#31. Lorraine Close. How can we make movement accessible to everyone?

In this powerful conversation, Andrew speaks with Lorraine Close, Outreach Director of Edinburgh Community Yoga, nurse educator at the University of Edinburgh, and long-time facilitator of trauma-informed movement programs across prisons, the NHS, psychiatric hospitals, addiction recovery centres, and local communities.Lorraine shares her personal journey into yoga - from teenage drinking culture in Glasgow to yoga communities in San Francisco, India, and Thailand - and how those experiences shaped her understanding of belonging, class, agency, and the deep inequities in Scotland’s health landscape.She explains the principles of trauma-informed practice, why “choice” and “agency” matter far more than perfect poses, and how the yoga and wellness worlds often unintentionally reinforce exclusion, coercion, or pseudo-spiritual dogma.In the second half, Lorraine speaks openly about the coming closure of Edinburgh Community Yoga after 11 years of impact, and the brutal pressures that community-based organisations face in a funding landscape that increasingly rewards commodification and influencer culture over grassroots relational work. What emerges is an honest exploration of what it means to do meaningful practice in an increasingly extractive system and where hope lives now.