It doesn’t rush. It doesn’t hold yesterday’s storm against today’s sky. It simply is present, reflective, and still enough to show you yourself clearly.

Reiki’s most tender teaching is this: you don’t have to heal everything at once. You just have to choose, one breath at a time, to come back to now.

Just for today.

Let go of worry. Let go of anger. Be compassionate toward yourself and others. Be grateful. Lead with love and kindness. Be in the moment. Release expectations. Know that you are loved.

These aren’t rules. They’re invitations whispered to you the way still water whispers to a restless mind.

If you’ve been carrying more than your share lately, this one’s for you. Press play. Let the lake do what lakes do best.

You are held. You are enough. Just for today.

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There is a particular kind of knowing that lives in your hands before your mind catches up.

I find it in the garden. Hands in soil, the smell of dirt, the quiet that isn’t really quiet at all, birds, wind, something small moving through the leaves. My nervous system settles before I’ve done a single productive thing. My lungs remember how to fill completely. Something that had been braced releases.

This is not a metaphor. This is information.

The body knows what refills it. The question is whether we give it permission.

I have been a giver for most of my adult life, and with certainty since I found my way onto this yogic path.

I don’t say that to be admired. I say it the way you’d describe any pattern that runs so deep you didn’t choose it so much as discover it already operating inside you. I am an introvert who shows up anyway. I am the one with shoulders wide enough. I am the one who gets the call.

And every time I show up for the student who is struggling, for the person who needs careful thought offered into the specific shape of their need, for the vision someone else named and then quietly stopped carrying, it costs me something real. Not because I resent it. Because I am an introvert, showing up always costs energy. Every single time.

I do it anyway. I have always done it anyway.

For a long time, I called that virtue.

In yoga philosophy, there is a concept called seva.

It translates simply as selfless service action offered without attachment to reward, recognition, or outcome. It is considered one of the highest practices. Not because suffering is noble, but because giving from a place of genuine fullness, with no strings attached, no ledger kept, no receipt expected that is a form of love that transforms both the giver and the world around them.

Seva is not martyrdom. That distinction matters more than I can tell you.

Seva is the greenhouse advice offered freely, completely, released the moment it leaves your hands. It is the printed home practice slipped to a student who is struggling, given because you saw what they needed and you had it to give, not because you needed them to write back and tell you it helped. It is the three hours in the car because someone needs you, driven in full presence rather than quiet resentment.

Seva is conscious. Seva is chosen. Seva comes from a full cup.

And here is what I have learned the hard way, the only way some things get learned:

The same act can be seva or depletion depending entirely on where it comes from inside you.

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There is a moment, and if you are a giver, you will recognize it when what is freely offered becomes silently expected.

It happens gradually. People calibrate to what they receive. The effort becomes invisible not because anyone is cruel but because consistency does that it erases itself. The gift stops looking like a gift and starts looking like just what you do. Just who you are. Just what can be counted on.

And then one day you need to say not this time. Not in this way. I don’t have it right now.

And the boundary lands like a withdrawal of love.

Even though you never owed it in the first place.

This is one of the most disorienting experiences available to generous people. You have given freely, consistently, without keeping score, and somehow you are now in a conversation about what you are withholding. The boundary that was simply you telling the truth about your capacity has become, in someone else’s experience, a rupture.

It is uncomfortable. It is necessary. And it is not your fault.

The boundary is not the opposite of seva. The boundary is what keeps seva alive.

If you cannot say no, it is not service anymore. It is obligation wearing devotion’s clothing. An obligation depletes in ways that genuine giving never does.

There is another thread here, a yogic concept called aparigraha, non-attachment. Usually, it gets taught as releasing attachment to things, to outcomes, to the fruits of your actions. The Bhagavad Gita names it directly: do the work, offer the work, release the work.

I have come to understand aparigraha as the interior condition that makes seva possible.

Because here is the truth about the silence after the carefully written email, the printed handout, the session recap typed after a full day of teaching, and sent into what feels like a void:

When I am in right practice, the silence doesn’t cost me anything. I gave what I had to give. It left my hands. Whatever happens next is not mine to carry.

When I have slipped out of practice when I am giving from the old pattern rather than the present moment, from obligation rather than choice, from the wound rather than the wholeness the silence is deafening. Because I was giving with a hidden hope for something in return. Not always acknowledgment. Sometimes just proof that it mattered. That I matter.

That is not aparigraha. That is a need wearing seva’s face.

And I am not ashamed of that need. It is human. It is honest. It just isn’t the same thing.

So how do you know which one you’re in?

I check my hands.

Not literally though the garden does help. I mean I come back to the body. The place that knows before the mind does. Am I braced right now? Is there a subtle holding, a waiting, a part of me that has already sent the thing and is now hovering near the door waiting for a response?

Or did it leave clean?

The full cup gives and releases in the same motion. The depleted one gives and grips simultaneously, even when the grip is invisible to everyone, including yourself.

The cup needs refilling. Not as a reward for good service. Not when you’ve earned it. Regularly. As a condition of the practice.

For me, that is hands in soil. Birds on the back fence. Full lungs on the back patio. A good conversation with my husband. The sound of my grandchildren laughing in the next room. The shower, the kitchen, the quiet places where nobody needs anything from me, and I remember what it feels like to simply be alive inside my own life.

None of that is productive. None of it generates anything. It just makes everything else possible.

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You cannot pour from an empty cup. And just like depleted soil, no matter how it looks on the surface, lacks the nutrition to feed what it’s growing. Sadhguru speaks to this. The earth itself must be tended, enriched, and allowed to rest. We are no different.

Even the earth needs a fallow season. The field that gives every harvest without rest stops giving eventually, not out of stubbornness but out of depletion. The rest is not laziness. The rest is what the next season of abundance requires.

Seva is not about how much you can give before you break. It is about tending the source so the giving never has to stop.

So give freely. Give consciously. Release what you give with both hands and no receipt.

And then go put your hands in the dirt.

Refill.

Come back whole.

That is the practice.

For Your Journal Or Just Your Quiet Mind

Where in your life has freely given become silently expected? How does that feel in your body when you name it?

What fills your cup not productively, not visibly, just genuinely? When did you last give yourself permission to do it without earning it first?

The next time you give something time, energy, knowledge, or presence, notice where it comes from inside you. Does it leave clean? Or are you hovering near the door?

What would it mean to tend yourself the way you tend the people you love most?

Shanti Shanti Shanti

Heather ~The Bountiful Yogi

You do not have to have written anything down.

You just have to be willing to look.

At some point, most of us picked up beliefs about ourselves that we never actually chose. About our worth. Our body. How much space are we allowed to take up? How much help are we allowed to ask for? What we deserve. What we are capable of. Some of them came from people who loved us and did not know the weight of what they were handing over. Some came from a world that had its own agenda. Some we absorbed so young that we can no longer trace them back to a source.

They just feel like facts.

This is an invitation to pause and look at them. Not with shame. Not with a highlight reel of how far you have come. Just honest, compassionate looking. To honor where you were. To recognize what has shifted. And if there are beliefs that are still running in the background, still holding you back, still playing on repeat without your permission, let the questions at the end of this piece help you begin to look at those, too.

I will go first.

* * *

What I wrote then

I wrote my first blog about ten years ago. It was about old tapes, the things we play on repeat in our heads. The things that stop us dead in our tracks sometimes, from trying something new or wearing that outfit. I am sure you have heard the term, even if some people do not even know what a tape is anymore.

My generation calls these old tapes. If you grew up in the era of cassettes, you already know what I mean. And if you did not, here is what you need to understand: a mixed tape was not just music. When someone made you one, they chose every single song deliberately. Each one meant something. This song is how I see you. This is what I feel when I think of you. This one is the memory I want you to carry. A mixed tape was someone else’s vision of you, encased in plastic, with handwriting on the sticker, and handed over as a gift.

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Old tapes are like that. They are not just thoughts that play on repeat. They are beliefs that someone else made for you. Curated. Chose. And handed to you so many times, with so much feeling behind them, that eventually you stopped noticing they were not your own.

My husband and I have used this term for years. And the more I sit with it, the more I think it is exactly right. Because the question is never just, “What are you believing?” It is always: “Who made this for you?”

Here were some of mine throughout the years:

Thin equaled pretty.

Sex meant love.

The more I do, the more worthy I will be.

If I ask for help, I am a burden.

I am not smart enough.

I have all the time in the world.

* * *

Where I am now

Every single one of those tapes sounds different to me today. Not gone, exactly. But different. Loose. Like something that used to fit tight and now just kind of hangs there.

And if you asked me how that happened, the honest answer is: I stretched them.

Here is what I have come to understand after years of teaching yoga, working with the nervous system, sitting with people in their hardest moments: we do not think our way out of a belief that lives in our tissues.

We breathe our way there.

The times we live in have created a particular kind of stuck. We carry chronic stress in our bodies like furniture we forgot we moved in. Our nervous systems are running hot, scanning for threat, bracing for impact. And when the body is that contracted, the mind contracts with it. The old tapes get louder. The beliefs get more rigid. What felt like a thought starts to feel like a fact.

This is not a personal failing. It is physiology.

What is remarkable about yoga, and why I think it found its way to so many of us at exactly this moment in history, is that it offers the body as the doorway. Not the mind. Not willpower. Not positive thinking. The body.

* * *

A five-thousand-year detour

Here is something that reorients me every time I think about it: movement is the newest part of yoga.

The asana practice, the physical postures that most of us picture when we say the word yoga, came thousands of years after the philosophy, the breathwork, the meditation practices were already well established. The ancient tradition began from the inside out. Meditation. Breath. Stillness. Inquiry.

Movement was added, in part, because the body needed to be prepared for long meditation. But also, I believe, because the teachers understood something about human beings: some of us cannot access stillness directly. We need the physical first. We need to move the stuck places before we can sit inside them.

And now, in the modern West, we have nearly flipped the whole thing. Many people come to yoga only for the physical. They find the mat and think the mat is the practice. What is extraordinary is that even so, even without the history or the philosophy or the Sanskrit, the body does its work anyway. People get on their mats seeking flexibility or stress relief or a tight core, and they find something they were not expecting. A relationship with themselves. A moment where the breath softens and the shoulders drop, and something they have been carrying for years starts, just slightly, to loosen.

The body knows the way even when the mind has forgotten there is a destination.

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* * *

This is what integration feels like

When you stress the body intentionally, through held poses, through breathwork, through movements that ask you to be present, something interesting happens in the brain. The hippocampus and the amygdala, the parts of your nervous system that track threat and emotional memory, begin to register something important: we are safe. We stressed the system, and we survived. We were uncomfortable, and we did not fall apart.

