About

Hi, I’m Nadine Fawell, and I suffer from the curse of introspection.

I’m making it sound like I’m at an AA meeting, aren’t I? I guess in many ways, it is an addiction: the obsessive need, or compulsion, to overanalyse absolutely everything.

It’s through yoga that I’ve channelled this unfortunate tendency into something useful: Svadhyaya, or enlightening self-study. It’s a cornerstone of my practice, this self-reflection-without-judgement – and it’s helped me reframe my relationship with my world.

There’s something about yoga: something really powerful. It can knit together all the separate parts of ourselves, remind us that we are ONE, body mind and soul, not just a bunch of different bits for different occasions.

I felt pretty fragmented for most of my life: I had a traumatic childhood – if you want to, you can read a bit about it here – and grew into a woman with a host of issues: desperately low self esteem, depression, anxiety, anorexia, then overeating and back again to anorexia. Who needs a fun-park ride with a crazy life like that! Thankfully, in my twenties, I stumbled into a yoga class.

As I became physically strong, balanced and capable in my yoga practice, I developed the emotional strength to deal with the nastiness of my past, and start to heal.

In the thousands and thousands of classes Ive taught, I’ve seen yoga work its juju with other people too. I’ve seen how people move out of pain, how they get stronger, more flexible, more emotionally stable. People tell me they are sleeping better, that their headaches and backaches are gone. People say that they have begun to reconnect to their spirituality. And all this from a bit of breathing and stretching.

Gotta love that.

My style, grounded in a decade of practice, study, and teaching, is what I’d call slow and strong: fluidly repeated movements to build flexibility, followed by long holds to increase strength and stability. Those long-held poses are a great place to practice self-examination: asking questions like -

Am I as comfortable as I could be here?

If not, does anything need to change?

Do I give myself permission to change or come out of the pose if I need to?

Do I want to move because I am bored? What happens if I stay?

A yoga practice, done in this way, can provide amazing emotional change, and powerful integration of mind, body and breath.

If you’d like to practice with me,

I run a corporate yoga business in Melbourne, and occasional public yoga classes. You could also come along to one of my events or retreats.

I’m adding and planning new things all the time, so follow me on Twitter, friend me on Facebook or sign up to my newsletter to hear about them first!

Or you could grab a set of my yogAttitude cards!

They are a great way to inspire (or kickstart) your home practice. Who knows, after using them for a while, you may find you don’t even need to go to yoga class all that often! We yoga teachers live in hope that our students will develop a home practice, and these cards, along with the book and guided practices that come with them, are a good way to start.

You can buy them here.