Natural Connection
We offer friendly, embodied mindful yoga, nature connection and therapeutic wellbeing classes, workshops and retreats for all ages and backgrounds.
What we offer
Public classes, workshops, courses, training and retreats online/ in person.
One-to-ones for taking yoga practice deeper or recovery from illness and injury.
Workplace and home working sessions for staff and the self-employed, including coaching.
Therapeutic programmes e.g. for mental health service users, refugees, older people.
Yoga for all
We offer a weekly schedule of public yoga classes in East and South London with an emphasis on mindful breathing and kindly awareness. The flow of poses builds an embodied sense of what’s helpful for our bodies - and in our lives more generally!
Retreats
Magical Morocco Yoga Retreat, Essaouira, 22nd - 29th April 2024
Turkish delight Yoga Retreat, Dalyan, 8th - 15th June 2024
Gorgeous Greece Yoga Retreat, Zakynthos, 21st - 28th September 2024
Mindfulness and nature
We teach mindfulness through mindful movement and/or yoga and through nature-based practice, amongst trees and greenery. We encourage embodied awareness for all round well being, while deepening our delight in and care for the natural world.
Therapeutic services
We design specialist yoga, mindfulness, nature connection, coaching and well being services for people experiencing high levels of stress, anxiety and trauma and related mental and physical health conditions e.g. recently arrived asylum seekers.
Workplace wellness
We create tailored wellness packages, bespoke events and holistic coaching programmes for employees, volunteers and the self-employed to support good health and creativity, relieve stress, reduce sickness andfoster connection.
About us
Meet the team:
Sally Ramsden aka Vimalamani: yoga, mindfulness, nature connection.
Yoga teachers, facilitators, advisors and mentors
“Yoga helps me be more at ease with myself and the world while supporting others. It enables me to connect to my body, while working with people from all walks of life”.
Sally, Bethnal Green
Triple benefits
Significant research shows that all three practices offer similar as well as distinctive benefits in each case.
The different elements of my work – yoga for well being of body and mind, gentle mindful movement for recovery from stress and illness or nature connection out in the open – are interrelated and mutually reinforcing.
They are linked by mindfulness: a gentle, compassionate and kindly awareness through whose warmth we enter the world of immediate sensory experience and the body.
Much research has demonstrated the holistic benefits of all these practices for healing, for feeling at home in the body and for deepening our connection with each other and the earth.
Yoga is a unique form of mind-body exercise which offers many health gains including:
Builds muscular strength and body flexibility
Supports and improves respiratory and cardiovascular function
Promotes recovery from and treatment of addiction
Reduces stress, anxiety, depression, fatigue and chronic pain
Improves sleep patterns
Increases blood flow, bringing more oxygen into the body
Reduces blood pressure and heart rate
Decreases age-related changes in gait
Improves proprioception and balance
Boosts overall well being and quality of life
Increases physical, mental and spiritual wellness
- ‘Exploring the Therapeutic Effects of Yoga and Its Ability to Increase Quality of Life’, Catherine Woodyard, Department of Health, The University of Mississippi
In addition to its many physical and mental health benefits, mindfulness can:
Strengthen cognitive functioning
Create positive neurological pathways
Build more focus, concentration and absorption
Increase awareness of physical sensations, thoughts and feelings
Help you stay in the present and savouring pleasures
Create greater capacity to deal with adverse events
Encourage responsiveness over reactivity
Help you form deeper connections with others
Bring increased sense of meaning and purpose
-’Living Well with Pain & Illness: The Mindful Way to Free Yourself from Suffering’, Vidyamala Burch
The positive effects of spending time in nature include:
Calming and mood lifting
Reduces feelings of isolation
Increases self-esteem
Improves community cohesion
Lowers crime rates
People pay attention more broadly and more effortlessly in nature
Builds ecological literacy
Reduces anxiety over climate change
- ‘Ecopsychology: How Immersion in Nature Benefits Your Health”’ Jim Robbins, Yale Environment 360, January 2020
“I love Sally’s mindful yoga. It’s so inclusive and friendly and always lifts me”.
Jane, Camberwell
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