And then, in the stillness after, there is a window. The nervous system integrates. The breath slows. The muscles release what they were holding. And in that window, the old beliefs have a little less grip. The body has just demonstrated, at a cellular level, that things can be different than they were.

This is not metaphor. This is how it actually works.

The compression and the lengthening. The holding and the releasing. The challenge and the breath that follows. Yoga works the body the same way emotional intelligence works the mind. You stretch a limited belief not by forcing it out but by creating space around it. You compress it, you breathe into it, you work the edge without violence, and over time, the grip loosens the same way a tight hamstring does. Not because you fought it. Because you kept showing up and choosing breath over bracing.

* * *

Now it is your turn

You do not need a yoga mat for this part. You just need a moment of honest stillness.

Think about a belief you have been carrying. About your body. Your worth. What you are allowed to want. Whether you are enough. You do not have to know where it came from. You just have to be willing to look at it directly, maybe for the first time.

Ask yourself: Is this mine? Or did someone make this for me?

Because the old tapes do not live only in your thoughts. They live in the set of your jaw and the holding of your hips and the shallow place your breath stops when you feel afraid. You will not think your way out of them. But you can breathe your way through. You can stretch what feels like a fact until it becomes pliable. Until it bends.

And pliable is where everything changes.

If you want to go a little further in this work, here are ten questions to grow with:

What belief about yourself have you never actually questioned?

Whose voice does that belief sound like?

Where in your body do you feel it when that belief gets loud?

What would you do differently if that belief were not true?

What has your body already survived that your mind still doubts?

When did you last feel genuinely safe in your own skin?

What are you bracing against right now?

What would it feel like to let that go, even for one breath?

What do you know about yourself that no one else put there?

What is one thing you are ready to stop carrying?

Heather ~ the Bountiful Yogi

Not long ago, someone I was working with said something that stopped me mid-sentence. They commented on my confidence, how steady I seemed, how I made hard things look easy.

I’ve heard versions of this my whole life. And every time, I feel a little like they’re describing someone else.

I wasn’t a strong student. College was hard. I’m still taking classes that stretch me to my edges. With dyslexia and ADHD, things that feel effortless for others can take everything I’ve got. So when someone says you seem so sure of yourself I genuinely have to pause and ask: What are they seeing?

This time, something clicked.

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The Wide View

Here’s something I’ve been sitting with lately, and I suspect you’ve noticed it too.

We live in a world full of people who are enormously confident in places they have no business being. They speak loudly, move boldly, claim authority they haven’t earned and somehow the room listens. Meanwhile, the people who have actually done the work, who have held the complexity, who know, they’re the ones quietly questioning themselves. Wondering if they’re enough. Hesitating before they speak.

Modern psychology has a name for this paradox: the Dunning-Kruger effect. People with limited knowledge in a domain consistently overestimate their competence, while genuine experts tend to underestimate theirs. The less you know, the less you know what you don’t know. It’s a closed loop, and from the inside, it feels exactly like confidence.

Yoga philosophy named this thousands of years earlier. Avidya, often translated as ignorance, but more precisely, a fundamental misperception of reality. It’s not simply being uninformed. It’s having stopped looking. It’s mistaking the ego’s comfort for actual truth. The person deep in Avidya isn’t just overconfident; they’ve closed themselves off from new information, from challenge, from growth. They’ve decided they already have it all figured out. And that decision, more than anything else, is what stops them from ever truly becoming.

The Beauty and the Trap of Self-Study

Now here’s where it gets tender.

The person who questions their every move… the one who wonders if they’re doing enough, being enough, knowing enough that person is often doing something profoundly right. They are practicing Svadhyaya, the Niyama of self-study. They are looking honestly at themselves, staying open, remaining willing to be wrong. That openness is not weakness. It is one of the most important qualities a human being can cultivate.

But Svadhyaya has a shadow side. When self-examination becomes a loop, am I enough, am I doing this right, who am I to think I can, it stops being self-study and starts being self-imprisoned. The practice is meant to liberate us, not keep us pinned in place. Honest looking is only beautiful when it leads somewhere.

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This is where Tapas enters.

Tapas is often translated as discipline, but the Sanskrit root means to burn to purify through heat and effort. It is the fire of transformation. The drive that says: I will keep showing up even when it’s hard, even when I can’t see the progress, even when my best today looks nothing like my best last week. Tapas is what keeps Svadhyaya from becoming paralyzed. It is the fuel that turns honest self-examination into actual growth.

The person stuck in self-doubt keeps looking without the fire. The person deep in Avidya stopped looking, and they’ve stopped burning for growth. The sweet spot, the place we are always moving toward, is the willingness to examine and the courage to keep going anyway. Always learning. Always absorbing. Always willing to be a student, no matter how much you already know.

The Zen tradition calls this beginner’s mind, showing up to every situation, even the familiar ones, with openness and curiosity. The expert who still asks questions. The teacher who is always also a student.

What I Actually Believe

My confidence has nothing to do with how well I know something, or how good I am at a task. It has everything to do with my commitment to show up fully with love, with presence, with my whole honest effort, regardless of the circumstances.

And here is what I want you to hear clearly: your best is not a fixed thing.

Your best on a Tuesday morning after a full night’s sleep is different from your best on a Thursday when you’re running on fumes and holding grief you haven’t named yet. Your best at twenty looks nothing like your best at forty-five, not because you’ve diminished, but because you’ve deepened. Life asks different things from us at different times, and the only honest response is to give what you actually have, not what you wish you had.

Some days, my best means leading a room. Some days it means saying I don’t know, let me find out. Some days, the most courageous thing I do is say I’m not the right person for this and help someone find who is. Some days, my best is simply asking for help without shame.

That fluidity is the practice.

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What People Are Actually Seeing

As a yogi, I know this in my body too. Confidence lives in how I carry myself in breath, in presence, in the willingness to hold space without shrinking or overreaching. The physical and the internal are never separate. When we are rooted in honest self-knowing, the body reflects it.

This is Shraddha, faith rooted not in certainty, but in earned trust. Trust built through practice, through falling down and getting back up, through all the times you kept going when you didn’t know if it was worth it. Shraddha doesn’t perform. It doesn’t need to fill the room with noise. It simply shows up and does the work again and again and again.

Avidya masquerades as confidence. Shraddha doesn’t need to.

What I think people perceive when they look at me isn’t mastery. It isn’t ease. It’s the wholeness of someone who isn’t at war with where they are. Someone who has learned to trust the process of becoming, even on the days when becoming is slow and unglamorous and hard.

Move through life always trying to do your best. Know that your best will look different every single day. Stay curious. Stay humble. Keep the fire burning. And trust that a genuine, wholehearted effort offered consistently, imperfectly, devotedly over time is one of the most quietly powerful things a human being can do.

That’s where real confidence lives. Not in what you know. In how you show up.

—

We all carry challenges the world can’t see. What would it mean to trust that your genuine presence, not your performance, is enough?

The light in me sees and honors the light in you.

Heather~ The Bountiful Yogi

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The message, however unintentional, is this: if you practice, you should be at peace. The practices should be curating happiness, choosing joy, and arriving somewhere serene. And if you haven’t gotten there yet, well, maybe you’re not practicing hard enough.

I’ve watched what this does to people. Someone arrives at class carrying something heavy: grief, fear, exhaustion, the kind of week that leaves a mark, and before they’ve even unrolled their mat, they’re already managing how they appear. Already editing themselves to fit the room. Already apologizing, sometimes out loud, for not being okay.

And here’s the thing that breaks my heart: they came to yoga precisely because they weren’t okay. The wellness space isn’t unwelcoming exactly, but it carries an air. An unspoken expectation that if you’re a yogi, a holistic practitioner, someone on the path, you should have a certain vibe by now. And that air is enough to make someone feel like their hard feelings don’t belong here.

* * *

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The phrases have become so familiar that they’ve lost their edges.

“Everything happens for a reason.”

“You’re exactly where you need to be.”

“Your trauma is your greatest teacher.”

“Choose love over fear.”

“Raise your vibration.”

“Good vibes only.”

These phrases aren’t inherently harmful. The harm comes from when and how we use them as shields against discomfort rather than bridges to deeper understanding. There is a world of difference between genuine inquiry and spiritual bypass, between sitting with someone in their pain and reaching for a platitude to make it stop.

Bypass rushes to the lesson to avoid the feeling. It hands someone a silver lining before they’ve been allowed to name the storm. And most of the time, the person reaching for the bypass isn’t being cruel. They’re uncomfortable. They don’t know how to just stay. So the phrase comes out sometimes from you, sometimes from them and the feeling gets closed back down.

I’ve watched people do this to themselves. Something real surfaces in class, in conversation, in the quiet of a restorative pose and before anyone else can even respond, they’ve already smoothed it over. “I’m fine, everything happens for a reason.” The door opens and closes in the same breath.

That’s not healing. That’s performance. And yoga culture, without meaning to, has built a stage for it.

The Nervous System Doesn’t Do “Good Vibes Only”

Here’s what your nervous system knows that toxic positivity ignores: you cannot think your way out of a dysregulated state. You cannot positive-vibe your way through unprocessed trauma. You cannot manifest safety when your body is screaming danger.

Your nervous system operates on actual safety, not the performance of it. It doesn’t care about your affirmations or your vision board. It cares whether you’ve eaten, whether you feel physically safe, and whether it’s been given permission to discharge the stress it’s holding.

When we insist on “good vibes only,” we are asking people to override their body’s wisdom. We’re teaching them to distrust their own experience. We’re saying: your pain is inconvenient to me, so please pretend it doesn’t exist.

And for those who’ve survived trauma, who’ve had their reality denied or their pain dismissed this isn’t spiritual growth. It’s re-traumatization.

Bypass vs. Inquiry

The crucial difference between spiritual bypass and genuine spiritual inquiry is timing and presence. Inquiry only works after we’ve made space for what is actually happening in the body, in the moment, without trying to fix or transcend it.

“Everything happens for a reason” as bypass says: stop feeling what you’re feeling. As inquiry it asks: after I’ve felt all of this what, eventually, when I’m ready, might I learn?

“You’re exactly where you need to be” as bypass enforces passivity. As inquiry it honors both acceptance and agency: what is this moment showing me about my needs, my limits, my next step?

The first version shut things down. The second version makes room for both the grief and the growth without rushing past the pain to get to the lesson.

Feel the rage completely before asking what it’s teaching you. Sit in the grief fully before looking for meaning. Honor the fear before deciding if it’s serving you.

