About
I came to yoga through a door I didn't choose.
When my cousin died young, everything I'd been building (the acting career, the London hustle, the relentless forward motion) suddenly felt a little empty. Grief has a way of piercing through the noise and leaving only the things that actually matter for us to look at.
It left me asking: who am I underneath all of this?
I had graduated from drama school, started acting and creating my own projects and was a part of other people’s visions too. I loved the creativity, the storytelling, the being fully alive and present in a moment - particularly on stage. But the industry around it didn't fit the person I was becoming. Alongside this, I began my journey with yoga.
As time went on, the industry resonated less and yoga resonated more. Yoga as a technology for becoming more honest with myself. I started cutting through the noise of labels and expectations and even past dreams, and began tuning in.
I found a lineage, the Himalayan Yog-Vedanta and Tantra, that had been passed from teacher to student for thousands of years. I found practices that did something no app or studio class had ever done: they put me in contact with myself. It wasn’t a ‘better version of myself.’ Just what had been present and real all along.
I let go of acting, I let go of London and moved to Sri Lanka. Something deepened. By living close to the ocean and within a stone’s throw of India, I had an easy, daily connection to something larger than myself.
Studying Tantra in the Himalayan mountains of India and through self-study, helped me stop seeing my body as something to perfect or ‘transcend’ and start treating it as something sacred. The shift was slow and it was real - months and years - and it changed how I teach.
I've been teaching for six years now and of course this has changed over time. What happens in my classes and on my retreats is more traditional and precise than what most people mean when they say yoga. We work with breath, mudra, mantra, Kriya and movement. If you come with an open mind, together we can create shifts in the nervous system, the mind and the heart. You will sweat. You will be pushed. You may cry in our sharing circles and not know why. It’s all normal and all valid.
I'm not the right teacher for you if you're looking for a workout, a perfect handstand or something that leaves you exactly as you arrived. I am the right teacher for you if you're ready to look inward and allow something to shift.
My retreats are small and intentional. The people who come tend to arrive focused outward. On their children, their work, their partners - everyone but themselves basically. They leave having remembered, and re-centred. It’s a slow turn from the external to the internal and the realisation that they are worth caring for too.
I have to share this story, as it’s one of the most profound moments I've witnessed within my time as a facilitator. There is an incredible woman called Lynn who is a friend of my Aunty's. She had lost both her husband and her daughter in close succession and flew from the UK to Sri Lanka in the depths of grief. Her body was stiff from everything emotional she had been carrying. Over the course of the week, things moved. Her body softened and her face became lighter. She relaxed into the flow of the retreat and on one of the last days, she pulled an oracle card that read ‘the second bloom’. She looked at me and said she felt like she'd been given a second chance at life.
I cannot promise you that. But what I can promise is that you will leave feeling more connected to body, spirit and your life than when you arrived.
Rosie Parton, HEART—TEMPLE founder & retreat facilitator
For more information please contact us at rosie@heart-temple.com or use the form below.
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