September, for me, always invokes the excitement of a new term and memories of being a student. As I walk in and out of the University building where I work this week, I brush past proud graduates, baby-faced freshers, and the steady PhD-ers.

Inspired by the students surrounding me, I wrote a list of things I would've liked to have told my young student self. Reading them, I reckon they are just as relevant to me now as I attempt to be a diligent lifelong learner of medicine and of yoga.

Advice to my student self

• Walk before you can run; foundations are essential, even if they might be boring.
• Open the mind, ears and eyes wide. You never know what you will pick up.
• Be curious.
• Be grateful, for learning itself is a privileged journey.
• Put in the hours; there are no shortcuts.
• Benefit from collective minds and experiences.
• Do your best - your best is good enough.
• You can (and probably will) change your opinions; what you knew then is not what you know now (and so it shall be, year on year on year)
• Accept you can never know it all.
• Respect lineage and expertise, the dedicated work of others past and present.
• Learn how to learn as well as what to learn.
• Test, question, experiment.
• No despairing at your confusion and ignorance; they are part of the process.
• Try not to be obsessed with marks and achievements.
• Learning never ends.

Part of the reason I love yoga is that it helped me to bring a new dimension to what it is to learn. From the geeky kid who thought all education was to be won from books, this physical discipline has taught me so much and continues to give! Through a physical practice, an embodied understanding rather than cerebral knowledge is nurtured - a knowing in the bones, the breath, and the soul. And not to sound too profound, but yoga teaches me how to live and how I want to be.

In whatever subjects we choose to grow, how lucky we are to have the chance to be forever students.