MY STORY
From burnout to balance
As a young reporter in the nineties I lived a fast-paced life and thrived on deadlines (30 years and two teenagers later, nothing has changed). Back then I didn’t have the tools to manage stress; I came close to burnout several times and my sleep suffered.
The penny dropped when a close friend sent me a birthday card covered in fire engines saying “this reminded me of you”. I was clearly a walking emergency!
Calming my racing mind
A few people suggested that I should try yoga. Back then, it wasn’t as popular or widely available as it is now and the classes I found seemed to be aimed at slow-moving seniors in socks.
I dismissed yoga as boring – until I stumbled upon an Ashtanga yoga class in a gym in 2001. It was dynamic, fast-paced – no pose was held longer than five breaths, perfect for my impatient racing mind. While I hadn’t a clue what I was doing in those 90 minutes – I certainly couldn’t touch my toes – I hadn’t thought about work, or been lured into anxious thought loops, because moving in new and challenging ways demanded all my concentration.
By the end, I’d gone from tight and stressed to calm and energised. That night I slept better than I’d done in years. I knew then that yoga was my medicine and that – almost counterintuitively – dynamic yoga slowed me down. It met me where I was, but showed me a new way to be me. It got me out of my thinking mind and into my feeling body.
Once I learned to slow down and control my breathing, the mental and emotional benefits of increased dramatically and I became truly hooked.
Becoming a yoga teacher
I felt compelled to share this life-changing practice and in 2006 completed the first of many yoga teacher trainings. For many years I taught my colleagues in the newspaper and magazine offices where I worked full-time. After our lunch hour sessions, we’d go back to our desks bright-eyed and smiling; people would wonder whether we’d been to the pub!
I’ve now completed more than 500 hours of yoga teacher training, learned Vedic meditation with the London Meditation Centre, written a book on yoga Everyone Try Yoga with London yoga studios triyoga. I teach on retreats, at triyoga and online via Zoom and on Instagram live @victoriawoodhall.
Woodhall & Woodall!
In 2020, I met Trinny Woodall through my work as Editorial Director of beauty and wellness website getthegloss.com. She was launching her BFF Rebalance foundation and asked beauty editors to suggest an activity to do with her that involved getting back into balance.
Naturally I suggested yoga. Like me, she’d tried yoga and found it boring and had struggled to find a yoga style that kept her engaged. But Rocket Yoga seemed to click. “I love feeling strong, but also the mental benefits,” she often tells me. “It calms my mind.”
People often ask if we’re related due to our surnames – we’re not, it’s purely coincidence! I’m delighted to be featured in Trinny’s forthcoming book Fearless, out in September 2023.
Yoga for modern life
I’ve always kept up my full-time journalism work, specialising in beauty and wellbeing and writing for national newspapers and magazines and working as Editorial Director or Get The Gloss. I find that the busier I become at work, the more yoga I do: the latter enables the former.
If you feel you don’t have time to do yoga, think of this way: yoga can help give you more energy and focus, make you more productive and stress-resilient off the mat. Yes, it’s a workout, but it’s also nervous system ‘hygiene’. Those 45 minutes you’ve invested in practice, I find, pay back multiple times.
My yoga teaching is about using the practice to undo the mental and physical tensions of a busy, often desk-bound land screen-centred life.
As for my personal yoga practice, you’ll find me doing Mysore-style Ashtanga self-practice and Rocket Yoga. What is Rocket Yoga? Find out more here.
VICTORIA WOODHALL
My Professional Qualifications
My first 200-hour professional yoga qualification was with my ashtanga yoga teacher Lara Baumann, who also founded the Quantum Yoga. I also learned to teach her Quantum Yoga method, a dynamic style based on balancing the Ayurvedic doshas.
In 2019, I completed a second 200-hour teacher training with Mercedes Sieff, combining dynamic yoga and positive psychology (a great combination for finding your flow state).
In 2021 I sought to deepen my knowledge of how breath affects the nervous system and how we can use breathing techniques for specific effects such to increase alertness, focus and performance, to feel balanced, to aid digestion, relaxation and sleep.
I’ve been practising Rocket Yoga since 2011 with Amme Poulton, and latterly with Amber Jean Marie, both direct students of Rocket Yoga founder Larry Schulz. I completed Amber’s Rocket Yoga teacher trainings at triyoga and am certified to teach all three Rocket Yoga sequences.
VICTORIA WOODHALL
Rocket Yoga
