Full Moon Retreat
On April 13th - just over a week away - we will gather at Live Love Yoga in Bangor for an afternoon retreat to practice Holosomatic Body Therapy and enjoy some nourishing ayurvedic food afterwards. There are just 8 spaces left and I would love to have you come and join us.
Live Love Yoga studio is such a beautiful space, I’m really excited to lead my first class here. I’ll be serving herbal tea on arrival. There’ll be plenty of time to find your mat, settle in, enjoy your tea and maybe get to know your neighbours. Then, I’ll explain the techniques we’ll be using during our session. We’ll flow into a deep metta (loving-kindness) meditation to deeply relax and drop into your parasympathetic nervous system (rest and digest state) — then we’ll move into conscious connected breathwork, activating the sympathetic nervous system (fight or flight state), giving you an opportunity to witness any sensations that arise, allowing yourself to release and make space for fresh energy to come in and clear any stagnant areas of the body — you might want to introduce movement, sound or touch to bring more activation — we’ll continue pendulating between activation and rest for 6-8 cycles — then I’ll guide you into integration where you’ll allow all the energy that moved through you to rest and settle — then I’ll leave you to journal about your experience for a few minutes while I prepare our nourishing, delicious food for us to enjoy together — there’ll be lots of time to chat and ask questions and we’ll close with sharing (completely optional but always amazing to see the way experiences resonate across the group).
Facilitating my session for Nourish NI a few weeks ago at Barefoot really made me realise how good it felt to blend two of my worlds together. Having the chance to share somatic techniques and nourishing food together felt so expansive. I became certified as an ayurvedic postpartum doula at the Center for Sacred Window Studies in 2021. I’d worked as a chef for 5 years before that and was so excited about the Cooking for Postpartum module. Ashlee Sakaishi-Wilkin was a beautiful tutor and taught me so much about incorporating intentionality into the food I was cooking. Postpartum cooking is focused on deep nourishment - the process of consciously nourishing, supporting transformation and integration, and deeply releasing layers that no longer serve us to create more space for who we are becoming, allowing ourselves to be held, supported, and nourished. Doesn’t this process sound very similar to the sensations experienced during and after Holosomatic Body Therapy!? It feels like too much of a coincidence that there is such a cross-over between postpartum and the sense of re-birth that you can feel after a holosomatic body therapy session.
The most important thing I learned from Ashlee was that the sense of nourishment had more to do with the level of heat applied to the food and atmosphere of the kitchen than the dishes themselves. Cooking with true care and intention - being aware of the extra nutrition that could be unlocked through soaking grains, slow cooking and more. After our practice we’ll be sharing a dish that I cook a lot and never tire of - a corn and lentil dahl with a generous spoonful of rayu from Tacacucina.
Alongside the dahl, I’ll be serving a delicious gluten-free (one of the only times those two words go together, imho) seeded bread, a recipe I first came across on Sarah Britton’s fantastic blog My New Roots and again in my now-kinesiologist, then gut-health guru Dearbhla Reynold’s excellent cookbook Cultured Club. It is worthy of being shared far and wide! If you haven’t made it, give it a go. It’s a really accessible recipe - you mix all the dry ingredients, add in the water and oil (all in one bowl!), and leave it to soak in your tin overnight. Bake for half an hour, turn it out onto the oven shelf, bake for another half an hour and you’re done.
If you have any questions, I’m always open to a free intro call which you can book here or if you’re ready to join you can book here.
Thank you so much for reading!
Lorna x