Part one – loss, the cost of stress and finding yoga
I’d already been practicing yoga a few years when I found out that my mum had a complicated terminal diagnosis and that life would never be the same again. Up until then, I’d enjoyed going to a weekly class as a means to counteract the pressures of a full on veterinary nursing apprenticeship that had led to a demanding shift nurse role at a leading veterinary referral hospital.
I loved the way I got to press pause on life, wringing out the stresses of the previous seven days as I reacquainted myself with my body and breath, moving mindfully before coming to a rare complete stillness in the closing Savasana.
I liked how I felt as I floated out of class, although the peaceful clarity would slowly seep away as the demands of a busy life crept back in. ‘More of this’, an inner voice would murmur to me as I practiced, ‘we need more of this.’
Having heeded that directive, I had already started doing little sequences at home between classes, when the earthquake that was my mum’s illness hit our family. Armed with ‘Yoga for Dummies’, a great little book I still recommend to people today, I’d retreat to a quiet corner and come back to that still place within me where everything felt just that little bit better than before I had stepped on my mat. So when life as I had known it started to slowly unravel into the tangled threads of my mum’s consultants, visiting nurses, increasing medications and torturous decline in long term residential care, it wasn’t long before my little purple yoga mat became a life raft in the stormy waters of protracted grief.
My mum it seemed, had been an even more integral linchpin than I had ever realised, and alongside her slow disappearance as Pick’s disease took her year by year, other parts of my previously settled life imploded and fell away too. Jobs came and went, a long term relationship ended, beloved pets passed away, a home was left and family ties were permanently altered.
As I navigated this new and altered landscape of my life, I clung even more closely to those times on my yoga mat, at home and in class. Even though now often the tears would flow as I lay in Savasana, my little purple mat was a safe haven that reminded me that whatever else was being taken from me, I had body and breath to return to.
The stresses of these turbulent years had left a mark though. Despite the frequent visits to the oasis of my mat, my nervous system was frazzled, and a significant health scare of my own reminded me of that truism – the body keeps the score. When I learnt that stress could have been a contributing factor for my thankfully successfully treated condition, it seemed something like fate that my then yoga teacher shared details of a colleague’s soon to start mindfulness based stress reduction (MBSR) course.
Eight weekly sessions, substantial follow up homework and a half day silent retreat later, my relationship with my yoga practice was forever altered.
This was the opening of my eyes to the fact that my practice wasn’t only confined to that flat purple rubber rectangle ever present in my living room; my life was my practice.
I was a woman transformed for the better by what I experienced during those eight weeks, but I was also self possessed enough to realise that, without the anchor of a teacher and the commitment of a course of study, I could easily go wayward and succumb to my old adrenalised ways again. I needed to keep going and to dig deeper into the system of yoga and what it could offer me. Thankfully the universe once again had my back, and a chance encounter with an old school friend led me to the British Wheel of Yoga (BWY) Foundation Course 1. Delivered over 10 months, this further showed me the jewels of yoga as a complete system of practice to promote wellbeing. But what next?
I knew I had to keep going, and again knowing my nature, I knew I had to do something that would keep me on this path. And so I reasoned … if I were to teach yoga, I’d have to make sure I knew these practices inside out, that I was walking the talk.
And so it was, that with one month still left to run on my foundation course, and a demanding job in veterinary education at Cambridge University, I signed up for the rigorous 500 hour BWY teacher training programme in London. Little did I know then where things would go next.
© Catherine Rolfe 2025