yoga Archives » Angelina Egerton

9 September 2020 No Comments

The last time I posted on this website was July 2019.

SO much has happened since then so today’s post is going to fill in a few gaps, ready to be expanded on later.

I guess I’ve been off the radar for a number of reasons. I got married in August 2019 to my wonderful husband Tim. We celebrated our first wedding anniversary a few weeks ago – not with the spa break that I was originally hoping for due to Covid – but with a dinner out and a cocktail or two.

Our honeymoon was in Lanzarote at the end of September and a bit of October 2019. Looking back, we were so fortunate to be able to have our wedding and honeymoon as normal. We planned it all so last minute it would definitely have been more ‘normal’ to wait until 2020 to have our wedding. Thank goodness we didn’t! My heart truly goes out to couples doing their wedding planning this year. What a nightmare.

I’m taking the focus of this website away from exclusively harp content. I want to share more aspects of my life on here, so let’s start now.

I was delighted to discover I was pregnant on January 17th 2020. I spent the next few weeks reading every pregnancy book I could get my hands on, getting really excited with my family and friends and just preparing myself for this monumental change that was coming to Tim and me. Unfortunately my pregnancy ended with a miscarriage at just over nine weeks.

Miscarriage – as I’m sure lots of you know – is one of the most devastating things a person can go through. It’s not something that leaves you and the pain doesn’t heal. It has softened with time though, and as what would have been my due date approaches, I can see clearly that if a baby is in our future, it will come along when the time is right. Lockdown isn’t the best time to go through a pregnancy. I may share our Trying to Conceive (TTC) journey a bit more on here as it may be of help and comfort to other women trying to start a family. No one talks about miscarriage, which is crazy as it is so common and utterly traumatising for those who experience it.

So I spent late February and early March going through and recovering from that. I cancelled a few bits of work to allow me to recover properly, only to be immediately thrust into lockdown. As a self-employed musician, I was devastated again to find my diary for the year suddenly empty, with no income for the foreseeable future.

Quite a few of my students happily transitioned to online teaching, which, along with the Self-Employed Income Support Scheme, has meant that Tim and I have sort-of been able to stay afloat financially. Tim has been setting up our garage gym for his personal training business, ready to see clients privately here in York.

My Yoga Teacher Training has also been put on pause, hopefully to resume this September, although like everything else, it’s not set in stone.

This post makes it sound like this year has been just awful, but there have been so many wonderful moments too:

Tim and I have been able to spend way more time together than we ever thought we would, and we still like each other, yay!
We are settled in our new house so it’s been really cosy and private being in lockdown together.
I’ve realised that, when I go back to gigging regularly, I’m going to say no to gigs that are more than 50 miles away. I don’t want to do that much driving any more. I’ve been so happy having a quieter, calmer pace of life and that is something I want to take with me into the future.

I’d love to hear from you, what aspects of lockdown will you be taking with you once (and if) restrictions are lifted?

Balance

About seventeen years ago I had my first harp lesson (writing that made me feel insanely old).

The first thing you learn when playing the harp is to find the balance point. The harp is a heavy instrument, mine weighs in at around 36 kilos. However, they are designed so that, when tipped back into a playing position, they are almost weightless. All you need is to gently rest it on your knees and you don’t feel the weight at all. Once you find the balance point, everything becomes much easier.

I’ve been thinking recently about balance. This blog is about the experiences of a freelancer and a lot of that is about balance – balancing the different aspects of a career, or just a day, can be challenging.

In addition to this, I’ve started practicing yoga. The idea for this post came to me while I was in the tree. The tree pose, that is… I haven’t taken to climbing the trees of Central Manchester yet – although I’d hate to rule it out. Anyway, my fancy yoga ipad app told me that it helps your balance if you focus on an unmoving object. It’s certainly a helpful tip, but I wondered if it applies to more than yoga.

Maybe this rule could apply to our careers as well? If we have a specific focus in mind – a goal or a target – maybe we are more balanced in our approach? Conversely, what if we don’t really know where or what we are aiming for? Will we lose focus and fall out of balance?

What about balancing the different areas of our lives? Career, Family, a Relationship, Friends, Money, how do we know the best way to balance it all?

Something else I’ve learned from practising yoga is to not compare myself with others. Personally, I can’t touch my toes, yep, it’s embarrassing, but that’s what you get when you’re six foot tall and did all your growing in the space of about a year. It would take me weeks, possibly months of daily stretching to be able to touch my toes.

Some people don’t even think twice about it. But if I just gave up due to my blatant inadequacy, I wouldn’t get anywhere. I choose to practice and trust that I will improve gradually.

The same goes with music, by the way. I’m sure many of us are guilty of feeling like we’ll never be able to play like *insert amazing musician’s name here*, and feeling like there’s no point even trying. Maybe that person you aspire to emulate is thinking the exact same thing about someone else. Torturing yourself because you’re not there yet is counter-productive, you are on your own journey and need to stay focussed on your own targets, to stay balanced.

Lots of questions in this post I know – let’s call it thinking out loud. I need to figure out my own targets and focus on those, I need to find my own balance point.

A long-overdue catch up

Balance