The Stillness Within – Yoga for deep rest
Monday evenings 6.30-7.30 pm
St John’s church hall, Bryngwyn Road
“The body isn’t a thing we have, but an experience we are.”
Every body carries stories.
Every gesture, every breath, every ache or softness is the echo of a life lived. Our bodies hold the whispers of everything we have ever known—moments of joy and loss, love and stress, ease and endurance. Each of us walks through the world carrying a unique tapestry woven from memory, wisdom, and an innate, intelligent knowing.
To live fully is not only to think, plan, and act—but to feel, to sense, to embody. Emotional resilience, adaptability, and our capacity for connection all begin here, in the living landscape of the body. Cultivating safety and a sense of belonging within ourselves is the essential starting point.
When we suffer—when we feel anxious, overwhelmed, sad, or in pain—the body is not the enemy. It is the doorway.
By listening to what is held and expressed in our tissues, our breath, and our posture, we begin to unlock change. Not only in muscles and bones, but in the deeper patterns of our nervous system and neurology—the whole of our being.
Somatics & Yoga Nidra: Practices of Remembering
Somatics teaches us to dissolve habitual tension and rediscover ease. Yoga Nidra carries us into profound rest, where the body and mind can finally exhale. Together, they form a deeply integrative practice that supports healing and gently weaves itself into the fabric of daily life.
Somatics and Yoga Nidra are not about fixing you.
They are about helping you remember.
Remember your wholeness.
Remember the wisdom already within you.
Somatic Yoga: Strength Through Listening
In Somatic Yoga, practice becomes less about striving and more about listening. It is not about pushing the body into shapes, but about meeting yourself exactly where you are—with patience, curiosity, and care.
Movement is gentle, slow, and intelligent, following a step-by-step approach (vinyasa krama) that honours the body’s natural unfolding. Rather than being instructed to perform or achieve, you are guided to sense, feel, and respond within simple sequences and shapes.
This practice does not build strength through force.
It builds strength through balance, awareness, and integration.
The strength that emerges is sustainable rather than exhausting—supple rather than rigid. A resilience that supports you not just on the mat, but in life.
Somatic Yoga is for anyone longing to slow down, to reconnect, to inhabit the body as an ally rather than an obstacle. It is a practice of befriending. A practice of coming home.
Yoga Nidra: Deep Rest & the Courage to Stop
To rest deeply and consciously is one of the most nourishing—and yet most challenging—things we can do.
Yoga Nidra invites us into the art of rest, asking us to gently surrender layers of social, cultural, and even generational conditioning. We live in a world that worships productivity, where our senses are constantly pulled toward what’s next. In this climate, rest can feel unfamiliar, even uncomfortable.
When we slow down, guilt, restlessness, or the feeling of “not enough” can arise.
It takes courage to step out of this cycle.
It takes bravery to pause.
To lay things down.
To question patterns of over-efforting and constant doing.
Deep, conscious rest is not laziness. It is where integration happens—where body, mind, and nervous system can reorganise and restore themselves.
Come.
Rest into your body.
Befriend its wisdom.
Discover what it means to feel truly at home within yourself.
“To relax is not to collapse, but simply to undo tension. This tensio accumulated in the body and in the mind by years of forceful educ
Tension is the result of will, effort and prejudice.
We have been trained during the first part of our lives, to struggle 1 we have to work in the opposite direction, by letting go, by giving f different action, an “undoing action”.
This will stop the habitual process of doing which has become mec
There is nothing to be done. It is not a state of passivity but, on the watchfulness. It is perhaps the most “active” of our attitudes, goin!
“against” our body and feelings.
There is beauty in the acceptance of what is.”
Vanda Scaravelli
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