Because sometimes pain is just pain. Sometimes trauma is just trauma. Sometimes there is no silver lining, and the most honest thing we can say is: this is hard. This shouldn’t have happened. I’m here with you.

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What Yoga Actually Asks of Us

Authentic yoga practice, the kind rooted in actual yogic philosophy, not the Instagram version, makes room for everything.

The Bhagavad Gita doesn’t open with Arjuna doing sun salutations at sunrise. It opens with him in existential crisis, paralyzed by grief and moral confusion on a battlefield. Krishna doesn’t tell him to choose love over fear or raise his vibration. Krishna sits with him in the complexity. He holds space for doubt, for sorrow, for the very human struggle.

The Yoga Sutras speak of equanimity not positivity. Equanimity means meeting pleasure and pain, success and failure, praise and criticism with the same steady presence. Not pretending everything is fine. Developing the capacity to be with what is, without grasping for the good or pushing away the hard.

This is so much more difficult than toxic positivity. And so much more honest.

Real yoga doesn’t ask you to be happy all the time. It asks you to be present. It creates space to rage at injustice, to sob through grief, to shake with the fear your body has stored and then it offers practices to be with those experiences without being consumed by them. Not to bypass them. To metabolize them.

What We Lose When We Bypass

When yoga culture insists on constant positivity, we lose the transformative power of anger. Anger tells us where our boundaries have been violated. It gives us energy to protect ourselves and move toward justice. But wellness culture has rebranded anger as “low vibration,” teaching people especially women, especially marginalized folks to suppress the very emotion that could liberate them.

We lose the wisdom of grief. Grief is how we metabolize loss evidence that we loved, that we’re connected, that what happened mattered. But “good vibes only” culture treats grief like a problem to solve rather than a process to honor.

We lose the intelligence of fear. Sometimes fear is your nervous system accurately assessing danger. Sometimes it’s your body remembering what your mind has tried to forget. Not all fear is irrational. Sometimes it is information.

And we lose the necessity of naming harm. When we ask everyone to “stay positive” in the face of injustice, we’re protecting the status quo. Real yoga, rooted in ahimsa and satya, non-harming and truth, demands that we name what is actually happening, even when it’s uncomfortable.

The Middle Path

This doesn’t mean we make suffering our identity or stay in pain indefinitely. The middle path is this: we acknowledge what’s true without making it our only truth. We feel our feelings fully without becoming identified with them. We name the harm without letting it become our entire story.

Real spiritual maturity is knowing the difference between honesty and wallowing, between naming your experience and performing it, between needing space to fall apart and needing space to be held while you do.

The culture tells you to choose happiness. What it forgets to say is that you have to be in the moment first. If you feel grief, feel the grief. It might take a day. It might take longer. But when you allow yourself to actually feel it to honor it your body will know when it’s time to move forward. You won’t have to decide. You’ll just know.

* * *

I remember a moment in Dan Millman’s Way of the Peaceful Warrior, and I’m paraphrasing from memory here, years after reading it, where Dan arrives to find his friend Joseph standing outside his café as it burns. His livelihood, his life’s work, gone. And Joseph is crying. Not performing okayness. Not reaching for a lesson. Just standing there, feeling the full weight of the loss.

And then, when the feeling has moved through him, something shifts. He doesn’t decide to be okay. He just becomes okay because he lets the grief be real first.

That scene lodged in me and has stayed. Because that’s what “good vibes only” would have stolen from him. Not the café. The grief. The necessary, honest, human grief that made it possible to move forward.

* * *

What I want for you for every person who rolls out a mat in my room, or anywhere, is simpler than any of this.

I want you to feel safe to breathe. Safe to rest. Safe to be.

Not the performance of being okay. Not the curation of high-vibe energy. Just the actual, unglamorous, sometimes-tearful reality of being a human in a body on a given Tuesday.

That’s what the practice is for. That’s what the mat is for. That’s what we’re building when we build a real holistic community: not a space where everyone arrives already healed, but one where healing has room to happen.

So the next time someone tells you “good vibes only,” know this: you are allowed to struggle. You are allowed to not be okay. You are allowed to bring your whole self into the room: the light and the shadow, the joy and the grief, the peace and the rage.

All of it is welcome. All of it is yoga.

What would it mean to stop performing wellness and start practicing truth?

What might become possible if you brought your whole self, not just the parts that are easy or positive or “spiritual,” into the room?

There was a time I lived in unsafe environments with my children because nothing available was better. Uprooting into the unknown felt more dangerous than staying inside the misery I already knew how to navigate. And that’s the thing nobody talks about the familiarity of suffering has its own gravity. The devil you know.

I think about that now when I watch people make choices that seem, from the outside, like surrender. Chemical food. Two jobs with no time to breathe or heal. Working for companies that do harm because the paycheck is the only thing standing between a family and freefall. Living in neighborhoods that are unsafe, in structures that are unsound, because that is simply what is affordable.

We call this a broken system. But broken implies it failed at what it was trying to do.

I’m not sure it failed at all.

* * *

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But here’s what I keep coming back to.

We are too tired and too divided to see it the same way at the same time.

There’s a moment in a cartoon where fish are caught in a net being hauled onto a boat. One fish starts swimming down. The others ask what are you doing? The fish says if we all swim down, we can escape the net.

They don’t all swim down.

That’s us. That’s exactly us.

The system doesn’t just trap us. It separates us inside the trap. Keeps us too exhausted to organize, too divided to trust each other, too focused on our own survival to see that the net holds all of us. And some people are so close to the edge, one missed paycheck, one medical bill, one bad month, that they cannot risk the coordinated swim downward even if they can see it clearly.

So the net holds.

Not because we are weak. Not because we are blind. But because the net was designed by people who understood exactly how fish behave when they are scared and tired, and hungry.

The system is working precisely the way it was built.

* * *

The yogic lens doesn’t make this comfortable. Nothing about this is comfortable.

In yoga philosophy, we talk about the kleshas, the afflictions that keep us bound. One of them is Abhinivesha. Usually translated as fear of death, but it is bigger and more human than that. It is the grip of the familiar. The deep preferring of a suffering we recognize over a freedom we cannot yet picture.

The system counts on Abhinivesha. It is not a personal failing. It is one of the most fundamental human experiences there is. And any spiritual tradition that skips over it on the way to transcendence is selling something.

Helplessness is a real feeling. I want to say that plainly before I say anything else.

I chose familiar discomfort for a long time. I told myself that no matter what, I would be uncomfortable, so better the uncomfortable I already knew how to navigate. And there is a kind of logic in that. There is even a kind of survival intelligence in that.

But there is a difference between learning to navigate and survive and learning to navigate and live. And I didn’t fully understand that difference until one ordinary day, walking home with my boys.

My oldest son was crying. Miserable. He believed I had options I didn’t have yet. And as we walked, something clarified inside me that I couldn’t un-feel after.

I am miserable. He is miserable. The discomfort is already here.

So the question became, can we be uncomfortable in a new direction? Toward something unknown instead of something familiar? Because I knew exactly where staying led. I had been living that destination for a long time.

I didn’t know where leaving led. But both roads were uncomfortable. Only one of them had a different possible ending.

That is not a yoga pose. That is not a breathing exercise. But that walk is the most yogic moment of my life. Because yoga, at its root, is not about flexibility or stillness. It is about the courageous act of choosing consciousness over unconscious repetition. Even when consciousness costs something. Especially then.

The tradition calls this Svadhyaya. Self study honest enough to see what is actually happening rather than what we have learned to tolerate.

And it calls the movement toward freedom Tapas. Not punishment. Not deprivation. But the disciplined tending of your own flame, even when everything around you is trying to extinguish it.

The system wants us too exhausted for Svadhyaya. Too depleted for Tapas. Too divided for the collective swim downward.

But sometimes a child cries on a walk home, and something in you refuses the familiar shape of that suffering one more time.

That refusal is where living begins.

* * *

But I want to say something that might sound less like yoga and more like truth.

Why should I be the only one sitting in discomfort?

If you are suppressing me, stealing my joy, causing harm to others — my refusal to absorb that quietly is not aggression. It is not bitterness. It is not a failure of compassion. It is the honest redistribution of a weight I was never meant to carry alone. And when my refusal makes you uncomfortable, that discomfort is not punishment.

It is an invitation. For both of us. To grow from this moment.

I know this because I lived it.

After 28 years, I left a job with a pretty large paycheck. Twenty-eight years is not a small thing to walk away from. That is decades of showing up. Of knowing the system from the inside. Of caring enough to stay vocal about what wasn’t working, about the disrespect for the worker, about the deficiencies that everyone could see and nobody would name out loud.

I stood up. The system made me the problem.

I fought back. The system absorbed it without flinching. Because systems built on familiar discomfort are very good at neutralizing the people inside them who refuse to be comfortable. Your resistance becomes the disruption. Your voice becomes the issue. And somehow the harm that prompted the resistance goes unexamined while everyone manages the person who named it.

So I left.

And that turned out to be the loudest thing I ever said inside that building.

Because here is what I didn’t fully understand until after I was gone. My presence, even resistant, even vocal, even pushing against everything that was wrong, was still holding something up that needed to fall. I was still supporting the system I was fighting. My labor, my expertise, my decades of knowledge were still serving something that did not deserve that service.

The system didn’t feel my voice the way it felt my absence.

When I left they had to look at what the department actually needed. Conscious change became unavoidable not because I argued for it but because I stopped making it possible to avoid.

This is what standing up sometimes looks like from the outside. Not a triumphant moment. Not immediate vindication. Sometimes it looks like walking away from security into uncertainty. Sometimes it looks like leaving people behind who weren’t ready to swim down yet. Sometimes it looks like trusting that your absence will say what your presence never could.

And sometimes all three happen in the same decision.

You stand up. You fight back. And then you leave.

Not because you gave up. But because you finally understood that staying inside the net was never going to change the net.

Your discomfort was always part of their equation. You were just expected to hold it quietly and alone.

The moment you stop holding it alone, everything shifts.

Not always immediately. Not always visibly. But something shifts.

And that shift, however slow, however costly, however lonely in the gap between leaving and landing, that is where living begins to look different from surviving.

* * *

So here is what I want to leave with you.

Not a solution. I don’t have one. The system is real, and it is large, and it was built carefully by people who understood exactly how to make the net hold.

But I want to ask one question, and I want you to sit with it honestly, the way I had to sit with it on that walk.

Is the discomfort you are inside right now the discomfort of

a life being lived or the discomfort of a life being survived?

Because if it is survival. If you are serving something that diminishes you just to keep the body breathing one more day. I am not here to judge that. I have been there. I know the weight of it. I know how the familiar shape of a hard thing can feel safer than the shapeless unknown of something different.

