Friday 17th July 2026 5:30pm BST ONLINE Come enjoy this yoga class and focus on yourself, all that you’ve grown through and all that you will be.

It’s hot.

It’s full summer here in England as we start another heatwave, with the temperatures in the south of the country hitting 36C (or ~97F). I’m a little luckier being up north and having big shady trees over my garden so we’ve reached about 33C (or ~91F) in the shade. I could talk all day about how we’re not adapting to this new hotter climate but ignoring it completely. We’re building high rise flats all over Leeds with no form of air conditioning or cooling units. I could tell you how the old air conditioning units in grocery stores can barely manage to keep the place cooler than outside let alone cool enough to help you cool down, especially comparing it to the cold air conditioning I was used to as a teen growing up in South Carolina, where 100F is a summer norm (yes everyone thinks that’s too hot), but it seems to be all anyone can talk about, the heatwave and climate change, so I’ll leave that to the professionals and the influencers.

Was it warm where you grew up?

Do you remember growing up? Do you remember the locations, the buildings, the good stuff and the bad stuff? We all have our own coming of age stories. But the more I think about this amazing, special, human life full of all our experiences, I realise that we don’t just come of age once. The journey between one stage of life into another, such as switching careers, becoming a parent, living through a trauma, finishing a big project, they all create a distinct timeline in our minds of Before and After. Our perspectives, our experience, our sense of self all change sometimes slowly sometimes very fast and not always in ways we can predict.

How many stages have you had?

We can find ourselves deepening into our sense of self, taking root in a new landscape; or we find ourselves expanding into unknown spaces, overtaken with a curiosity that turns all our goals into an adventure. Sometimes we find the focus of our daily happenings, narrowing down with pinpoint precision, cutting out the things we once considered steadfast and essential. Like when you get ill and you actually realise work will go on without you. [Work being anything you do, mama-hood is work, caring for someone else is work ]

The Lotus Flower in Yoga…

But all of this, all of our experiences, they make up our lives. They make us who we are right now. This is the focus of the Lotus Flower yoga class. 

The way I like to think about the Lotus Flower in yoga is like this:

The roots of the flower are deep in the water and mud, these are your past experiences. You grew into the person you are from these. The flower is your best self, your highest self, you know where you came from, the roots are still a part of you but they do not change that you are above that now, beautiful, healed and floating above it all. The stem is the you that bridges these two extremes, some days we are feeling on top of everything and are doing well and some days we feel like we are going through something that will become our mud. Like someone has dumped a load of fertiliser into our pond and we’re moving through it. Our goal is not to try to forever be a flower, that’s impossible, but to accept every part of our selves as they are right now.

Friday 17th July 2026
5:30pm BST
ONLINE
Come enjoy this yoga class and focus on yourself, all that you’ve grown through and all that you will be.

If you’ve missed the live class you can get the recording in the member’s area.