Yoga is a Practice of the Mind

The Mind Under Pressure

Something is happening in Australian workplaces, and most People and Culture leaders already feel it before they see it in the data.

According to ELMO Software’s Q3 2025 Employee Sentiment Index, 40% of Australian employees, around 4.3 million workers, are experiencing burnout right now. The estimated cost to the Australian economy through absenteeism, presenteeism and turnover combined sits at $14.2 billion annually. And perhaps most telling: 36% of organisations are doing nothing to address it, and 56% of People and Culture departments don’t even create space to talk about it.

Behind every one of those numbers is a person. A team member who is running on empty. A manager holding everything together while quietly depleted. A workplace that is losing good people not because the work is wrong, but because no one has given them the tools to sustain themselves through it.

This is not a trend. It is a signal. And it asks something of us as people who care about the organisations and the humans within them.

If you want to understand more about how sustained resilience breaks down and what that looks like in practice, that post is worth reading alongside this one. What we want to talk about here is one of the most effective — and most misunderstood — tools available to address it.

More Than Movement

When most people hear the word “yoga,” they picture a fitness class. Stretching. Poses. Perhaps incense. And they move on — because that doesn’t sound like what their team needs.

We understand that. And we want to offer a different starting point.

Would you believe that the most advanced of yoga practices are performed in absolute stillness?

There is a line at the very heart of yoga philosophy, written by the sage Patanjali more than two thousand years ago. It defines the entire practice in a single sentence:

Not the perfecting of postures. Not flexibility. Not fitness. The cessation of the fluctuations of the mind — the quieting of mental noise, the restoration of stillness and focus.

This has been yoga’s purpose for millennia. The physical postures — the asanas most people picture — are just one of eight limbs of the practice. One doorway, not the destination. The destination has always been a mind that can be present: responsive rather than reactive, clear rather than cluttered, settled enough to actually hear the person across the table.

Which is, as it happens, exactly what the modern workplace is asking of its people.

What Yoga Actually Does

When I bring yoga into a workplace, I am not asking anyone to be flexible, to adopt a particular worldview, or to sit cross-legged on the floor. I am offering something far more practical: a set of evidence-informed tools for training the mind.

The physical elements help. Gentle movement releases the tension that accumulates across shoulders, necks, and lower backs during long hours at a desk. But the deeper work happens through pranayama — conscious breath work — and through meditation and mindfulness practices that train the nervous system to settle rather than spiral.

The Practitioner Behind the Practice

I should tell you where I am coming from, because it shapes what I bring into a room.

My name is Penelope. I hold a Bachelor of Management with a major in Employment Relations, and I have spent years working in both People and Culture and Technology Services. I understand how organisations work — the dynamics, the pressure points, the invisible weight that accumulates in teams that are doing a great deal with not quite enough. I know what it costs when people don’t have tools for their own minds. Not just the financial cost, though that is real and significant. The human cost.

I have also practised yoga for thirty years. I hold a Diploma of Integral Yoga and carry the title of Yogacharini — one who is fit to guide others on the yoga path by her own example. Knowing yoga has provided me with the essential tools to remain resilient, focused and emotionally aware in challenging workplace situations. Time and again I turn to yoga to fill my cup and reset. These tools become easier to use and more beneficial the more they’re practiced. Learning how to regulate your nervous system is an investment in wellbeing and happiness. Give your team the gift that gets better with use.

Alongside me, Trevor brings a sound bath experience that deepens everything the yoga practice begins. His seven frosted quartz crystal singing bowls create a physical acoustic environment that includes what are known as monaural beats — a natural phenomenon in which two slightly different frequencies played simultaneously create a pulse felt through the body, supporting the nervous system in settling into genuine rest. You can read more about the science behind what happens in a sound bath if that interests you. For now, the short version: Penelope takes the room inward. Trevor takes it deeper.

What a Session Looks Like

A Healing Indulgence wellness session is designed around you. We come to your space — your office, a meeting room, a studio, a park — and we create the experience there. No special equipment needed on your end. No prior experience required of your team.

The minimum session is sixty minutes. That is a lunch break. One hour that returns something the working week tends to quietly take away.

Within that hour, your team might move through gentle breath work, some mindful movement, and a Yoga Nidra — a guided practice of conscious deep rest that researchers describe as uniquely restorative, with benefits that accumulate even from a short and carefully guided session. Trevor’s sound bath weaves through and beneath all of it, creating an acoustic environment that begins to settle the body before the mind has even caught up.

Longer sessions allow for more depth: movement practices, group meditation, space for your team to actually breathe together and reconnect. Everything is tailored to your group and its needs. People can participate lying down, seated in a chair, or however they are most comfortable. The only requirement is a willingness to pause, briefly, and notice what is there.

What Your Team Takes Back to Their Desk

The most common thing people say after a session is some version of: I didn’t realise how tightly I was holding until I wasn’t.

What they take back to work is harder to put in a report but easy to observe: a steadiness that wasn’t there before. A capacity to pause before reacting. A sense of having been genuinely looked after — which, more than any single initiative, tends to be what builds the loyalty and discretionary effort that keep good teams intact.

Many of the organisations we most admire have understood this for years. Google, Apple, Deloitte, and many of Australia’s largest employers — Woolworths, NAB, BUPA, Suncorp among them — have embedded mindfulness and yoga into their workplace cultures. Not because it sounds good in a wellbeing policy, but because the evidence supports it and their people asked for it.

You don’t need to be a large corporation to start. You need a space, a group of people worth looking after, and sixty minutes.

Let’s Have a Conversation

If you are thinking about what a Healing Indulgence session could look like for your team — a lunchtime taster, a half-day staff wellbeing event, or a regular fortnightly offering — we would genuinely love to hear from you.

There is no pressure and no pitch. Just two practitioners who have spent decades learning to hold space for people, and who are always happy to talk through what might work best for your group, your space, and your people.

Get in touch. We’re glad to have that conversation.