When I first started teaching yoga, I remember proudly writing a piece about how yoga was for everyone. And what’s more I truly believed it. I was trying to debunk the usual myths and stereotypes about the ‘type’ of people who do yoga. You didn’t have to be young, thin, vegan or flexible. If you know me, I don’t have to tell you that I am not young, thin or vegan - and the flexibility I possess has been developed through the practice of yoga.

And yet I’ve learned that while ‘yoga is for everyone’ is true in principle, in reality the classes that I teach and the ones that I have participated in are absolutely not suitable for ‘every body’.

This realisation shattered my belief that yoga has an automatic ‘inclusivity’ and ‘accessibility’. It wasn’t a gentle, slowly dawning realisation either. It was immediate and brutal; a bit like falling on your head in crow pose.

Ironically, it happened during a moment of celebration.

It took place in Ipswich at the ‘Active Suffolk Awards’ in November 2022. I had been shortlisted for the ‘Suffolk Activity Champion of the Year’. Yes, here is the horrible photo of me winning that award.

So, there I was, being photographed, looking at myself being blown up on a big screen, and carefully not tripping over my feet as I collected the trophy for ‘success, dedication and commitment to sport, physical activity and community in Suffolk’.

And I was hit with the realisation that this wasn’t as true as it could be. I realised I needed to widen my vision and up my game to really make yoga accessible to all.

The Awards were inspiring in a way that came as a surprise. I hadn’t expected to be moved by them, and I certainly hadn’t appreciated how real this all was until I sat in a room with people like Zoe Newson, the Paralympian powerlifter who won the ‘Sports Personality of the Year’ award; and with people like the group who set up a football team for refugees who are trying to find new lives in Suffolk.

I’m sharing this with you because this night made me feel two deeply opposing thoughts about myself at the same time. Firstly, there was the positive feeling of seeing some of the things that I had achieved through the eyes of others who had seen fit to give me an Award. But alongside that was the horrible truth that my cast-iron belief that I was being inclusive was a delusion, and that my yoga classes are not actually accessible or inclusive to everyone.

So, after that realisation, I found myself doing a little bit of squirming, a pinch of self-torture and quite a lot of thinking, trying to answer these questions: ‘How can I make my yoga classes more accessible? What do I need to do to include people who would currently struggle with what I offer? Where and with who might I be able to create this community?’.

And suddenly the answer was obvious.

By the beginning of December, I enrolled in my ‘Chair Yoga’ teacher training, which I completed over Christmas. Chair-based yoga is a more ‘person-centred’ approach to teaching yoga. The key thing though is that the basic principles of yoga – breath, grounding, expansion, balance can all still be applied.

I am not completely to blame for thinking I was being inclusive. In hindsight, the original Yoga Teacher Training course I did at the start of the journey to become a teacher was totally focussed on teaching able bodies. There was little or nothing to prepare us students for real world yoga - a place where yogis struggle with wrist pain, vertigo, mobility issues, chronic pain, and kneeling difficulties.

I am really excited about the prospect of teaching Chair Yoga in the community, in care homes, online, or wherever I can find enough people who want to practice. I want yoga to become a reality for those who may not feel it’s possible due to their disability, age, mobility, injury, or body size. Yoga really is for everybody and that means every body.

If you are interested in finding out more about Chair Yoga, please feel free to get in touch or check out my website for my new online course staring at the end of February.