Celtic Yoga: Connecting Ancient Wisdom with Modern Wellness
Welcome to a special guest blog by Ailie, founder of Yoga Rewild and my collaborator in Celtic Wheel Ceremonies.
As we prepare for our upcoming Autumn Equinox retreat in Wales, Ailie shares her insights on Celtic Yoga - a unique practice that blends ancient Celtic wisdom with traditional yoga.
Discover how this earth-centered approach can deepen your connection to nature, enhance your spiritual journey, and bring balance to modern life.
Read on to learn about the power of Celtic Yoga and why you might consider joining us for a truly immersive experience this September.
I’m Ailie, a yoga teacher, founder of Yoga Rewild and space holder for Celtic ceremonies and retreats.
I have a background in health behaviour, I am a mother of two and I live in east Bristol.
In this blog, I share my interpretation of Celtic Yoga as a spiritual practice to connect with nature, life rhythms, and ancestral wisdom to overcome the challenges of modern living, as well as supporting earth guardianship.
Discovering ancient wisdom: What is Celtic Yoga?
Celtic Yoga is a practice which makes both my spirit and the world around me glow. It is a physical yoga practice (known as Hatha Yoga) which weaves in the ancient spiritual beliefs of the Celts, who were rooted in the natural world, revering Mother Earth, the trees, the solar and lunar cycles, and the festivals marking seasonal shifts and farming milestones. The ancestors were also honoured by the Celts, as were the creatures of the natural world and beings of other spiritual realms. The world was animate to the Celts and they engaged in practices to shapeshift, channel, and connect with the energies of these spirits.
Personally, Celtic Yoga has enabled me to feel into my Welsh and Scottish roots, it has deepened my connection with nature, furthered my healing journey and provided spiritual direction. Perhaps more surprisingly, Celtic Yoga has also evolved my practice of eco-activism, community connection and Earth guardianship.
I know for some, the very notion of Celtic Yoga, might be confusing or even triggering, particularly for those who are protective of the ancient origins of yoga (which I feel too) or perhaps are unfamiliar with either yoga or Celtic spirituality. I therefore begin with honouring the meaning and practice of yoga, before explaining how Celtic spiritualism can be weaved into our yoga practice to not only counter the challenges of modern living, but to help us remember and reconnect to our bodies, each other and the natural world.
Key Benefits of Celtic Yoga
Deepens connection with nature & the land
Enhances spiritual growth
Promotes eco-awareness & activism
Strengthens ancestral connections
Balances modern life stressors
The Roots of Yoga:
From Ancient India to a Modern Practice
Yoga originated somewhere near the India-Tibet border approximately 5000 years ago during the end of Stone Age (Neolithic era). As the climate had globally stabilised after the ice age, human beings in many places including Central Asia and Ancient Britain, had gradually transitioned from being nomadic hunter-gatherers to settled small scale farming communities. This shift created a surplus of food, increasing life expectancy, and creating time for spiritual practices, such as yoga. I find it particularly fascinating that this shift enabled elders to evolve and for those with wombs to experience menopause, which brought a particular type of wisdom into community life.
‘Yoga’ originates from a Sanskrit word meaning to ‘yoke’ or ‘unite’. It refers to the uniting of body, mind, and spirit to experience self-actualization and oneness. At its absolute essence, this is the meaning of yoga to me. Whilst yoga began as a meditation practice, it evolved over time to be a philosophy for life and way of being. There are recognised to be several pathways to experiencing yoga, like branches of a tree.
“The paths are many, but the Truth is one.”
Hatha Yoga is the physical practice which involves calming the mind, connecting to the body through postures (asana) and breathwork techniques (pranayama) to feel life-force energy.
This form of yoga has particularly evolved over the last 200 years, proliferating in styles which have spread around the world. Whilst this has made yoga more globally accessible, there are criticisms that yoga has been misused and misappropriated, being taught without honouring the connection to spirit or it’s ancient origins.
From Liverpool to Yoga: A Celtic Student's Discovery
The fact that yoga did spread meant that I, a Celt studying an English Degree in Liverpool was exposed to this wonderous practice, which has fundamentally shaped my life. I began in my early 20s, firstly with traditional Hatha and then for many years Iyengar, both with experienced British teachers, trained in India.
Finding Balance through Yoga
I found yoga instantly appealing, a medicine to counteract the heady, chaotic, and hedonistic aspects of university life. It calmed my monkey mind, something I had always struggled to do, often experiencing sleep insomnia.
I loved the physicalness of yoga; it brought me into my body, enabled me to explore boundaries and play with the challenges of complex poses. It also brought spiritual intrigue, which felt esoteric and new to me as at that time, I regarded myself as an atheist or perhaps an agnostic with a resistance to religious dogma and a strong curiosity of magic and the unseen.
Two Decades of Yoga Exploration
I am now approaching 40, and over the past two decades I have explored many forms of yoga, through classes, workshops, retreats, and teacher trainings. I have studied the ancient origins, key texts, practical teaching guides and manuals which layered with modern scientific research to demonstrate the benefits of this practice on well-being.
