I heard a lot about Staying Connected during the lockdown. I even used this expression for my Zoom classes helping people to cope with disquietude and restlessness. It is a beautiful reminder to stay in touch with friends and family via the wonderful technology of Internet can offer. Especially for me as my whole family is in France. 
Like many, the multiple lockdowns have been challenging, using every single ounce of energy for home-schooling 2 children, care for their emotional and mental health, sharing yoga online, helping neighbours for their food shopping and of course all the mundane housekeeping chores – laundry, housecleaning, cooking (more often with everybody in). We also lacked fresh air due to being confined indoors for too long periods of time. 
 
All was topped with extra layers of forced solitude, worries for members of the family catching Covid 19 and the inability and powerlessness to do anything to help. This made everything else more difficult. Then on a larger scale the feeling of uncertainty sinuously settling at the back of the mind; uncertainty of the future, as a person, as a family, as a worker, as part of the community, as a citizen of the Earth. Shades of anxiety, insecurity, anger and frustration, disrupted sleep would soon fill the inner sky of the mind, exhausting the body on many levels. 
 
Where did it leave us? Burnout. Physically, mentally and emotionally. 
 
Then came the start of easing the final lockdown. With the children back at school, more people back at work– and may they stay safe - a sense of sanity could return. Towns all over the world welcoming life, nostalgic of the hustle and bustle of the pre-pandemic. At last, we could meet up with our loved ones with no more restrictions. 
 
Now it is also a time to re-connect from within. To come back home to ourselves and see what damages the storm of the pandemics did to us internally. 
 
Staying connected has been and still is a beautiful and relevant reminder however, it has been predominantly directed outwardly: elderly, children, family, friends, community. Staying connected has an inwardly quality too often disregarded and forgotten. Healing progresses from the inside dealing with what we cannot see: our emotions, our mental states, our physical levels of energy and witness what has become of our inner garden. 
 
So, the question is what does the inner garden need to pull out the weeds of fatigue, anxiety, sadness and replace them with the seeds of joy, liveness, fresh energy? Yoga can. 
 
Yoga teaches a wide variety of ways to replenish depleted energy levels and feel the sweetness of vitality, renewal, wholeness. 
 
It does not matter if you are novice, rookie or expert in yoga. Now is a perfect time to come to the mat and experience the benefits of stretching, toning, strengthening, alleviating aches and pains, breathing, sleeping better, relaxing and the list can go on. 
 
After a short time, you feel high spirited, energized, healthier, stronger, calmer, more confident to cope with the ups and downs of life. As weeks go by you become more aware of your physical mental and emotional barometer and this ability creates the power to attend to their needs for an optimum state of wellbeing. 
 
At last yoga is kind and non-judgemental but respectful of our ever changing and fluctuating aptitudes and physical states. One day we can do a warrior pose easily and the next day we struggle. One day we can set the mind into meditating and the next day it is repeatedly disrupted with multiple distractions. But that is the thing, yoga is not about competing or achieving touching your toes. It is an invitation to the quest to find balance, quietude, wellness where you truly learn to enjoy the journey, not the destination. 
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