2018 Yoga Highlights

2018 was my second year of teaching yoga and I am loving it more than ever! As we reach the end of the year I wanted to share a round up of some of the exciting things that I have been lucky to be involved with this year as well as some exciting events in the Sarah Lucy Yoga community.

New Classes

I started some new classes for Nuffield Health this year. Covent Garden (from Jan 2018) and corporate classes in the Epsom Head Office (from Oct 2018). It has great to continue teaching at The Gym Group Lewisham and Chapter London for another year.

Yoga Classes for Lululemon

I had started doing classes in the Lululemon stores last year and I continued to do further classes this year as part of their promotional events. It is great to meet some new students through teaching at the different stores around London, I taught at Spitalfields, Richmond and Marylebone stores this year. I also love the Lululemon clothes and I pretty much live in yoga clothes, so it always nice to pick up some new gear.

Yoga in amazing places!

As well as travelling around London to teach my regular classes in studios in some of my favourite areas of London, I enjoy teaching at ad hoc events and seeing new places and meeting new people. I have also been lucky to attend classes in some amazing places including the Shard, Sky Gardens, The Royal Opera House, some beautiful outdoor classes and I was even doing yoga in an Igloo the other day!

New Students and more men!

It is always a pleasure to welcome new students to our classes and great to see popularity has grown with men. When I first started teaching I would tend to get around 1 or 2 men in a class and now this can often reach around 50% men in the class and I have even had odd classes this year where there have been more men than women. Great to see men are realising yoga is not just for women and they are experiencing the benefits as well.

I have met some fantastic people through yoga this year whether it is students, teachers and even connections through people I have trained with. After being in London for almost 10 years, I am grateful that it is has become a place where I feel a sense of community and can definitely call it my home.

Babies!

We also had some new additions in the form of baby yogis! It was a pleasure to guide you through your yoga practice in pregnancy and celebrate the arrival of your healthy babies.

Growing the community

As well as new students in the classes we have grown the Sarah Lucy Yoga social media network. I decided to be more active on the Instagram platform this year. The reason I hadn’t before was because I am not a fan of having my photo taken but it is nice to share snapshots of what is happening in my yoga world and feel connected with students and those who are interested in yoga. We reached over 1000 followers this year!

Blogging

I have continued to enjoy blogging as it is a good opportunity to research yoga topics I am interested in and share my findings with you. I have published lots of new content in my own blog this year including articles on different yoga poses, yoga philosophy and as I have been learning a lot more anatomy this year, ahead of my further training courses, there has been a big focus on anatomy topics this year. It was great to start contributing to the Sampoorna Yoga blog this year and see my articles being shared with a wider audience. Sampoorna is an International Yoga school with a fantastic reputation so it is a real privilege to be working with them and have my content published.

Advertising

It has been great to use this social network platform to help other small businesses with advertising and introduce you to products that I have recommend. Check out my Instagram @sarahlucyyoga for details of current offers.

Friends

I have the best set of friends in London but none of them were interested in yoga when I started practising. Since yoga has become a big part of my life after qualifying I have been continuously trying to get them to come to classes! As expected once they tried it they loved it and now practice regularly. I still had one friend who wasn’t interested in trying it but I finally managed to convince her this year and she now regularly attends one of my Saturday classes! Mission Accomplished!

It is great to see you come along to the yoga classes with friends, family and partners and that it is something that you can do as a social activity. We have such a lovely set of people in the classes so it is also a great way to meet new people. A lot of my social catch ups with friends this year have involved taking a yoga class – I just can’t get enough of it!

Pranayama

As well as teaching yoga, I also enjoy self-practice. This has helped me through what has been a difficult year personally, mainly with having to have two operations this year. I was quite worried about the surgery so yoga really helped ease a lot of the anxiety. The good thing is that I am finally able to breathe properly out of my nose as a result of the surgery so I feel like a proper yogi now! I have never been able to breathe properly out of the right side of my nose since I was born but I am all fixed now! This means amongst other things I can finally enjoy the benefits of Nadi Shodna (alternate nostril breathing)!

Self Practice

I really enjoy the challenge of self practice and enjoy working towards being able to do new poses. I feel my practice has got a lot stronger this year and I have tackled some poses I never imagined I would be able to do. I think my favourites poses this year are pincha and scorpion.

Business Award

The icing on the cake was to win the Mayor’s Business Award for Best Business Person 2018! You can read more about the awards in my separate blog post about the event.

Further training

After an encouraging year with yoga teaching and as my love for yoga continues to grow, I decided it was time to go to the next level and book my Advanced Yoga Teacher Training (300 hours) so that I can become a 500 hour qualified teacher. I am really looking forward to completing this in January and February 2019 and sharing everything I learn when I come back to teach in London from February. I am have been studying hard with all the pre-course material and I can’t wait to learn more on the course. I also feel incredibly lucky to be able to return to India. I will be mostly staying south this time, in Goa. For my last trip I visited Rishikesh in the north of India, at the foot of the Himalayas. It will be a great opportunity to experience a different part of the country.

Thank you!

Thank you to all my yoga students for making me love what I do so much and I am always learning from you! Thank you also to all the companies I have had the pleasure of working with this year. I have been much more active on social media in the last 12 months and it has been great that you have been interested in following and hopefully you will follow me to India in 2019 for more adventures!