24 April 2026
When I lived in Beijing, I practised yoga in the local Temple of the Sun (日坛) park, alongside others practising tai qi, qi gong or diablo; dancing; playing the erhu or guzheng; singing in groups; or painting calligraphy on the ground with large water-filled brushes. The style of yoga I practised and taught was influenced by tai qi, qi gong and traditional Chinese medicine. There was nothing “authentic” or “pure” about this amalgam of practices. But then again, movement, breath and life-force aren’t culturally specific, so maybe, in a public space, under the willow and ginkgo trees in the park, we were all just moving in our own ways, finding and re-finding something that offered a day-to-day sense of embodied ease and presence in the midst of change.
At that time, I felt unrooted. Maybe locals, and not just the internationally mobile expat community, felt this too. In Beijing, the landscape of the city was under constant demolition and reconstruction. A newly built shopping complex carried the slogan “a bit of everywhere, unlike anywhere”. Migrant communities without residency permits from rural parts of China clung on at the edges of the city. Their children, if they weren’t left behind with grandparents in villages, attending makeshift schools that weren’t supposed to be there.
Movement and breath practices had experientially, viscerally, taught me that feelings were felt in my body. In contrast to my earlier professional career, there was no clear path. In China, the US, and back in the UK, I explored movement and breath trainings, meditation, physical theatre and dance and immersive time in nature.
Since my early 20s, wherever I have lived, I have carried a postcard of an artwork by an Iraqi-French calligrapher, Hassan Massoudy, that I came across in the Institut du Monde Arab in Paris. The calligraphy, in Arabic, represents words of the fourth century B.C. Chinese philosopher Laozi from verse 27 of the Dao De Jing “善行無轍跡”, translated on my postcard as: “the perfect traveller does not know his destination”. Or elsewhere as: “good walking leaves no tracks”. For me, this captures something about relating to uncertainty and the unknown. Moving towards, or within, the unknown, perhaps we can feel our breath and our feet on the ground and can come to hold what we know and carry with us more lightly.