"I met Sarah Lindsay in March of 2024 at our Auckland showroom, and all of a sudden an hour had passed with merely a break taken in our conversation. She's a total force and I'm so pleased to have her as part of our Musing on Sensuality series to delve a little deeper." - Maxine
Musing on Sensuality is a series where we sit down with people who inspire sensuality, and talk about how they cultivate it in their life and work. We hope for this series to be a source of inspiration for readers to help cultivate their own daily sensuality.
Hi Sarah, welcome <3 Please introduce yourself - who are you, where are you based, and how do you spend your time?
Hi, I'm Sarah, a London native who is Aotearoa-based. I am a mother, entrepreneur, and poet. I'm the founder of Sala, a multidisciplinary movement studio based in Ponsonby, Auckland. Sala is a container that respects culture, art, and movement as parts of our personal spiritual growth. I spend my time between playgrounds and yoga classes, swings and headstands, although that makes my life sound a little more simplistic and zen than it truly is.
You strike me as a significant vision type - for those who don't know Sala, what is it, and what is your big vision for it?
Sala is primarily a movement community. We offer over 100 classes a week in yoga, barre, reformer pilates, and sound healing and are currently expanding to offer a treadmill/strength class space. Sala takes a curious, open-minded, and creative approach to movement by viewing wellness through an integrated lens rather than as a fragment of one part of our experience and psyche.
I've always been naturally quite entrepreneurial. If I see an opportunity, I usually take it and work out the finer details in the flow. I've always loved John Burroughs quote 'Leap, and the net will appear.' Although I'm now ambitious about creating a studio that will become a local institution, initially, there wasn't a grand masterplan – I just wanted to create a space that I felt inspired to move in, and that has spiralled. I consider Sala to be in a symbiotic relationship with its community. It is informed directly from the hive mind of us-ness. I suppose my big vision is to create a space with purpose, led by the hub of my heart.
What does the word sensuality mean to you? What does it feel like?
To me, sensuality is expression. Whether creative, physical or metaphysical, it is the exploration of meeting the self as something expansive, divine and intimately connected to something more significant than the individual self. Pleasure as a bridge to the whole universe.
Has your approach to it changed over time? Through your 20's, into motherhood?
It has absolutely changed. The importance of prioritisation is more potent than ever. The ongoing inner recalibration of what's important to me, how I do it, and how I get there. If I want to live a life in alignment with my core values, it means prioritising connection, interpersonal relationships and pleasure. I often joke that joy is my rebellion in a world that deliberately dismantles our connection to happiness. It wants to commodify our happiness, package it up and resell it to us. But the joy I seek in the world is free; it comes from within me.
Your work is so centred around movement, embodiment and awareness - how do you feel these play into the concept of sensuality?
I think that everything I do, whether it's writing poetry, moving my body, or parenting, is linked to freedom. Expressing ourselves, be it through movement, pleasure, or sensuality, is the ultimate freedom—the freedom to connect to the endless possibility of feeling vast and already enough.
Do you have any specific practices that you like to lean into to help cultivate sensuality?
Active listening with my lover, quality time and curiosity are doorways to sensuality for me.
I often liken sensuality to just being the essence of mindfulness - how do you think the two intertwine?
They both relate to authenticity. This is the ultimate freedom.
What is inspiring you at the moment?
I love writing. I have always written poetry as a way of digesting my lived experiences. I am publishing a book, Mother Made Me, this August, which has been quietly scintillating in my notes app for years, so it feels really freeing to finally release it into the world.
I also really love heritage magazines like Horse and Hounds and Cottage Living. I love looking for the evolving contemporary lens of the classical. That there is a continuum that runs through time rather than swift changes. I have subscriptions to heaps of 'old lady' country living magazines, and I love them.
Physically, I’m currently loving barre. I had forgotten how playful that movement container is. It’s got the same energy of those drunk, in toilet female exchanges. Everyone is doing these funny pulsing Jane fonda moves and giggling. Everyone’s trying their best, and telling each other how epic they’re doing. It’s big cheerleader energy, and it feels so healing.
Is there anything else you’d like to share?
If you are a poetry reader, Mother Made Me is available from August. It is inspired by the liminal space between girlhood and motherhood. It explores the way we reinvent ourselves, as we move through the world: across continents and through time, inhabiting archetypes of womanhood that seem laid out for us, but don’t have to be.
For more about Sarah and SALA: