For most of my life, yoga happened indoors. A studio, a wooden floor, mirrors, maybe candles if it was a nice place. Controlled. Quiet. The outside world stayed outside.
I don't really remember the last time I practised like that. These past months it has been sand under my hands, wind moving through everything, and the ocean somewhere in my field of vision — sometimes close, sometimes just a strip of blue on the horizon, but always there.
Mornings in Abéné
In Abéné, Senegal, my mornings started the same way for weeks. Roll out the mat outside, usually before the heat really arrived, and within minutes the dogs would show up. Not one dog — several, the ones who had basically adopted us, who slept near our door and walked with us to the beach like it was their job.
They would flop down at the edges of the mat, or wander into a downward dog of their own, or just sit and watch with that completely unbothered dog calm. At first it felt like a distraction. Then it became the thing I looked forward to. Practising alongside creatures who have absolutely no concept of "getting it right" — who are just there, present, warm in the morning sun — does something to how seriously you take your own poses.
"You cannot take yourself too seriously when a dog is doing a better child's pose than you, three feet away, completely by accident."
The platform in The Gambia
In The Gambia I had a wooden platform right at the edge of the beach — slightly raised, facing the water, with palm trees on either side. It became my place. Same spot, different ocean every day — sometimes glassy and flat, sometimes wild with wind and spray reaching all the way up to where I was practising.
Wind on a yoga mat outside is a completely different experience to wind in a studio with the air conditioning on. It pushes against you mid-pose. It makes balance poses genuinely harder — tree pose with a crosswind is not the same as tree pose on a still studio floor. You have to actually engage, actually root down, actually feel where your weight is. The wind doesn't negotiate. Either you find your balance or you don't.
And somehow that made the practice feel more honest. Less performance, more conversation — with the ground, with the air, with my own body trying to find stillness inside something that refuses to be still.
Dom joined the mat
Somewhere along the way, Dom started practising with me. Not every day, and not because I asked — he just started rolling out a mat beside mine in the mornings. Watching someone you love discover their body in this way, slowly, without ego, just because the setting made it feel natural — that has been one of the unexpected gifts of this whole journey.
We don't talk much during practice. But there is something about moving through the same sequence, side by side, facing the same water, that says more than conversation would.
Sunset is the ritual
If morning practice is about waking the body up gently, sunset practice is something else entirely for me. It has become a ritual — not negotiable, not something I skip. As the light changes and the heat of the day finally lets go, I move through my practice facing the water, and the colours shift the entire time I'm on the mat. Pink, orange, that brief gold moment, then the blue settling in.
It is the same sequence I might do anywhere. But doing it while the sun goes down over the Atlantic, with the sand still warm under my hands from the day's heat — it turns a physical practice into something that feels closer to a closing of the day. A way of saying: this day happened, and now it is ending, and I was here for all of it.
What I don't think I can go back to
I don't know what my practice will look like when — if — I am back in a studio again. Walls. A fixed floor. No wind to push against, no dogs to step over, no horizon to watch the light change on.
I think I will miss it. Not in a romantic, missing-paradise way — but in the way you miss something that taught you something real about your own body and how it actually wants to move, once nothing artificial is shaping the space around it.
For now, I am just grateful — for the sand, the wind, the dogs, the platform, the sunsets, and for Dom beside me on his own mat, figuring it out in his own way. This is the practice. Not a substitute for one.