ABOUT JUSTINE
Some people find yoga because they're looking for flexibility or fitness. I found it because I was lost. Genuinely untethered from myself and looking for something but I didn't know what.
My dad died suddenly in 1990. I was in my early twenties at a time when nobody talked about grief, trauma or the way loss rewires a person from the inside out. There was no language for what I was carrying. No diagnosis. Just years of getting on with it, holding it together on the outside while something quietly unravelled within.
In January 2000 I walked into my first yoga class. I cried in Savasana because for the first time in years my body felt like somewhere it could be. I had found my home.
A few years later I began an eighteen month teacher training in London. I was anxious, nervous and still carrying grief I hadn't fully named. But the practices were beginning to do what nothing else had, they were giving the grief somewhere to go. I qualified, started teaching immediately and haven't stopped learning since.
What I didn't know then, but understand deeply now, is that what I was experiencing had a name. PTSD. Undiagnosed, untreated, quietly managed through yoga and sheer necessity at a time when trauma wasn't yet part of the mainstream conversation. I was an early adopter not by choice but by need. I learned the techniques as they emerged, applied them to myself first and eventually brought them to the women I work with.
I'm still studying. I recently completed my second professional anatomy training with a world renowned teacher and what it gave me - a genuinely deep understanding of how the body works and what it needs - and it's transformed how I teach. Most women arrive having been told what to do in yoga for years without anyone ever helping them understand their own body, what yoga can do for them or why they might any of it at all. Once they do, everything changes.
Two years ago something happened that changed everything again.
I contracted severe double pneumonia, flu and a hospital super bug. Ten days in ICU. Twenty days in hospital. The severity of it revealed itself slowly. It was only as a cluster of migraines began to clear that I managed to sit up and the nurses applauded. Then my husband walked in and I saw his face. That's when I understood how close it had been.
But here's what I want to tell you about those twenty days. I never stopped doing yoga. Not poses, not sequences, not anything you'd recognise from a studio. Just quiet movement in a hospital bed, breath by breath, being aware of how fragile each one was and that’s saying something coming from a yoga teacher. When people ask if I missed my yoga I always say the same thing: "it was the best yoga I've ever done in my life".
Being that ill, that reduced, that completely dependent on other people it made sense of everything. The grief I had carried alone for decades. The silence I had kept. For the first time I was held, properly supported, unable to do anything but receive. I had to surrender and something shifted the thirty years of solitude hadn't touched.
It showed me we need people. Staying silent is bad for us.
That's why my retreats are small. That's why my classes are intimate. That's why I think about everything - the transfers, the meals, the ensuite rooms, the maximum of eight women. So that the women who come to me don't have to think about any of it. So they can just arrive. And be held. The way I finally was.
I've been teaching for twenty five years and running retreats in Portugal for thirteen of them. My husband Giles helps make the retreats run smoothly so I can focus entirely on what I'm here for.
The women who come to me are intelligent, self-aware and done with being fobbed off with movement and shapes. They want to understand themselves, their bodies, their emotions, their reactions, their patterns. They want a practice that works when life gets hard. Not a sequence to follow. Something they own.
If any of this sounds familiar - the quiet carrying, the feeling that there should be more to this - you're in the right place.
Justine x
TRAINING & QUALIFICATIONS
I've invested heavily in understanding the body, trauma and therapeutic practice over twenty five years. My core trainings include:
- Yoga Anatomy Principles & Practices — Leslie Kaminoff (one of the world's leading anatomy teachers)
- Integrative Yoga Therapeutics (an in-depth, rigorous training in therapeutic application with Bo Forbes)
- Advanced Restorative Trainer — Judith Lasater (the world's leading teacher in restorative practice)
- Trauma Informed Yoga — TCTSY
Qualifications recognised at Senior Teacher level by British Wheel of Yoga and Yoga Alliance Professionals — though I choose not to maintain those registrations. If you know yoga, you'll know why.
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