Insight/Vipassana Meditation, Still Flowing Yoga, Buddhist & Yoga Philosophy
Gemma is the Director of and a teacher on Still Flowing Yoga Teacher Training.
She is a mother, lives in Totnes, Devon and teaches Yoga to small groups at home and to Still Flowing students in London.
She teaches different ways to embody awareness, including Insight Meditation (formal sitting, walking, everday mindfulness and loving kindness), Still Flowing Yoga (inspired and fusing togther Vinyasa, Yin and Scaravelli) – She now leans prdominantly towards a Scaravelli approach to asana), Buddhist and Yoga Philosophy and techniques from Peter Levine’s Somatic Experiencing Therapy (Body orientated trauma healing)
Gemma delivers a somatic interpretation of quintessential Buddhist and Yoga teachings and practices for todays person in a direct, informal and often playful style.
With minimalist facilitation, Gemma guides students to skillfully explore what it is to embody awareness through the physical, sensate, emotional, cognitive and energetic realms and experience the multi dimensionality of being human.
She uses her intutive skill, somatic insight into the nervous system (by focussing on felt sensation)and trust in the innate wisdom of the body/mind to invite individual and group healing during the training.
The combination of techniques that she has put together work in a complementary way to skillfully release the energy of trauma that is bound in the nervous system. She now understands that this powerful energy is at the root of much of the suffering that we experience, and acts as a major obstacle to the experience of the free flowing awareness of the here and now. This energy when skillfully released can bring about resolution and a deeper sense of being able to inhabit the present unbound.
Her main teachers and influences are her son Toby, her partner Sid, Thich Nhat Hanh, Peter Levine and his Somatic Experiencing Method, The Insight Meditation Society (many teachers most recent to date Steven Smith, Martin Aylward – (now studying under Martin), Silence, Nature, Animals, Danny Paradise in Yoga (original teacher), Bill Wood in Yoga (current teacher) and not to mention all her humble, unamed but certainly not unrecognised family, friends, teachers and students along the way…
She has been involved in the yoga retreat and intensive yoga world for the past 13 years, practicing yoga and meditation for 15 years, and has been running yoga teacher training programmes since 2008. She co owned and co directed El Convento Yoga and Meditation Retreat Centre in Andalucia, and was co founder and director of AshtangaOm Retreats with her ex partner Nic Freeman which was established in 2001. Her depth of experience in this field led her to the creation of Still Flowing Yoga Teacher Training which both consolidated, and allowed an ongoing expression of her knowledge of intensive yoga group facilitation, research and coordination of appropriate yoga curriculum material that would allow for a broad, open minded and integrated study into yoga and meditation.
The programme takes students on a journey of exploration that moves them seamlessly through asana its bio mechanics and technique, through mindfulness of the phsyical form expressed in Vinyasa Flow Yoga, over the bridge of Yin Yoga taking students into embodied energetic awareness, that in turn prepares yoga students to move onto the subtler aspects of the path of Yoga – Meditation and the Buddhist Practices of Mindfulness, Insight and Metta (Loving Kindness), leading students to greater personal freedom and the cultivation of the Brahmaviharas or the Four Sublime States.. Love, Compassion, Joy, Equanimity – The Hallmarks of a Path with Heart.
“Yoga is a journey that leads us back to our true selves. Yoga facilitates the realisation of this great intimacy and acceptance of ourselves, as we are – human beings first and foremost – within this mysterious/unfathomable world – only from here can we even start to contemplate matters of Spirit”
