Yoga · Five Elements · Shiatsu · Retreats

Meet Leyla

I work with the body as it actually is — tired, changing, strong, tender — not as a project to perfect.

Movement was my first language. Ballet and gymnastics from the age of seven taught me power and weightlessness long before I had words for practice. In my twenties I left London for India, and the years that followed became an education in other ways of living: the work of hands, breath, and how a culture holds health. I trained in Traditional Chinese Medicine and Five Element theory, qualified as a Shiatsu practitioner in 2006, and as a yoga teacher in 2008.

Uganda is part of that story. I settled in Jinja, taught widely, and led a yoga safari company there before co-founding Karuna Yoga Journeys with Payal Gori in 2017. The retreats and trainings that followed are still built the same way: intimate, place-led, and more interested in accurate care than in a factory syllabus.

I was first drawn to the fire of Ashtanga. I still love strength. What I teach now holds both — vitality and softness, effort and the nervous system’s need to come down. Vinyasa and Yin. Breath, acupressure, meditation, and enough stillness to hear yourself.

I don’t think wellbeing is a formula. It is learning to listen, nourish, and choose in a way that matches the life you actually have — especially in seasons of burnout, change, menopause, and other honest transitions.

Yoga, for me, is not only what happens on a mat. It is how we meet ourselves, and then how we live.

Practise with me

A retreat, a private session, weekly yoga, or a conversation. The invitation is the same: space to feel at home in your body, and to find what becomes possible when care is accurate, not performed.

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