But I want you to know the unknown discomfort is also real. And survivable. And sometimes on the other side of it is something that finally feels like living.

Not comfort. Not ease. Not a perfect ethical life untangled from every broken system.

Just you. Choosing consciously. Moving toward something instead of just enduring something.

Discomfort is coming either way. The net promises it. The unknown promises it. The only choice that was ever really yours was whether to inherit your suffering or choose it consciously.

Change is uncomfortable. Staying is uncomfortable. If discomfort is inevitable, then the only question worth asking is whether yours is moving you toward something or just holding you in place.

Sit with these.

There are no right answers here. These are not a checklist. They are seeds. Read them slowly. Let them land in your body before your mind tries to answer them.

When you think about a choice you stayed in too long... what was the familiar discomfort you were holding onto? And what did it cost you to keep holding it?

Is there a place in your life right now where you can feel the net? What does it feel like in your body when you name it honestly?

Everyone has a walk-home moment. A moment where something clarified, and you couldn’t unfeel it. Have you had yours yet? And if you have... did you listen?

Is there somewhere you are still the only one quietly holding the discomfort? What would it mean to stop?

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And the question the whole essay lives inside:

Right now. Today. Are you living or surviving?

Heather-The Bountiful Yogi

They walk in, roll out their mat, and then somewhere between the opening breath and the first fold, they leave. Not physically. Their body is still there, right in the middle of the room. But they are gone. Running their own sequence, following their own inner playlist, a half beat ahead or three poses behind, entirely unconcerned with the collective thread the teacher is weaving.

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I have practiced beside this person. I have also taught this person. And my experience of them is completely different depending on which side of the room I am standing on.

As a Student

When I am a student, I am in. Fully. There is something almost sacred to me about being guided, about letting someone else hold the map while I simply walk.

Think about what that means for a moment. Most of us spend our days making decisions. Constant, relentless decisions. What to say, what to do, who needs what, what comes next. To walk into a room and hand all of that over to trust another person’s voice enough to let it move your body that is not passive. That is an act of surrender. And surrender, in yoga, is one of the hardest poses there is.

There is also something profound that happens when we move together. When we breathe together. I feel it every time, this quiet recognition that I am not separate. My inhale rises with yours. My exhale settles into the same silence. For a few breaths, we become something larger than our individual selves. That is ancient. That is what humans have always done: gathered, moved, breathed in unison, around fires and in temples and in fields. The yoga room is just the newest version of something very old.

When that one student is doing their own thing a few feet away, I notice. But because I am rooted, because I am present, the noticing does not take me anywhere. I see them, and I come back. That moment of seeing and returning, that is the practice. It always has been.

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As a Teacher

As a teacher, it is a different experience entirely.

I see them peel away from the group, and something in me immediately turns inward. Are they not hearing me? Are my cues not landing? Is there something I could say differently, something that might reach them, something that would bring them back?

I cast nets with my words.

If you are not here yet, please meet the rest of the class in this breath.

If you are not taking the full round of breath, please slow down. This is not a race.

If you are in Warrior Two, we are in Warrior One.

These cues are not corrections. They are invitations. I am not calling anyone out. I am holding a door open and saying, gently, there is room for you in here. We are waiting.

What I have come to understand is that their absence pulls at my presence too. A teacher holds the container. When someone steps outside it, there is a pull, a small gravity, toward self-doubt. And I have to do the same thing my students do. I have to notice. And return.

The Greatest Lesson

Here is what I did not expect when I started teaching. That student, the one who cannot follow, the one who does their own thing, the one who seems unreachable, they became one of my greatest teachers.

Not because they changed. Because I did.

The first time that student is in my class, I question everything. My cues, my sequencing, my ability to hold a room. The second time, same thing. I am still turning it inward, still asking what I am missing.

But by the third or fourth time, something shifts. I catch myself mid-doubt, and I come back. I practice what I teach. I return to the breath, to the room, to the fifteen other people who are right here with me.

By the fifth or sixth time, I surrender. Not to failure. Not to giving up. I surrender to who I am as a teacher. I hold space for that student as if they are doing every pose with the rest of us. Because in the ways that truly matter, they are. They are a being in the room. They are breathing. They are here, even if their awareness has not fully arrived yet.

That is non-attachment to outcome. That is one of the deepest teachings in yoga offering your best without gripping the result. I did not learn it from a book. I learned it from that student, week after week, in real time, on a real mat.

Holding space is giving grace to the moment and all the beings in it. Every single one. Even the ones who seem to be refusing the gift.

What Is Actually Happening

Here is the honest truth about the student who cannot follow along: they are not present.

I do not mean that critically. I mean it as an observation, the way you might note that it is raining. They are simply not here. They are in their head, running their plan, executing their habit, somewhere between yesterday and tomorrow. Their body is on the mat, but their awareness has not arrived.

And here is what makes it interesting: they often look the most advanced in the room. They know the poses. They move with confidence. They have clearly practiced. But the person beside them, the one who has never done yoga before, who is completely focused on figuring out where their foot goes, that person is practicing. They are present. They are in it.

Presence does not require skill. Skill does not guarantee presence.

Yoga was never about the shape of the pose. The pose is the vehicle. Presence is the destination. And you cannot drive to a place you have already decided you know better than the road.

The Invitation Is Always Open

I do not give up on that student. I keep casting the net. Because sometimes, not always, but sometimes something shifts. A cue lands. The breath slows. Their eyes soften. And they come back.

That moment is one of the most beautiful things I get to witness as a teacher. Not because they finally followed instructions. But because something in them let go. Something in them chose, even briefly, to trust the room, to trust the guide, to trust that there was something here worth receiving.

Surrender is not weakness. It is not compliance. It is the willingness to be moved by something outside your own agenda. And in a yoga class, that willingness is the whole practice.

So if you have ever been that student, I have been that student, know that the door is not closed. The class is not moving on without you. The collective breath is still breathing.

Come back. We are right here.

Reflection Questions

For Students

When you arrive on your mat, where does your awareness actually land? Are you following the guide, or are you already somewhere else, running your own plan before the first breath is even cued?

Is there a place in your life outside of yoga where you struggle to surrender the map to someone else? What would it feel like to set that down, even for an hour?

For Teachers

Think of a student who has challenged your presence. How many times did it take before you stopped questioning yourself and started extending grace instead? What shifted in you?

Where in your teaching are you still attached to the outcome, still needing the student to receive what you are offering? What would it mean to offer it anyway, with open hands?

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I want to ask you something harder. How does that serve you? And how does it truly serve others?

This is not the essay I planned to write today. I planned to sit here with my morning coffee and write about other people’s lack of self-awareness. About the people who move through the world without considering how their actions land on the people around them. I had a lot to say about that. I still do.

But somewhere between the first sip of coffee and this moment, I turned the lens around. And what I saw looking back at me was uncomfortable. Because the truth of the matter is this essay is really a reflection. I am the problem. And if you are a fixer, an adapter, a person who steps in before anyone asks, you might be too.

I have always tried to be proactive instead of reactive. That does not mean things don’t catch me off guard. I can be reactive. I fail sometimes. Sometimes I have to eat humble pie. Sometimes I have to let something go because it cannot be fixed. But when I see an issue, I try to help. I spent years as a supervisor of a large department and when I left that role I carried the mindset with me. We are here to make things better than we found them.

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That belief has shaped everything about how I move through the world. It shapes how I teach. How I show up for my students, my community, my family. It is not a bad thing. Most of the time it is a genuinely good thing.

But here is the question svadhyaya, the yoga practice of self-study, eventually asks of every fixer. What happens to the people around you who never have to develop the skill because you are always already there? What lesson are you carrying that belongs to someone else? What growth are you preventing by making everything smooth before anyone feels the friction?

When we fix things no one asked us to fix, we remove the invitation to grow. When we adapt so no one is uncomfortable, we protect people from the very discomfort that would have taught them something. When we change ourselves because someone might be angry or sad instead of letting them own their experience, we are not helping them. We are helping ourselves avoid the discomfort of watching them struggle.

We are the shock absorbers. And shock absorbers,

by design, protect the system from feeling its own impact.

Everything is about perspective. And this is no different.

The fixer sees a problem and moves toward it. That is a gift. But from another perspective, the fixer is also the reason the problem never has to be owned by the person who created it. The adapter makes room, and from another perspective, the adapter is also the reason no one ever has to learn to make room for themselves.

I am sitting with this right now in my own life. There is a situation where my perspective is one thing, and another person’s perspective is something completely different. And instead of just deciding I am right and they are wrong, svadhyaya asks me to sit with my own role. To ask honestly, what did my actions look like from the other side? Not to collapse into self-blame. Not to dismiss my own experience. Just to look.

That is the practice. Not a one-time inventory of your faults. A daily returning to the honest question: how am I moving through the world, and what does that cost the people around me?

Self-awareness is not a personality trait. It is a practice. And it requires friction to develop. When we remove all the friction, we remove the invitation to grow. Not just for others. For ourselves.

The people who never have to look at themselves because someone always smooths it over before the moment of reckoning arrives, those people do not become more aware over time. They become less. And the people doing the smoothing, the fixing, the adapting, they carry the weight of two people’s growth. Their own and the one that was never claimed.

That is not sustainable. And it is not kind. Not really. Not in the long run.

If we never self study we never get better. That is true for all of us. The unaware person who moves through the world without considering their impact. And the fixer who moves through the world considering everyone’s impact except the cost of their own relentless helpfulness.

The atrocities of history did not happen because a handful of monsters existed in a vacuum. They happened because millions of decent people kept absorbing, kept adjusting, kept making things work until making things work became the whole project. Most of them were good people. Aware people even. People who cared. People who just never asked themselves the hardest version of the question.

We are a part of the problem. The other part is the people who do not have the self-awareness or the capacity to govern themselves.

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But if we always fix it, there is no need for change.

Reflection Questions

Sit with these. There are no right answers. Only honest ones.

1. Where in your life are you absorbing consequences that were never yours to carry, and what would it look like to stop?

2. Think of a time your values or your words were used to justify taking something from you. Did you name it, or did you let it pass?

3. Where are you confusing chronic accommodation with grace? What is the difference between the two in your own life?

4. Svadhyaya asks you to look honestly at how you move through the world. What is one thing you have been too comfortable not to say out loud?

5. If the people around you never had to grow because you were always there to fill the gap, what would you need to stop fixing to create the space for that growth?

