Welcome to this week’s Newsletter. I hope you have had a good week and thoroughly enjoying the sunshine in April.

I am making April a more mindful month, and this week I am focusing on time. If you have found yourself saying ‘where did the time go?’, you are not alone, and in Your Whole Self this week I take a look at why as we get older, we feel like time passes by much faster. Is it because we aren’t living in the moment, but thinking about our ‘To do list’ all the time? … I can’t remember having a ‘To do list’ in my 20s, so maybe this plays a part. Anyway, grab a cuppa, have a read and let me know what you think.

There are no Face-to-Face Classes this week as it's our Easter break, but will return week beginning 28 April.

This week I am encouraging you to be more mindful with your movement, being more conscious with your mind/body connection, noticing how you feel when you move, and moving with more purpose. 

The exercise I have chosen to get you thinking and feeling is Thread the Needle. This isn’t a specific Joseph Pilates exercise but it does incorporate all the Pilates principles of stability and mobility and stretch. 

The mobility comes from the mid-spine, the stretches come into the back of the body and — with the addition of chest opening — we start to open up the front line. The addition of stability work for the lower body covers all the Pilates bases. 

Enjoy, keep away from pain, and work appropriately for your body.

Message me if you have any questions.

Where Did the Time Go, and how is it April already?

Have you ever caught yourself saying this? 

I was chatting with some of the JTPers in the week, and we are all curious to know why it feels like this. It seems the older we get, the faster time moves — so why might that be? 

When we were kids, a week felt like forever — summer holidays stretched out like a lifetime of sunshine and ice lollies. But now? Blink and it's Monday again. Is it just because we’re older, or is it something to do with the way we fill our days?

Well, let’s consider the mighty ‘to do list’. Once upon a time, we lived more in the moment. We didn’t worry about the food shop, booking the boiler service, replying to emails, or rotating the mattress (honestly—who has time?!). Now, many of us have a running list in our heads all the time. It’s like our brains are constantly doing admin.

Could it be that the more we try to manage time, the faster it slips through our fingers?

Well time isn’t just ticking — it’s actually telling us something. Time isn’t going faster, we are just noticing its passage more keenly. We measure it with appointments, alarms, calendar reminders. It’s all a bit… structured, isn’t it? And when time is so segmented, it can feel like we’re just hopping from one task to the next without stopping to breathe. And so where does that bring us — as always, to mindful movement and being present.

We could ease the pressure by giving time a bit less power. Start by:

• taking a few minutes to move each day without turning it into another item on the ‘to do list’
• work on being fully present for a moment, even if it’s just while making a cuppa or simply watching the clouds
• letting go of the need to tick all the boxes, all of the time.

Time won’t slow down — but our relationship with it can shift. I don’t have the answers (I still haven’t rotated that mattress), but I’d love to know how you feel about this. Does time feel like it’s speeding up for you too? Do you live by a to-do list, or do you rebel against it?

Let’s just take a collective breath while we take a moment and think about time, because time — when it’s mindful — can feel like it stretches a little, and make space for what matters.

Have a great week folks — keep looking, moving and feeling good.

With love

Jane xx