About Me & Tigris Rose Yoga
My Story
The Beginning.
I first attended a yoga class in 2004 during my time as an undergraduate at the University of Leeds. After completing my degree in Biology, I pursued a career in wild cat conservation which resulted in me moving several times within the UK and travelling, fairly regularly, to far flung destinations, particularly in Asia.
During this time I continued to dabble in yoga but it was in 2011, during the final year of my PhD at the University of Kent, that I developed a consistent yoga practice and fell in love with a particular style of yoga: vinyasa flow.
A Fork in the Road.
By 2015, after years of dedication and seriously hard work, I had established what I thought was my dream career in wild cat conservation. However, life doesn’t always go to plan and, for various work and personal reasons, I was approaching burn out. Knowing that something had to change, I decided to step away from conservation work for a while and, instead, took the opportunity to immerse myself more fully in yoga practice and philosophy by taking the plunge and signing up for my yoga teacher training. The training was extremely intense but a wonderful experience and I began teaching as soon as I got back to the UK early in 2016.
Perpetual Growth & Healing.
I will always continue to seek opportunities to learn and grow, both as a student of yoga and as a teacher. I completed my Restorative Yoga Teacher Training in 2018, falling in love all over again with this gentle nurturing practice - the yin to vinyasa’s yang. I have taken many other trainings over the years, for example, delving into the fascinating world of human anatomy and exploring beautiful practices such as Mindful Self-Compassion.
On a more personal level, the path that began with the exploration of yoga has broadened and meandered, carrying me along new avenues of self-learning and opening up opportunities for personal growth and healing. Like most people out there, I have had difficult experiences in my life and carry unhealed wounds (i.e. what we refer to as trauma). What began with a personal quest to learn about trauma, trauma healing practices and Polyvagal Theory (which explains the functioning of our nervous system and is integral to understanding and healing trauma), led me, in 2023, to undertake a training in ‘Applied Polyvagal Theory in Therapeutic Yoga for Trauma Recovery’.
My Teaching Philosophy.
“I teach from my heart and aim to empower my students to find a practice that genuinely serves their mind, body and soul.”
Everything I learn informs my own practices and, of course, my teaching. Whereas yoga was once predominantly about me moving my body, today it is about much much more than that.
It is about self-knowledge and, ultimately, self-care.
By understanding how the mind, body and nervous system function and by being able to recognise current mind, body and nervous system states and experiences, we can better identify our needs in a given moment and respond with appropriate care-driven action (or inaction as the case may be).
Yoga is a wonderful doorway to compassionate, curious self-enquiry and the building of self-knowledge of this kind. Thus, as we become increasingly open to, and comfortable with, self-enquiry on the yoga mat we are better able to choose practices which honour our needs in a given moment, be it on a nervous system, physical, energetic, emotional and/or mental level, and that, therefore, nourish and restore mind, body and soul.
For example, we could choose which type of yoga to practice on a given day or we could incorporate into a yoga session particular somatic, meditation (e.g. mindfulness or self-compassion), pranayama (breathing) practices, poses or sequences that communicate a greater sense of safety to the nervous system and ground us in the present moment. In classes led by a teacher, we could chose to rest when we need it or take the particular variation of a pose that truly works for us in that moment. We could adapt a pose to suit our needs or skip a pose altogether.
I believe that what we initially learn on the yoga mat, will eventually seep out into our daily lives, allowing us to better take care of ourselves and others as we move through the world.
These beliefs inform how I teach: I aim for my classes to be care-filled and to include opportunities for curious, compassionate self-enquiry; for students to feel seen, supported and held in each and every session; and for them to feel confident and comfortable enough to tweak what I offer in a session to honour their own needs.
Why ‘Tigris Rose’?
Cats (domestic and wild) have always held a special place in my heart and, as I mentioned earlier, I previously had a career in wild cat conservation. For my PhD, I studied the nature of interactions between people and tigers in and around the Sundarbans mangrove forest in Bangladesh (the issue of ‘human-tiger conflict’). I then went on to manage the set up of a tiger conservation initiative in Nepal.
The Latin name for tigers is Panthera tigris and when I began teaching in 2016 and came to name my new business, I chose the name Tigris Yoga in honour of the beautiful creatures that had been so much a part of my life in the years preceding my teacher training. It was a merging of what I had been doing with what I was now doing.
Over time, my practice and teaching philosophy and style have evolved (as I outlined above) and I wanted to re-brand in a way that honoured both my journey to yoga teaching and the one that I have been on since. I wanted a brand name that reflected the growth that I have achieved to date and the also the growth still to come. Finally, I wanted in my new brand name to acknowledge that while the strength and resilience invoked by a tiger is still a key part of what I teach, I now also encourage softer, gentler, and more nourishing approaches to yoga, movement and healing than I did when I first started teaching.
And so I came to Tigris Rose.
‘Tigris’ remains representing my past and the roots of my teaching journey, while the addition of ‘Rose’ reflects my care-filled and nurturing approach to teaching (think of he softness of a rose’s petals) and my ongoing growth as a teacher. Rose is also my middle name, so there is a deep personal connection to that name too.