I understand the question. I was there once. In the early days of my practice, I measured progress in shapes: the deeper the backbend, the higher the arm balance, the longer I could hold standing bow without wobbling. I chased the Instagram vision of yoga even before there was Instagram. I celebrated them the way you check a box briefly, already looking for the next one. And shamed myself when I could not achieve something that looked so impressive.

But if you ask me now, truly ask me what is the hardest thing I have ever done on my mat, the answer is not a pose at all.

The hardest thing I have ever done on my mat is surrender.

— • —

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WHAT IT LOOKED LIKE BEFORE

For a long time, I didn’t surrender. I did on my mat what I did in my life: I pushed, I struggled, I forced, and I was so attached to what wasn’t happening instead of what was.

Yoga had become another box to check. Look, I took time for myself. But I was there in body only. My mind was somewhere else entirely. And my spirit didn’t show up until I learned to settle, until I became one with the moment I was actually in.

I held my breath and fidgeted through stillness. I made grocery lists in my head during Savasana. I planned my weekly schedule, the boys’ pickups and drop-offs, who I needed to call, and which emails were waiting. I planned my work week inside a yoga class. The one pose in the entire practice designed for complete rest, and I spent it doing a week’s worth of work in my mind. And I beat myself up the whole time for being on my mat instead of being productive. The irony of choosing a yoga class and then spending it in guilt about not doing something else did not occur to me for years.

Stillness felt like a threat. Rest felt like falling behind. My nervous system did not know the difference between a warrior pose that burned and a danger that was real. So it treated them the same. Brace. Hold. Push through. Get it over with.

That is not yoga. That is just surviving in a different room.

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— • —

THE UNLOCKING

The shift did not come all at once. There was no lightning-bolt moment, no single teacher, practice, or season that flipped a switch. It came the way most real transformation comes gradually, quietly, like locks opening one at a time. Subtle and soft. So soft I almost missed it.

Almost.

I did double classes that day. It was a hard day at work. A hard day with the ex and the boys. The day itself was emotionally heavy, and I had already done one 90-minute class, but walking out of the studio meant facing a world I wasn’t ready for. So I stayed. I did another 90-minutes.

And there it was. In complete exhaustion. In complete surrender.

It was the ninth pose. Camel. Heart open in a hot room, vulnerable to everything, trying to catch my breath. I had done this sequence time and time again. But something about this moment, the exhaustion, the heat, the weight of the day, the years of quiet unlocking happening underneath the door that had been loosening for a long time, finally walked through itself.

I could not stop crying. I cried through the rest of the class. I didn’t shower. I didn’t change. I grabbed my bag, got in the car, and drove 45 minutes home. And I crawled into bed in my yoga clothes.

Nothing but surrender. It was all I could do.

I didn’t question it. I didn’t explain it, manage it, or try to make it make sense. I just let it move through me. That was the first real surrender. Not the beautiful version. The only thing left version.

The camel moment didn’t come out of nowhere. It was built on years of subtle shifts I hadn’t recognized as preparation. The crying wasn’t the shift. The crying was the evidence that the shift had already happened somewhere I couldn’t see.

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— • —

WHAT SURRENDER ACTUALLY FEELS LIKE

The first thing I learned was how to settle into a pose while still being in it. Not collapse into it. Not check out. Settle. There is a difference.

An active pose is still active. The bones are stacked. The muscles are working. Your body is doing something real. But there is a layer beneath the effort where you can soften, where instead of forcing the shape from the outside, you let it form from the inside. Instead of holding your breath against the burn, you breathe into it. Instead of gripping, you find the place where strength and ease can live in the same body at the same time.

Strong and soft. Not one or the other. Both at once.

That is harder than forcing. Forcing is familiar. Most of us have been practicing force our whole lives. Settled strength engaged surrender that is the actual practice.

Then there was the mind. The monkey mind that jumps and chatters and pulls you out of the room entirely. The mind that tells you stories about what you should be doing instead, who you should be by now, and whether any of this is worth it. When the mind can finally just be here, not everywhere, not yesterday, not tomorrow, but here, in this breath, in this pose, everything changes. That is not an exaggeration. It changes everything.

Here is what I have come to understand after years of practicing and teaching this: the body cannot surrender what it believes it needs to survive.

The nervous system is not dramatic. It is just doing its job. When we stress the body in a yoga practice, and we do, even in the gentlest class, the nervous system notices. It is designed to notice. What it needs to learn, slowly, through repetition, breath, and the consistent experience of safety, is that stress is not the same as danger.

Effort is not emergency. Discomfort is not threat. You can work hard and still be safe. You can feel the burn and breathe through it. You can be fully in something difficult and know, in your bones, that you will be okay on the other side.

This is what I teach. Not just the poses. Not just the sequences. This. The slow, patient retraining of a nervous system that has been in survival mode in so many of us, for so long, learning to tell the difference between living and bracing for impact.

— • —

WHAT I LEARNED

What the mat taught me didn’t stay on the mat. But that is a longer story for another day.

What I will say is this: I do hard things on my mat so I can do hard things off my mat. And the hardest thing I have ever done is learn the difference between the two.

To challenge yourself is wonderful. It is human, necessary, and worthy of celebration.

To surrender with compassion is grace in its most beautiful form.

— • —

For your journal, or just your quiet mind

Where in your life are you forcing, holding your breath, bracing, pushing a shape that isn’t forming?

Where are you ready for surrender? Not giving up. Not going limp. The settled kind strong and soft at the same time.

Where in your daily life do you feel it in your body, the clenched jaw on the highway, the held breath before a hard conversation, the white-knuckle grip on an outcome you cannot control?

And where could you be strong and soft at the same time in a relationship, in your creative work, in the way you hold space for someone you love?

— • —

The light in me sees and honors the light in you.

Heather ~ The Bountiful Yogi

Not quite.

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In fact, it was one of the most revered yoga masters of the 20th century, B.K.S. Iyengar, who first introduced props into the practice. Not to make yoga easier, but to make it truer. He understood that when we bring the pose to the body instead of forcing the body into the pose, something more honest becomes possible.

That wisdom lives in every block, strap, and blanket in the room.

If you’ve been around my classes for any amount of time, you’ve probably heard me say it loud and clear:

“Cool people use props!”

Because props are not a sign of weakness. They’re a sign of wisdom.

When we understand how to use them, props help us explore our edge safely, with curiosity and intention. They remind us that yoga isn’t about performance; it’s about presence.

Reframing the Story: Props Are Teachers

Somewhere along the way, many of us absorbed the idea that needing help means we’re doing something wrong. But yoga isn’t about achieving the deepest expression of a pose. It’s about discovering your expression of it.

And here is something that surprises people: props serve every body on every end of the spectrum. They help you reach what feels too far away. They also help you stop before you go too far. For those with hypermobility, props set an intelligent boundary, a place to land that protects the joints and connective tissue from overstretching. The block, the strap, and the blanket don’t just bring the floor closer. Sometimes they hold the line.

When we use them with awareness, props become teachers, guiding us toward balance, alignment, and grace.

The Power of the Block

The block is one of the most versatile and underestimated tools in yoga. And here is what most people don’t realize: a block is a dial, not a crutch. You can turn it in any direction depending on what your body needs.

Flat, medium, or tall, a block brings the floor closer in Triangle Pose, steadies the hands in Down Dog, and creates space to step through in transitions like Warrior I and Low Lunge. In Bridge Pose it supports the sacrum, transforming a strength pose into a restorative one.

But you can also stand on blocks in a Forward Fold to move the floor farther away, dropping the hands below foot level and creating even more length through the hamstrings and spine. I do this in my own practice. And placing blocks at the soles of the feet in a seated Forward Fold gives the hands something to reach toward, a destination that opens the back rather than collapsing it.

For hypermobile students, blocks give the hands a place to land in Forward Fold so the hamstrings aren’t hanging on their end range. The block says: this far, and here you are held.

A block doesn’t make you less advanced. It makes you more attuned.

The Strap: Bridge Between Effort and Ease

A strap is more than a piece of fabric. It’s a bridge between where you are and where you’re growing.

In shoulder openers, a strap connects the hands when the shoulders need more space to open safely. In seated forward folds, it allows the spine to lengthen without rounding. It can bring steadiness to Waterfall Pose, or transform Pigeon into King Pigeon by bridging the gap between the hands and feet, helping you find the shape with breath and grace, not strain.

And for hypermobile shoulders, the strap also keeps the arms from overspreading past a safe range. It teaches the body where the edge is, long before the joints have to figure it out the hard way.

With time, the strap teaches patience: how to meet the body where it is rather than forcing it somewhere it’s not ready to go.

Blankets: My Favorite Prop in the Room

I’ll be honest with you: the blanket is my favorite prop. It’s the most humble thing in the room and somehow the most generous.

I reach for it constantly. In seated poses, a folded blanket under the hips tilts the pelvis forward just enough to let the spine rise without straining. That small lift changes everything. In Pigeon and Deer, I tuck it under the hip of the bent leg to even out the body, so instead of gripping through the tilt, you can actually let go and settle. For hypermobile hips, that same blanket also stops the pelvis from melting too far into the floor, giving the body an intelligent place to rest rather than a bottomless fold.

And sometimes I use it for nothing more than a simple seat. No dramatic pose. Just a folded square that says: you don’t have to work so hard to simply be here.

Blankets invite softness into the practice. They say: you don’t have to hold everything alone. And sometimes, that’s the medicine we need most.

Yin and Restorative: No Shame in the Prop Game

Two of my favorite practices to both teach and live in are Yin and Restorative yoga. And they happen to be where props show up with zero shame, zero apology, and zero hesitation.

In Yin, props help you find your edge without forcing it. A bolster under the knees, a block under the hands, a blanket folded just so. The prop lets you stay longer, breathe deeper, and release what the more active practices sometimes miss.

In Restorative, every single prop has a job. The bolster holds you. The blanket wraps you. The block positions you. The eye pillow tells your nervous system it’s safe to let go. Nothing is extra. Everything is intentional. The practice is built entirely on the intelligence of support.

And when class is over? Cleaning up a Restorative room looks exactly like cleaning up after a slumber party: bolsters, blankets, blocks, and mats scattered everywhere, because everyone was held so completely.

That image says everything. Props don’t diminish the practice. They are the practice.

The Chair: More Than You Think

I have a student with a heart condition. Her body is strong and capable, fully able to move through a regular practice. But her heart needs consideration, and that changes how certain poses feel for her.

In Down Dog and Forward Fold, placing her hands on the seat of a chair keeps her spine long and her heart supported, not working against gravity in a way that strains her cardiovascular system. The chair isn’t telling her she can’t do the pose. It’s a reminder, a reference point, a quiet conversation between the prop and the body.