Discovering the Power of Personalised Practice
What I have learnt is that the most effective and fulfilling yoga practice is one that is adapted to the individual. This depends on where we are at mentally, physically, emotionally, and spiritually, in the context of our life-course, our monthly cycle and how we are feeling on that given day. I also learnt that for me to deepen my spiritual practice and teaching, I need to connect with nature and that is how I discovered Celtic Yoga.
“What I have learnt is that the most effective and fulfilling yoga practice is one that is adapted to the individual.”
Try this simple Celtic Yoga Practice
Stand barefoot on the earth. Close your eyes and take deep breaths, imagining roots growing from your feet into the ground.
As you inhale, expand your heart space in all directions and visualise the life-force energy from the trees flowing into your body expanding and lighting up your sense of being. As you exhale, draw the belly back and gratefully send the breath, along with love and gratitude back to the trees and Mother Earth.
Blending Celtic Traditions with Yoga: My Spiritual Journey
Birthing my second child required me to go deep, to conjure the strength and wisdom of all the mothers who birthed before me. I was giving birth at home and whilst I apparently appeared calm in the warm waters of the birthing pool, I felt pushed way beyond my threshold for pain. To continue, I breathed deeply and sourced strength by visualising my lineage, which began with my foremothers and stretched back over evolutionary history to the start of life on earth, a speck of stardust in a drop of water in the womb of Mother Earth.
Reflection on that birthing experience invoked the deep realisation of the necessity of remembering our lineages and our connections to Mother Earth. It also gave me a new perspective on the concept of Yoga Rewild to mean a remembering of this connection. I had set up Yoga Rewild a couple of years earlier during the Covid pandemic when people were isolating, and I was feeling overwhelmed by climate change and the destruction of nature. Yoga Rewild began with the simple aim of “Sharing yoga, Planting trees” involving online classes and donations to tree planting, it then grew into a community and a form of nature-based yoga.
Over the next couple of years, as I emerged from the wintering experience of having my second baby, I drew strength and inspiration once again from Mother Earth. Yoga Rewild classes became intrinsically nature based and I began to develop Tree Yoga; a practice to embody, connect, and honour the trees and their vital role in our Earth’s ecosystem, which I also link to the Ogham, the ancient Celtic tree alphabet.
Whilst I was breastfeeding and missing my monthly menstrual cycles which I had tracked for years, I began observing and relating my practice to the moon cycle. This opened many channels, leading me to dark moon rituals at the Bristol Goddess Temple, where I met Ruth (of Starshine Roots) and we soon after began hosting Celtic Wheel of the Year ceremonies together.
From there a cascade of spiritual learning inspired my yoga practice, including the aspects of Goddess, the divine feminine archetypes, the practice of Green Witchcraft and Celtic spiritualism.
Celtic Wisdom for Modern Challenges: Finding balance in Nature
Celtic spirituality connects us back to simpler times and it can help counterbalance the complex challenges of living in a modern world. What we might associate with being Celtic has evolved over thousands of years, influenced by interactions with other cultures and religions, making it a rich tapestry of nature-based wisdom and mystical tradition, celebrated for its reverence for life, the earth, and the interconnectedness of all beings.
The Celts in ancient Britain, similarly to Central Asia were forming communities, practising early farming, and developing spiritual beliefs. Ancient Britain much like today, with its moist and temperate climate, had distinct seasons and extreme variations of daylight. As people began farming and observing the cycles of the natural world, they revered their first deity: Mother Earth, also known as Mother Nature and Mother Goddess. I believe that connecting back to these early spiritual beliefs can ground and reconnect us to nature. We are not learning anything we don’t intuitively already know, the practice is simply helping us remember.
Why Retreat to experience Celtic Yoga?
Modern society with its fast pace, reliance on technology and pressures to be competitively productive, disrupts our natural rhythms and instils a separation from nature. This makes us live in our heads and virtual worlds, releasing cortisol and adrenaline, putting us into our sympathetic nervous system, which is our fight/flight response mechanism.
Most of us are also live predominately indoors, eating in excess diets of processed foods, which is messing with our hormones, our body clocks, gut biome, and overall immune system. We’ve lost our communal ties which connect us to the land, the seasons and the celebrations of Mother Nature during the yearly cycle.
But all is not lost, as we can counterbalance and remember through a Celtic Yoga practice, which can be enhanced when we also give ourselves space to unplug, be in a natural environment and immerse ourselves in our practice. Celtic Yoga compliments other holistic therapies, particularly sound healing and drum journeys, which use ancient instruments to create space to release, experience rest, healing and spiritual insights.
Experience the magic of Celtic Yoga in Wales
If you are interested in the transformative experience of a Celtic Yoga and Sound Healing retreat, to restore balance, find inner peace, and cultivate a deeper sense of connection, then we warmly invite you to come to Penpont, Brecon, Wales, during the Autumn Equinox weekend, 20-22 September 2024.
For more details, visit our retreat page, and feel free to reach out with any questions.
FAQS
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A. No not at all, Celtic Yoga is open to anyone interested in connecting with nature through yoga. The practice can help us all remember that we share ancestors and a Mother Earth.
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A: While Celtic Yoga incorporates Hatha yoga postures and breathwork techniques (pranayama), it also involves other forms of movements and weaves in Celtic spiritual beliefs, emphasising connection with nature, seasonal cycles, and ancestral wisdom.
