Focus for the month: my Etsy shop Yoga Spirit Art

Several years ago, I made a conscious effort to make my interests and hobbies my work, figure out creative ways of monetising these things, and be 100% self employed. I’m now doing this (Yayy!), which includes yoga and meditation teaching, running my website Thought Brick, and also co-owning with my Mum our Etsy shop Yoga Spirit Art. But, sometimes, it feels like i’m juggling too much and I don’t know what next to focus on.

Having multiple projects and businesses is great, but I realised at the start of this month, that Etsy, unfortunately wasn’t getting much of my attention, so I’m dedicating this month to really growing and pouring more love into the shop.

We started Yoga Spirit Art a few years ago, with the intention of sharing affordable but high quality and environmentally friendly yoga inspired art and prints. There’s a lot more to yoga than the physical asanas and sequences, so although we use yoga poses in our work, we also share the other eight limbs of yoga philosophy too!

Space is important

We often think of yoga as something we do for health, happiness, wellbeing etc — or something that is restricted to our own being. I’ll never forget the time I was staying at the Sivananda Meenakshi Ashram in Tamil Nadu in India and was asked to tidy up my space. I had some clothes just lying on the bed and my space in the communal area wasn’t as tidy as it could be.

I remember feeling a bit defensive initially, wondering what this had to do with yoga. In many ways it was one of my first true introductions to yoga beyond the self, mat and yoga philosophy books. I learnt so much in just two weeks.

Saucha means cleanliness and is one of the five Niyamas in the eight limbs of yoga. It doesn’t just mean use soap and take showers daily — it means, take care of your physical space too. This totally changed the way I viewed every space I spent time in, including the images and words I surrounded myself with.

Our prints are all quite clean and minimal but there’s something inspiring to take away from every piece. We really wanted to create prints that would work well in pretty much any interior — home, yoga studio or work place. Public space is often taken up by adverts, but our homes can be filled with art and prints that are personal to us and reflect what we believe in or want to see more of in our lives. This is the inspiration behind Yoga Spirit Art.