I hope you have had a good week, and what a difference a week can make with our weather … sunshine and blue skies at the start, but grey skies and overwhelming rain by Friday! Hope no-one got stuck in the flash flooding and you were all able to get from A to B safely.

Face-to-Face Classes — because we are still covering the various half-term breaks around the East Midlands, this week we only have classes at our Loughborough venue and Old Woodhouse Community Hall:

• Wednesday — with Mary at Rosebery Street, Loughborough
• Friday — with Traudi at Old Woodhouse Community Hall

All face-to-face classes are back the following week.

Online Classes — all running as normal with the Live online class timetable on the members' jtp.zone website. All classes are recorded so when you can’t make the live session they are ready and waiting for you to do at a more convenient time for you.

Looking forward to running a Special Event as we head through November and December. This will be a programme to help motivate you to keep moving, and to keep taking care of yourself as the temperatures drop and the days get shorter. I will be introducing this from mid-November — more information to follow here soon.

This week I have been busy watching TV !!! 

I was recommended to watch Live to 100: Secrets of the Blue Zones. 

It's a series on Netflix which looked at various places around the world where there are communities with a higher percentage of people living not just a long life, but a happy and healthy life. The series looks at what these communities have in common in a hope to introduce that to other communities.

It is a very interesting series and I would recommend to watch it. 

There are the obvious things like a healthy diet, fresh air, exercise, and feeling part of a community — however for me what I felt stood out was ikigai which roughly translates as the happiness of always being busy.

Having purpose in life seems to be the biggest common denominator: why we get up in the morning, how we spend our time, and what makes us feel happy.

Sometimes I think we feel like the busyness of life can be overwhelming and stressful, but busyness doesn’t have to equate to hard work, big effort, with a high impact. 

Our busyness can come from small things that give us a quick win, or something we feel is filling in time but which feels low on effort and low on impact, it doesn’t matter.  What matters is the fact that it feels part of your daily purpose. It could be 30 minutes of weeding a day in your garden, a quick win, but low on effort, but if you set it as part of your daily purpose you are getting in touch with your ikigai. 

We all need to have a purpose, we all need our ikigai. What is yours? 

Have a fabulous week everyone, keep moving, keep feeling and looking good.

With love

Jane xx