Felicity Cunningham. Based in — Living Form is the practice I built because nothing else worked, and then spent years understanding why it did.
I came to Ashtanga not as a disciplined person. I came as someone who was not.
I had tried everything. Yoga studios, gyms, running apps, morning routines. Nothing lasted past a few weeks. I assumed this was a character problem. It was not. I was trying to generate discipline through willpower, which is not how the body builds a practice. Willpower is a resource. It depletes. It has nothing to do with why people actually sustain things.
The first time I practised the Ashtanga sequence properly - breath locked, bandhas engaged, spinal movement generating internal heat rather than muscular effort - my body wanted it the next morning. Not because I had set an intention. Because something had shifted in the reward circuitry. Within a few weeks I was waking before the alarm, not from discipline but from draw.
That led me to Pilates and the question of structural precision. To fascia and the question of what the tissue is actually holding. To somatic nervous system work and the science of why the body stores what the mind bypasses. To depth psychology and Jung's framework for what surfaces when the body begins to release it. And eventually back to the Greeks, who understood all of this before it had a scientific name.
Living Form is the sequence I arrived at: four stages that each require what the previous one builds. I share it as I learn it.