Hello!  I am Mataji – from now, I will mostly be writing here, though we hope Sarasvati will continue with some of her wonderful posts.

My background is a long one in Yoga – I started when I was 16, and oh dear, that is a little over half a century ago.

At first it was when I was still at school, and the Women’s Weekly magazine – which was indeed a weekly then, and it was tabloid size –  published a little detachable insert with instructions and pictures of something that was probably a new “health exercise” called Yoga.

Well, I was a klutz on the athletics field, and my coordination was too poor ever to be picked for ball games, but I whizzed through that booklet and loved every movement in it. The mix of flexibility and strength suited me down to the ground, and do you know, it also gave me a mind buzz… something about the way the body moved was different from anything else I had experienced, and it just hit a little zinging spot in my mind.

So… it was the beginning of a long journey.

Of course, at first I had no idea of the 4000 year history of Yoga, nor that its real focus and outcome is an experience of wholeness instead of the fragmentation and reactionary processes that is our usual way of life,.And I did not understand that the most significant practice of Yoga is still-mind meditation, to tame the mind and allow us to see its processes. And so it didn’t help me much, in that way, for years.

Once I did find out a bit more about Yoga apart from asana, the stretching and bending, that is when I began to approach it with more respect, and that also is when I began to be able to look at my own life and my own patterns, without rationalising, blaming or projecting, and see clearly the person that was “me”. And to take her a bit less seriously, haha….

I write on a site on my own domain, too, that I call Reflections.  The latest there is on Uncertainty, if you’d like to read it.

Best wishes to you,

Mataji