That’s the chair as a prop within a regular practice, and it’s something more teachers and students should reach for. You don’t have to be in a chair yoga class to use a chair. A chair next to your mat during standing poses gives you something to rest a hand on, steadying the practice without shrinking it.

And then there is chair yoga itself, which is not a lesser practice. It’s a creative and compassionate one. It opens the door for people of all ages, abilities, and bodies to experience the benefits of movement, breath, and presence. You can practice almost any asana using a chair, from supported warriors and folds to twists and pranayama. Even experienced practitioners benefit from chair-supported variations. They refine alignment and reveal patterns of tension we might otherwise overlook.

The Wall: Your Biggest, Most Underused Prop

The wall is always there and almost always ignored. That’s a shame, because it might be the most versatile prop in the room, and it never needs to be checked out from the prop closet.

In balance poses, the wall doesn’t do the balancing for you. It lets you stop managing the fear of falling so you can actually inhabit the shape. In Dancer, one fingertip on the wall means your whole attention can go into the opening of the chest, the reach of the back foot, and the lift through the standing leg. In Half Moon, the wall behind you gives the body a reference point so you can find the pose instead of just surviving it.

Then there is the wall as a restorative tool. Waterfall, legs floating up, is a gentle inversion that lets the nervous system begin to settle. Stay there and breathe. Let gravity do something kind for your legs and your lower back. For hypermobile legs, the wall also gives a reference so the knees don’t hyperextend into that long hang.

And when you’re ready, try this: from Waterfall, simply bend your knees and place the soles of your feet flat on the wall. You’ve just arrived in Wall Frog. It lives somewhere between Happy Baby and Frog Pose, the hips opening wide, the wall doing the holding so you can do the exploring. It’s one of my favorite transitions in a restorative sequence, and it never fails to surprise people with how much space it creates.

Props as a Pathway to Growth

Props help you advance your practice, not escape it. They allow you to linger in poses longer, breathe deeper, and explore new sensations with integrity. When you remove unnecessary struggle, you make space for awareness.

And that’s where transformation happens: in the space between effort and ease, strength and surrender.

The Heart of It All

The next time you step on your mat, I invite you to see props not as crutches, but as companions. They hold you, guide you, and remind you that asking for support isn’t weakness; it’s wisdom.

Yoga isn’t about how far you can go. It’s about how deeply you can listen.

Whether you’re reaching for the floor or learning not to, whether you’re brand new to the mat or have been practicing for decades, whether your body needs more range or a gentle boundary, there is a prop for you. There has always been a prop for you.

Where would you use a little more support? Where might a prop set an intelligent boundary you didn’t know you needed? Have you ever let yourself be fully held in a practice and felt what becomes possible when the struggle falls away?

So grab your block. Stand on it if you need to. Unroll that strap. Fold your blanket. Pull up a chair. Find the wall. And remember:

Cool people use props.

Reflection Prompt

Where could you use more support in your practice, or in your life? What would it feel like to ask for help, not because you’re struggling, but because you’re ready to grow with more ease and awareness?

There is a text I have been meaning to send for three weeks. A friend I keep thinking about, a check-in that lives in the back of my mind like a quiet ache. Life keeps moving. The days fill before I can catch them. And that text stays unsent.

I don’t think I’m alone in this.

Most of us are carrying a list like that. The meetup that got rescheduled and then rescheduled again. The neighbor we keep meaning to introduce ourselves to. The family member we haven’t really talked to, not really, in longer than we want to admit. We mean well. We care. And yet something keeps getting in the way.

That something has a name. It’s exhaustion. And I don’t mean the kind that a good night’s sleep fixes. I mean the bone-deep, nervous-system kind. The survival-mode kind. The kind that narrows your whole world down to what’s within arm’s reach because your body and mind have quietly decided that is all you can manage right now.

~ ~ ~

Survival Mode Was Never Meant to Be a Lifestyle

Our nervous systems are extraordinary. When we are under threat, real or perceived, our bodies shift into sympathetic dominance: fight, flight, or freeze. Heart rate rises. Vision narrows. The brain prioritizes immediate survival over everything else. It is a brilliant, ancient system designed to get us through a crisis.

The problem is that modern life has made crisis the baseline.

Work that never fully stops. Bills that outpace wages. Caregiving that falls disproportionately on certain shoulders. News cycles that weaponize urgency. Schedules packed so tight there is no room for the unexpected, and there is always something unexpected. Our nervous systems were not built to sustain this level of activation indefinitely, and yet here we are, most of us running on low-grade alarm, day after day, year after year.

When you are in survival mode, connection is not the priority. It cannot be. The part of your brain responsible for empathy, creativity, nuanced thinking, and long-term relationship tending is not fully online when the alarm is sounding. You are not a bad friend, a bad neighbor, a bad community member. You are a tired one. And that tiredness is not a character flaw. It is a physiological response to a world that has asked too much for too long.

You are not a bad friend, a bad neighbor, a bad community member. You are a tired one.

~ ~ ~

This Is Not New. This Is a Pattern.

I was not alive in Weimar Germany. I did not live through the Soviet Union or witness Chile in the early 1970s. But I have studied what happened in those places, and I believe, with real conviction, that the people living through those moments were not so different from us. They were tired. They were surviving. They were consumed by the immediate demands of their own lives, by work and bills and family and the grinding uncertainty of unstable times.

And because they were exhausted, they were disconnected. Not because they didn’t care. Because they didn’t have the bandwidth left to look up from their own survival long enough to see what was happening in the wider world around them.

In Germany, years of economic devastation had hollowed out communities before a single speech was made. In the Soviet Union, fear and scarcity had already taught people to keep their heads down, to trust only what was within arm’s reach. In Chile, a country already strained by division and uncertainty welcomed the promise of stability because stability was the one thing nobody could afford to take for granted anymore.

Disconnection did not follow the authoritarianism. It preceded it. It created the conditions for it.

Disconnection did not follow the authoritarianism. It preceded it. It created the conditions for it.

When people are isolated, exhausted, and no longer sure who to trust, they become easier to divide. And divided people are far easier to manipulate than connected ones. This is not a conspiracy. It is simply how human psychology works under sustained stress. Division fills the vacuum that community leaves behind.

I look at our moment right now, and I see the same ingredients. The wealth gap widening faster than most of us can track. The information moving faster than we can process it. The sense that everything is urgent and nothing is within our control. The slow erosion of trust, in institutions, in neighbors, in each other. The exhaustion that makes it feel easier to scroll than to call, easier to consume than to show up.

We did not get here because we stopped caring. We got here because caring takes energy, and energy is the one thing most of us are running desperately low on.

~ ~ ~

Connection Is Work. That Is Not a Flaw. That Is the Point.

I want to say something that does not get said enough in wellness spaces: staying connected is work. Real, ongoing, sometimes inconvenient work. It takes energy that isn’t always there. It means reaching out when you’re tired. Showing up when you’d rather not. Rescheduling and trying again instead of quietly letting things fade.

I know this from my own life. I teach close to twenty-two classes a week. I care deeply about my students, my community, and my family. And still, people get missed. Texts go unsent. The gap between intention and action yawns wide some weeks. I fall short of the connection I want to be offering, and I have had to make peace with that without using it as an excuse to stop trying.

Because here is what I keep coming back to: imperfect connection is still connection. Showing up late is still showing up. A rescheduled meetup that actually happens three weeks later still counts. The text you finally send after sitting in your drafts is better than the silence.

The yogic tradition speaks of sangha, community, as one of the essential supports for a life of practice. Not a perfect community. Not a community that never gets it wrong. Just a group of people committed to moving through life together rather than alone. The practice is not about achieving some ideal of constant, effortless connection. It is about returning to one another, again and again, even when it is hard. Especially when it is hard.

~ ~ ~

Sit With This

Before you move on to the next thing, I want to offer you a moment of honest reflection. Not to shame you. Not to add another item to your list. But because the questions we don’t ask ourselves are the ones that keep running us quietly from the background.

When did you last feel truly connected to someone outside your immediate household? Not a text. Not a scroll. Actually, with someone, present and unhurried.

Where in your body do you carry your isolation? Because it lives somewhere. The tight chest. The heavy shoulders. The jaw that won’t fully release. What is your body telling you about how long you have been carrying this alone?

Who have you been meaning to reach out to? And what has actually been stopping you? Name it honestly, not to judge it, but to see it clearly.

Are you consuming community or contributing to it? Both are valid starting points. But only one moves the needle.

~ ~ ~

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One Thing. This Week.

I am not asking you to fix everything. I am not asking you to become someone who never misses a text or always shows up on time or holds community together through sheer force of goodwill. That is not a person. That is a myth.

I am asking for one thing. This week. One real conversation. One door knocked on. One meetup that actually happens instead of getting rescheduled again. One moment of contributing instead of consuming.

Not because it will save the world. But because it will begin to rebuild the trust that isolation has been quietly eroding. And trust, rebuilt one small act at a time, is how communities remember their own strength.

The light in me sees and honors the light in you. And that is not just how I close my yoga classes. It is the truest thing I know about why connection matters. We are not meant to survive alone. We never were.

Shanti Shanti Shanti

Peace in body, peace in mind, peace in spirit.

Heather-The Bountiful Yogi

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There is a moment before every major shift when the air feels charged, like the world is holding its breath. You sense it in your body even before you can name it. A subtle restlessness. A quiet knowing. An awareness that something is moving beneath the surface.

Many of us can feel that hum right now, economically, socially, spiritually. The ground is shifting, and we know it the way the body always knows things first: a tightening in the chest, a shallowing of breath, a sleep that doesn’t quite restore.

The question isn’t whether change is coming. It’s this:

When you sense the wave approaching, do you wait for impact... or do you learn how to swim?

In yoga philosophy, this question lives in the practice of tapas, one of the five niyamas, the personal observances at the heart of yogic living. Tapas is often translated as “discipline” or “burning effort,” but at its root, it means something closer to conscious heat; the willingness to tend the fire within so you are not extinguished by the fire without. It is preparation as a devotional act.

The space between sensing and acting

We live in a reactive world. Headlines, social media, and political cycles are designed to trigger responses. Reactivity keeps us spinning in unprocessed emotion, where urgency replaces discernment, and clarity is swallowed by noise.

Reactivity is the mind trying to catch up to what the body already knows.

It’s the tightening in your chest when you read the news. The late-night scrolling for reassurance that never really comes. The argument with a loved one that isn’t really about the moment; it’s about the fear that’s been quietly accumulating, unacknowledged, in the tissues.

