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 with a question I've been answering ever since: who am I underneath all of this?
I had just graduated from drama school. I started acting, I created 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. Quietly, underneath all of this, I began my journey with yoga.
As time went on, the industry resonated less and yoga resonated more. Not yoga as exercise or yoga as an instagrammable aesthetic, but yoga as a technology for becoming more honest with yourself.
I found a lineage, the Himalayan Vedantic and Tantric Kriya tradition, 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 the actual one. 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, barely wearing shoes and within a stone’s throw of India, I had an easy, daily connection to something larger than myself.
Tantra, properly understood, 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. I teach from the Himalayan Kriya lineage which means that what happens in my classes and on my retreats is older and more precise than what most people mean when they say yoga. We work with breath, mudra, mantra and movement and sequences that have been designed, over centuries, to do particular things to the nervous system, the mind and the heart. You will sweat. You will be pushed. You may cry in Savasana and not know why. That's normal. That's the point.
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, often for the first time in years, that they are also someone. Someone who matters. Someone worth attending to.
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 a 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. Her face became lighter. 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 I can promise you that what happens in the room is real and that I will be present with you for every moment of it.
Rosie Parton, retreat facilitator, yoga teacher, Kriya practitioner, tantric lineage holder.
For more information please contact us at rosie@funkycactusyoga.co.uk or use the form below.
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