This week feels a bit strange.
It’s Christmas week, the studio’s quiet, and it’s the last week I’m teaching under the Yoga Local name. Not with a bang or a big party — just gently, almost under the radar.
And honestly? That feels about right.
Some endings don’t need celebrating.
They need noticing.
There’s a tenderness to this week. A sense of something completing. Not sadness exactly. Not excitement either. Just that feeling you get when you know you can’t quite keep doing things the same way — even though nothing’s gone “wrong”.
That’s been sitting with me a lot.
When practice actually works
We often think yoga is working when there’s more of it.
More classes.
More energy.
More people.
More momentum.
But that’s not really how yoga works in real life.
Yoga is working when things simplify.
When you don’t need quite so much doing.
When the breath steadies more easily.
When awareness drops into the body without effort.
When what you’ve learned starts showing up off the mat — in how you respond, how you rest, how you don’t push quite so hard.
Yoga hasn’t failed when a structure changes.
Often, it’s succeeded.
Why we’re practising the chakras this week
The final classes this week are themed around a chakra alignment practice. Not as a big finale. Not to “activate” anything.
More as a way of gathering the year back into the body.
I’ve always thought of the chakras less as things to work on, and more as ways life expresses itself through us.
So instead of striving upwards, this practice is more like a quiet check-in
- What’s grounded you this year?
- What’s softened?
- Where have you learned better effort — not force, just steadiness?
- How have you stayed open without losing yourself?
- What can you say more honestly now?
- What do you see more clearly?
- And what do you trust, even without having all the answers?
That’s not an achievement list.
That’s integration.
And integration is a deeply underrated stage of practice.
A story that really stayed with me
After class this morning, one of my students stayed on the zoom call for a chat.
She’d just lost her dog — and anyone who’s been through that knows how completely devastating it can be. The quiet in the house. The routines gone. The space where something very loved used to be.
She spoke about the grief very plainly. No spiritual gloss.
And then she said something else.
Alongside the sadness, she and her husband could also feel that this chapter of their life had completed. That years of caring, organising, walking, planning everything around their dog had shaped them — and that now, slowly, something else was becoming possible.
Not better.
Not easy.
Just different.
A friend had sent her a card with a poem that ended with the line:
“Don’t cry because it’s over. Smile because it happened.”
She said that line had stayed with her. Not as a way to bypass the grief — but as a way to honour the love without clinging to the form it took.
And I thought… yes. That’s it.
That’s what practice teaches us.
Not how to avoid loss —
but how to hold it without closing our hearts.
Completion isn’t the same as loss
This is the bit that feels important to say out loud.
Low numbers. Quiet rooms. People moving on.
These things don’t automatically mean something has failed.
Sometimes they mean something has done its job.
Nothing you’ve practised disappears when a class ends or a timetable changes.
It lives in your breath.
In your nervous system.
In how you meet life when it doesn’t go to plan.
We don’t smile because it’s over.
We smile because it happened — and because it shaped us.
A gentle bridge into what’s next
Yoga Local isn’t ending because the practice didn’t work.
It’s changing because it did.
What comes next — FireWoven — isn’t about doing more or learning more. It’s about living from what’s already been integrated. About having a container that supports practice inside real life, especially when life itself is changing.
There’s no rush. No pressure. No big reveal here.
Just an acknowledgement that things evolve when they’re alive.
This week isn’t about nostalgia or tying things up neatly.
It’s about gratitude.
And trust.
Not because it’s over —
but because it happened.
J X