This is where yoga has always had something to say. The practice of svadhyaya, self-study and honest witnessing, asks us to notice what we’re feeling and sit with it long enough to understand it. Not to perform calm. Not to bypass discomfort. But to become curious about what the sensation is trying to teach us.

Proactivity begins in that pause.

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Waiting or preparing?

When we wait, we outsource our power to circumstance. We say let’s see what happens and quietly hand our well-being to forces outside ourselves.

When we prepare, we reclaim that power, not through control, but through rootedness.

You cannot stop the wave. But you can strengthen your foundation before it arrives.

Waiting is rooted in doubt, in the belief that we are subject to our conditions rather than in relationship with them. Preparation is born of faith: in your capacity to adapt, in your body’s wisdom, in your connection to something larger than the chaos around you.

The yogic tradition calls this santosha, contentment that isn’t passive resignation but rather a deep equanimity. The prepared person isn’t hoping things won’t change. They’ve built a relationship with change itself.

Why I write this from experience, not theory

I want to be honest with you, because this is a new space and you don’t know me yet, and I think you deserve to know where this comes from.

I have known what it is to lose stability suddenly. More than once. The kind of loss where the safety net you assumed was there simply... wasn’t. And while I won’t unpack all of that here, I carry that knowing in my body the way you carry a scar; not always visible, but always present.

We live a comfortable life now. I am genuinely grateful for that. But comfort, I’ve learned, is not the same as security. And so I hold it lightly.

When I start to sense the signs, in the news, in the economy, in the conversations people are having in hushed tones, something in me begins to quietly shift. I start moving toward preparation the way you move toward a warm coat before the weather turns. Not from panic. From pattern recognition. From a body that remembers.

This past season, that has looked like building a backyard greenhouse and starting a garden, stocking the pantry with intention, and teaching my granddaughters to cook real food for themselves, not as a chore, but as a gift. You will always be able to feed yourself. That feels like one of the most important things I can give them.

But here is what I want you to understand... and what took me years to learn: the greenhouse and the pantry are the visible part, the part people can see and name and sometimes mistake for fear. The invisible infrastructure underneath all of it is the nervous system work; the breath practice, the mala beads I carry into the garden, into stillness, into the moments when the world feels like too much, the mat I return to every single day. Preparing the nervous system is not separate from preparing the home... it is the first act of preparation. Because a regulated body can respond. A dysregulated one can only react. And when things shift, the world needs people who can respond.

I share this not to alarm you, and not because I think collapse is inevitable. I share it because I think a lot of us are quietly doing versions of this, and we’re not talking about it. We’re treating preparation like something to be embarrassed about, when it might be one of the most grounded, loving things we can do.

This is what tapas looks like off the mat.

The shifts are already here

Let’s be honest. The world has been sending signals for years. Economic systems are wobbling; social trust has eroded. Communities are divided not just by politics but by exhaustion. The pace of everything is accelerating in ways our nervous systems were not designed to absorb.

And yet, beneath the noise, something else is rising.

Awareness. People are simplifying, turning inward, seeking ways of living that feel more human and less mechanical. There is a collective reaching toward presence, toward connection, toward meaning that can’t be streamed or scrolled.

If we can already sense these shifts, and many of us can, then the real question is: how are we preparing not just to survive, but to show up differently this time?

When you see it before others do

One of the quiet challenges of awareness is that sometimes you sense the shift before the people around you are ready to name it. Your body responds before your mind has language for what it knows. When you try to name it, you may be met with dismissal. You’re overthinking. You’re being dramatic.

This is where many of us either retreat into silence or surge forward in urgency. Neither serves us, or the people we love.

In yoga, the concept of vairagya, non-attachment, offers a path through. Seeing clearly doesn’t require us to grip the vision or broadcast it. We can hold what we know with open hands, tending our own nervous systems first so we don’t transmit fear while trying to offer steadiness.

Awareness without regulation becomes alarm; awareness paired with grounded presence becomes something closer to leadership, the kind that doesn’t need a title.

What preparation actually looks like

Preparation looks different for each of us, because our vulnerabilities and resources are different. But it is never only logistical; it is emotional, it is energetic, it is relational.

For some, it means simplifying, consuming less, spending intentionally, and building gratitude for what already is. For others, it’s practical skill-building: learning to grow something, repair something, or depend a little less on systems that feel fragile. For many, it is deeply spiritual; refining the inner practices of breath, movement, stillness, and community that help us remain anchored when the external world feels untethered.

On the mat, we call this abhyasa, consistent and devoted practice. Not perfection. Repetition. The understanding that the body learns through return, not through arrival.

Preparedness built in panic doesn’t last. Preparedness built with intention becomes embodied wisdom, the kind that lives in your nervous system, not just your mind.

Community as practice

Community preparation doesn’t begin with grand plans. It begins with relationships. It’s checking on a neighbor, not to convince them of anything, but to build trust before you need it. It’s asking who in your circle has skills you don’t. It’s creating space for honest conversation without urgency, sharing resources without preaching, and modeling calm rather than anxiety.

The yogic concept of sangha, a community of practitioners, reminds us that we were never meant to navigate transformation alone. We regulate each other’s nervous systems; we hold each other’s histories. We become the evidence that change is survivable.

Communities don’t fracture because of change. They fracture when people feel unprepared, unseen, and unsupported. Proactive care reduces fear by increasing connection.

Becoming an anchor

If we remain reactive, we become part of the turbulence. But when we choose conscious preparation, emotional regulation, community care, and grounded presence, we become something else. We become stabilizers.

Every family, every community, every moment of collective difficulty needs people who stay calm in crisis; who can discern truth from fear, who hold compassion while taking clear, rooted action, who do not perform peace but embody it, because they’ve practiced it daily, on the mat and off.

You don’t need a platform for this. You need presence, integrity, follow-through, and deep roots.

This isn’t preparation that builds bunkers. It’s preparation that builds character.

Proactivity as sacred practice

To live proactively is to meet life halfway. It is a devotional act, one that says I will not wait to be swept away. I will tend my soil. I will build my roots. I will show up, again and again, so that when the season turns, I have something to offer.

The world doesn’t need more people performing fine. It needs people who have done their inner work, who can sit with discomfort without transmitting it, who can hold steadiness without bypassing the grief, who can love fiercely without losing themselves.

That is the yogi’s work. Not just on the mat. In the world.

When you sense the wave coming, open your eyes wider. Root deeper. Prepare not from fear, but from love.

Because what’s coming isn’t just a challenge. It’s a transformation. And the world will need steady hands to help shape what comes next.

Questions for reflection

What signals or shifts have I been sensing, in myself and in the world, that I haven’t fully named yet?

Where have I been waiting for something to resolve on its own rather than preparing for it?

What would proactive living look like for me, emotionally, spiritually, practically?

How can I contribute to the steadiness of my community, not just my own comfort?

What daily practices help me return to my roots when the world feels destabilizing?

What is one skill, relationship, or resource I could strengthen this season?

A note on language: The Sanskrit terms in this piece, tapas, svadhyaya, santosha, vairagya, abhyasa, sangha, are from the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali and the broader yogic tradition. They are offered not as decoration, but because they carry meaning that English approximates imperfectly. Hold them lightly or explore them deeply; either is welcome here.

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A hat. A shirt. A sticker on a water bottle.

My stomach drops. My body goes heavy.

Not with anger, I want to be clear about that. With grief. A grief that moves in two directions at once: for the people being harmed, and for the people causing harm from a place of chosen apathy, who have decided somewhere along the way that certain suffering is not theirs to feel. Who may not believe they are causing harm at all, because empathy for particular lives has been quietly set aside.

And then I breathe. And I think: what can I say today that might land? What truth can I carry into this room that might, without anyone knowing it, plant something?

Then I unroll my mat. I sit in my simple seat and invite the class to do the same. Let’s begin.

This is what aparigraha actually looks like in my life. Not a peaceful philosophical concept. A practice I do in my body, on ordinary mornings, in ordinary rooms, with real people who sometimes make my heart heavy.

I’m writing this as a reminder to myself as much as anything else. Because I need it. I am not on the other side of this teaching. I am in the middle of it, same as you.

What Non-Attachment Is Not

Aparigraha is the fifth yama in yoga philosophy, one of the foundational ethical teachings of the practice. It is most often translated as non-possessiveness, non-greed, non-attachment. The practice of open hands.

But I want to name what it is not, because I spent a long time confusing non-attachment with indifference. With not caring. With the kind of spiritual distance that lets you float above the messy, painful, complicated reality of being human among humans.

That is not aparigraha. That is avoidance wearing yoga clothes.

Real non-attachment doesn’t ask you to stop feeling. It asks you to feel everything — and then release your grip on the outcome. To love without owning. To offer without demanding return. To plant without controlling the harvest.

The Bhagavad Gita says it plainly: you have the right to your actions, but not to the fruits of your actions. Do the work. Offer it fully. Release what happens next.

That sounds clean on paper. In a room full of people, some of whom are actively resisting the very awareness you’re trying to offer, it is one of the hardest things I know how to do.

The Gap That Breaks My Heart

I don’t grieve people’s politics, exactly. What I grieve is the gap.

The gap between the symbol and the living of it. Between the cross around the neck and the compassion it points toward. Between the mat beneath the body and the awareness the mat is meant to cultivate. Between someone showing up to breathe and soften and be still, and then leaving that stillness in the parking lot.

I watch bodies soften as we move through practice. I watch shoulders drop. I watch breath deepen. I watch faces go quiet in ways they probably don’t go quiet anywhere else in their week. And something in me rises hope, maybe. Or love. Or the particular tenderness of witnessing someone become, even briefly, more themselves.

And then class ends. And I see them in the hallway, or I overhear a side conversation, or I watch someone jump up from savasana to put on their socks while others are bowing their heads. And I think: where did that softness go? Was it real? Does it matter if it doesn’t leave this room?

The honest answer is: I don’t know. And that not-knowing is exactly where aparigraha lives.

The people I witness having genuine breakthroughs, the ones who stay after to talk about a shift, who come back changed in some quiet way, they were already on the path organically, I think. Already moving toward the interior before they ever found my class. I was a waypoint, not the origin.

The ones who come in resistant and leave resistant? I don’t get to see what, if anything, moved in them. I just don’t know. And the practice asks me to make peace with that unknowing. To trust that something can move in a body even when the mind doesn’t register it. To believe in seeds I will never see sprout.

The Drive Home

On the hard days, driving home, what moves through me isn’t unkindness.

It’s sorrow.

