What is the relationship between creativity, sexuality and the cycles of our lives? How does energy move, as creative and sexual expression, and how does she get blocked? What is the relationship between rest and activity in relation to our creative and sexual cycles? What is the nature of Shakti and how has she been constrained? How can we understand the movements of Shakti? How can the Great Wisdom Goddesses Kamalatmika (the lotus goddess of delight) and Matangi (the wild outcaste poet) support our understanding of creative and sexual energies? 

This experiential day long workshop is open to all women and yoga teachers, yoga therapists and health care practitioners who are seeking to support positive experiences of creativity and sexuality in women’s lives, either for themselves personally, or for their students and clients. 

The day counts as continuing professional development (CPD) for teachers who have completed prior trainings with Uma, and can also count towards CPD points for general yoga teachers and therapists, depending upon the requirements of their professional associations. Health care practitioners, psychotherapists, sexological body workers and coaches with an interest in yoga, sexuality and creativity are also welcome to attend, provided they have a living interest in and practice of yoga. 

The intention of this day is to provide practical experience of breath (pranayama), rhythmic and restorative yoga postures (asana), gestures (mudra), heart-based meditations (yoga nidra) and deep, joyful heart songs (kirtan) that promote healthy creative and sexual energies. Supportive sequences of integrated yoga postures will be taught, and there will be time for discussion. An overview of common creative and sexual challenges and opportunities will be discussed in relation to appropriate yogic responses. By the end of the day, participants will have an understanding of the key practical and theoretical yoga-tantra responses that are helpful to support the expression of women’s creativity and sexuality.

There will be plenty of opportunity for questions and discussions. The programme is open to responsive, intuitive attunements and adjustments to meet the specific needs of those attending.

Uma met Yoga in 1969, at the age of four, and fell in love. She’s been practicing ever since, teaching since 1994, and training yoga therapists since 1999. Uma spent many years within traditional yoga teaching guru-hierarchies, and in 2011 co-founded (with her husband Nirlipta Tuli), the Yoga Nidrā Network. An eco-yoga therapist with special expertise in yoga therapy for empowering women’s health, Uma is a mother of three, and has written four books on yoga, including the massive Yoni Shakti: A Woman’s Guide to Power and Freedom through Yoga and Tantra, the influential pranayama guide Mother’s Breath, and co-authored The Celtic School of Yoga. She is the lead author of the forthcoming Nidrā Shakti: An Encyclopaedia of Yoga Nidrā. Uma has trained over one thousand specialist teachers in Total Yoga Nidrā and Yoga for Women (including yoga for pregnancy, menstrual health, fertility, postnatal recovery, and menopause) and has shared over a million unique and responsive Total Yoga Nidrā practices in eighteen different countries. Her passion as a writer and as a teacher is to transmit the clarity of awareness, creativity and profound vitality nourished by yoga tantra. Her practice and teaching respects the cyclical powers of the living earth, and honours human life cycles as spiritual initiations (including conscious menstruation, menopause, birth and postnatal recovery). Uma’s yogini heroine is Lalleshwari, and she aspires to embody in her own practice and teachings Lalla’s combination of ‘… compassion, commonsense knowledge and resistance to authority’.