My story and my approach to yoga, pilates and bodywork

As the founder of Bliss Baby Yoga and author of Moving with the Moon: Yoga, Movement & Meditation for your Menstrual Cycle and Beyond I have a depth of knowledge and experience around women’s yoga. I can work with you to tailor a practice to support your optimal health and vitality during your menstrual cycle (moving with the moon®), menopause/ perimenopause, fertility, pregnancy and postpartum. I’m excited to now offer this knowledge in the personalised context of private classes, or mentoring (if you’re a teacher looking to deepen your own women’s health teaching knowledge).

Plus, I’m super excited to share all that I’ve learnt from my own practice and research around the following conditions:

• sacral/ pelvic stability—working with your body to reduce and ultimately eliminate the pain and inflammation that comes from conditions like SIJ (Sacroiliac Joint Dysfunction). As part of this approach of balancing out imbalances in the pelvis and lower back, it’s important to also work on gently and intelligently releasing the psoas and illiacus muscles.

• pelvic floor health and tone in menopause/ postpartum—working with mild prolapse conditions

• bone health and bone building—working with Buff Bones® pilates and strength and impact training

Due to practising too-strong yoga in my 20s and 30s as well as the demands of ballet training in my teens, I have had to work to bring my body back to balance and heal injuries that developed over these years of being young and ‘gung-ho’ in my approach to working with my body.

Perhaps you can relate?

Over the last 10 years in particular as I’ve been moving through my 40s and into my 50s my bodywork practice has been all about ‘maintenance’—rehabbing injuries and working to keep my body as healthy and strong and mobile as I can, so that I can age as easefully and joyfully as possible.

Over recent years I’ve also learnt ways to be painfree and to manage my severe SIJ (sacral instability) and scoliosis so that I feel like at the age of 53 I’m now in the best and healthiest shape of my life. What I mean by this is that even though I may not be as crazy-flexible as I was as a younger yogini, I’m much stronger, more stable and mindful in how I work with my body. And most importantly, my body feels GOOD and pain free - no more random muscle spasms and my back going radically ‘out'.

So, I want to share all this with you!

If you’ve been battling with niggling (or not so niggling) pain in the sacrum / groin/ hips, I’m excited to get stuck in with you to work together with awareness, intelligence and above all with sensitivity to bring you out of pain and back into health and to stop ‘guarding’ around your injury.

Together we’ll work from my toolbox of techniques that may include:

• restorative yoga

• yoga therapy

• what I call ‘baby yoga’ (simple, non-fancy poses to bring optimal strength, stability and functional movement)

• fascial release and massage and release of the all-important psoas / iliacus using somatic techniques and gentle stretching where appropriate

• working with props (that may also be integrated with the above techniques)

• pilates - as a Buff Bones® pilates-mat and workout instructor

• Ayurveda

• Chi Kung and dynamic gentle energetic movement and Taoist breath work

• meditation (including Mindful Self Compassion techniques), relaxation practices (like Yoga Nidra), visualisation, affirmation and pranayama (yoga breathing techniques)

• dance and embodied movement / warm-ups / exercises

I feel that working privately with students is the best way to harness the many layers that I now have to offer as a teacher and yoga/pilates/ bodywork pracitioner with three decades of experience behind me.

Just think how much my experience as a senior teacher and teacher trainer can feed into your home-practice, giving you new tools and new insights about how to work with your unique body-mind.

Won’t you join me?

It will be a journey of self-discovery and you’ll be in safe hands.

Ana x