daker at Calm Armour Yoga

Yoga is Play. As adults, play often fades from our lives, unlike childhood when we explored our bodies through movement. For me, yoga brings back that sense of exploration and play. While I enjoy other forms of exercise, yoga focuses more on the journey than the destination. If you’re looking for a good stretch, mental stimulation, and a way to explore your body's potential, yoga could be a great choice.

The sacral (Svadhishthana) chakra is associated with the element of WATER (Jala). 💧The sacral chakra promotes creativity, flexibility and adaptation to the ups and down in life.
Water is unrelenting and powerful in it’s determination to flow around obstacles. It can wash away negativity. It can become hard as a rock as it turns to ice or form the softest, quietest snowflake.❄
In tune with the water element, the sacral chakra asks us to honour the “flow” in life. It represents the ability to let go, move forward with determination and embrace change as a necessary part of life – often making space for joy and renewal.
An unbalanced sacral chakra may leave you uninspired, stuck, or even imposing rigid control over your life. Trauma, shame or emotional neglect can cause a blockage in your sacral chakra.
To balance your sacral chakra:
• Find freedom in yoga poses that open the hips, such as wide legged forward fold, pigeon pose, frog pose or goddess pose.
• Activities such as dancing, swimming or crafting may help you to reconnect to joy and inspiration.
Or you can repeat these helpful affirmations to yourself – especially if you can be around water:
• “I release resistance and left life move through me”
• “I wash away guilt and embrace my natural desires.”
• “I am fluid, flexible, and open to change.”
The sacral chakra is coloured orange – wearing orange, surrounding yourself with it or visualising an orange lotus flower in your lower abdomen will help bring balance.
How can you invite more “water energy” into your day today? 🌅

Most of the time we don't notice our breath - it just happens. But if we were able to really observe it, we would notice that people around us are breathing in a variety of different ways. For example, when people are in "fight, flight, freeze mode" they may be doing something called "thoracic breathing" - shallow and rapid. The body is preparing for action and needs a sudden burst of oxygen - but when that action does not happen, this type of breathing is counterproductive. It makes us feel even more stressed.

The good news is, we can calm ourselves down - just by learning how to control our breath. We can learn different techniques to help us cope better with all sorts of situations. I teach these as an integral part of my classes and I use them often in daily life - particularly when things don't quite go to plan. I'll be talking about these and demonstrating them in future posts.

I wish I'd had had this knowledge years ago when learning to drive - it took 5 attempts to pass my test because I was shaking so much I could barely change gear! Luckily I got there in the end - but it could have been so much easier.

Not every yoga class is the same. I've spoken to friends in the past who tried one yoga class, hated it, and never tried another which is a shame. Yoga is such a vast practice - you can have really fast paced classes, you can have those which are aimed at perfecting some of the really difficult poses and you can have slower, more reflective classes like mine. My classes usually start with some breathwork (there are multitudes to explore, all offering different benefits) then we do some poses (these are to stretch the body and they make you feel amazing) and then we finish with "Savasana" - a resting pose which you can enjoy while listening to a meditation, yoga nidra or guided visualisation.