Sorrow that someone can sit in stillness every week and not yet feel the thread that connects their peace to someone else’s pain. Sorrow that the path, this path that has the capacity to crack people open, is not sustainable for everyone, or not yet. Sorrow that it is genuinely easier, in the short term, to stay on the surface. To collect the aesthetic of wellness without the interior work it points toward.

I know that path. I understand its appeal. Because I was on it once, in my own way.

My life has not been an easy one. And the path to this practice, to standing at the front of a room and teaching what I teach, was not easy either. It took me a long time to look inside. A long time to decide, I was not going to become the people who hurt me. To choose, over and over, not to pass the wound forward.

That is not a small choice. And it is not a one-time choice. It is a choice you make again on every hard morning. Every heavy class. Every drive home through the sorrow.

Because here is what I know about the easier path, the surface path, the path that never asks you to look in: it is also costly. Profoundly costly. Whether you know it or not. The wound you don’t tend doesn’t disappear. It just travels. Into your body. Into your relationships. Into the way you move through the world and treat the people in it.

I grieve that cost. For people, I may never be able to reach with words. Because I know what it costs. I paid it too, for a long time.

The wound you don’t tend doesn’t disappear. It just travels.

Roots Down. Branches Open. Trunk Unmoved.

I have been sitting with an image lately that has become a kind of practice in itself.

A tree.

Roots down. Branches open. Trunk unmoved.

It landed in my solar plexus before my mind could catch up to it. That’s usually how I know something is true: the body receives it first.

The roots are the reason I can stay open at all. My own practice. My own interior work. The years of choosing the harder, truer path. Without the roots, open branches are just exhaustion. Just depletion dressed up as generosity.

The branches are not reaching. They are not straining toward anyone, willing them to shift. They are simply available. There is a difference between arms extended in effort and arms open in presence. One costs everything. The other sustains.

And the trunk. The trunk is what I had to learn the hardest way.

The trunk doesn’t mean unfeeling. It means the center holds. The wind moves through. The edges bend, I feel everything, the grief, the sorrow, the hope that rises, and the hope that doesn’t land. But the core doesn’t blow away with every person who resists. The core knows why it’s here. And it comes back next week.

This is what aparigraha looks like embodied. Not a concept. A posture. A way of standing in a room full of people you cannot save and choosing to love them anyway.

Not owning the space. Holding it.

Why I Keep Coming Back

I show up because the path changed me.

Because there was a version of my life where I became the people who hurt me, and I didn’t. Not because I was stronger or more evolved or specially chosen. Because something turned me toward the interior instead of away from it. Because I found practices that gave me somewhere to put the pain that wasn’t someone else’s body or life.

I show up to prove to myself that my journey is not over. I still have lessons to learn. The teacher at the front of the room is not finished becoming.

I show up because I know, I know in the marrow of it that this work is possible. Even for the person whose body only softened for one hour on a Tuesday. Even for the person who put their socks on during the closing bow. Something happened in that hour, and I don’t get to know what. That is not mine to know.

I show up because the Gita is right: I am responsible for the effort. I am not responsible for the harvest.

And I show up because on the days when someone stays after class and tells me something shifted when I watch the path do what the path does, it is the most sacred thing I know. It makes every heavy morning worth it. Every stomach drop. Every drive home through the sorrow.

The practice saved my life. Not dramatically. Slowly. Quietly. One hard choice at a time.

Maybe it will do that for someone in my room who I will never know it did that for.

Maybe it already has.

That has to be enough. And on the good days, the days I am actually practicing aparigraha instead of just teaching it, it is.

I am responsible for the effort. I am not responsible for the harvest.

An Invitation

If you are a teacher, a guide, a caregiver, a parent, a friend who loves someone you cannot reach, this is for you too.

You are not failing because you cannot make someone see what you see. You are not failing because the seed hasn’t sprouted where you can witness it. You are not failing because the class ended and they went back to the parking lot unchanged, as far as you know.

You are doing the most human and most difficult thing: loving without owning. Offering without controlling. Standing rooted in your own becoming while holding space for someone else’s on their timeline, not yours, in their way, not yours, if at all.

Sit with this:

Where in your life are you holding space and secretly owning it?

Where is your grief really love in disguise?

What would it feel like to plant the seed and walk away with faith?

What does your trunk feel like right now, and what do your roots need?

The path is not asking you to stop feeling.

It is asking you to feel everything and keep your roots.

— Heather Rogers

The Bountiful Yogi

Maybe it happens in child’s pose, forehead to the earth, breath finally deepening. Or in savasana, when the mental static suddenly quiets, and you can feel your heartbeat like a drum beneath your ribs. Or after a long, slow exhale in pranayama, when the world softens at the edges, and you remember what it feels like to be home in your body.

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You’ve felt it. That mysterious descent from doing into being. That sense of arrival you can’t quite name.

For years, I chased that feeling without understanding it. I thought if I just did more yoga, held the poses longer, breathed deeper, I’d figure out what was happening. I thought it was supposed to feel mystical and unexplainable, like that was the point.

But here’s what I learned: it’s both mystical and physiological. And understanding the physiology doesn’t make it less sacred. If anything, it makes it more so.

Your practice has been speaking directly to a specific part of your nervous system all along, teaching it something it desperately needs to remember. Meet your vagus nerve. The part of you that your yoga has been healing, one breath at a time.

(And yes, it’s pronounced “VAY-gus,” not “Vegas.” Though honestly, I spent years saying it wrong, so if you have too, welcome to the club.)

Meet Your Vagus Nerve: The Body’s Prayer Strand

The vagus nerve is the longest cranial nerve in your body, running from your brainstem down through your neck, wrapping around your heart and lungs, and descending into your digestive organs. If you trace its path, you’re essentially mapping the chakra system from throat to heart to solar plexus to sacral center.

Ancient yogis didn’t have MRI machines, but they knew. They understood that this central channel was sacred, that breath and sound and stillness could travel this highway and change everything.

Meanwhile, Western medicine took until the 1990s to really start paying attention to this nerve. Which feels about right we’re usually late to things the body’s been trying to tell us all along.

In Western terms, the vagus nerve is the main communication pathway of the parasympathetic nervous system the part of your autonomic nervous system responsible for rest, digestion, recovery, and regulation. While your sympathetic nervous system governs fight-or-flight (the gas pedal), your parasympathetic system is the brake. And the vagus nerve? It’s the mechanism that allows you to actually press it.

When your vagus nerve is functioning well when vagal tone is strong you experience what researchers call “social engagement.” You feel:

• Calm but alert

• Emotionally regulated, able to feel without being overwhelmed

• Capable of digesting both food and experiences

• Resilient to stress you can activate when needed, then return to baseline

• Connected to yourself and others

This is the state yoga philosophy calls sthira sukham asanam, steady and easeful. Not limp. Not checked out. Present, responsive, alive, but not white-knuckling your way through every moment.

Here’s the part that changed everything for me: the vagus nerve doesn’t just carry signals from your brain to your organs. It’s a two-way street. And roughly 80% of the vagus nerve’s fibers are afferent, meaning they carry information from your body up to your brain.

Your organs are constantly sending status reports I’m safe, I’m threatened, I’m okay, I need help and your brain is listening.

This is why your yoga practice works. You’re not just stretching muscles or filling lungs. You’re sending new information up that highway. You’re teaching your brain, from the bottom up: You are allowed to rest. You are allowed to feel.

And for some of us, that’s the hardest lesson we’ll ever learn.

What Dysregulation Actually Is (Or: Why I Feel Like This)

I need to tell you something that’s hard to admit.

For most of my adult life, I thought I was just “anxious.” Like it was a personality trait. Like some people are tall and some people are anxious, and that’s just how it goes.

I didn’t know I was living in sympathetic overdrive. I didn’t have language for it.

I just knew that my heart was always racing. That I startled at everything: a door closing, a notification sound, someone saying my name. That I held my breath without realizing it. My digestion was a disaster. That sleep never felt restful. That I was always, always bracing for the next bad thing.

Even when there was no bad thing coming.

This is what happens when the vagus nerve is compromised. When vagal tone is weak. When that communication highway gets congested or shut down entirely.

You get stuck.

Maybe you’re stuck where I was, in a fight-or-flight that never resolves. Anxiety is humming beneath everything. Shallow breathing that’s become so habitual you don’t even notice it anymore. The feeling that you’re always preparing for impact.

Or maybe you’re stuck in what’s called dorsal vagal shutdown, the freeze response. Dissociation. Numbness. The sense that you’re watching your life from behind glass. Chronic fatigue. The inability to feel much of anything at all. Depression that sits on your chest like a stone.

Trauma does this. Chronic stress does this. Living in a world that demands constant productivity and calls rest “laziness” does this.

And for many of us, these patterns become so familiar that we think they’re just who we are.

I thought my anxiety was me. I thought my inability to relax was me. I thought people who could actually settle into savasana without their mind spinning were just... I don’t know, built different.

But they’re not. They’re adaptations. Survival strategies our nervous systems learned when they didn’t have other options.

The vagus nerve can be injured through physical trauma, surgery, accidents, or compression from nearby structures. But it can also become functionally impaired through chronic activation of stress responses. Through never being taught it’s safe to settle. Through a lifetime of holding your breath because exhaling felt too vulnerable.

If you grew up in a chaotic household, if you’ve experienced trauma, if you’ve ever had to be hypervigilant just to survive, your vagus nerve remembers. It’s trying to protect you. It just doesn’t know the danger is over.

And here’s what most people don’t know: you can teach it differently.

You can build vagal tone the same way you build muscle through practice, through repetition, through creating the conditions for your nervous system to remember what regulation feels like.

This is what your yoga has been doing all along. And it’s what mine was doing for me, years before I had any idea what was happening.

Before we go further, I want you to pause. Right now, in this moment:

• How’s your breath? Is it shallow, stuck in your upper chest? Or can you feel it moving into your belly?

• Where is tension living in your body right now? Your jaw? Your shoulders? Your hips?

• Can you feel your heartbeat? Can you sense the rhythm of your own aliveness?

• Do you feel present in this moment, or is your mind already three steps ahead?

Just notice. No judgment.

If you just realized your shoulders were up by your ears, if you just noticed you’ve been holding your breath, if you can’t feel your body at all right now that’s information. That’s your nervous system talking. And the fact that you’re noticing? That’s already the beginning of something.

Why Movement Heals: The Four Pathways

Yoga doesn’t “fix” the vagus nerve. It creates the conditions for the nerve to function the way it was designed to. It sends signals of safety through four primary pathways.

And I’m going to be honest when I first learned this, I was mad. Because it felt too simple. Like if breathing differently could actually help, why had I spent years suffering? Why didn’t anyone tell me?

But here’s the thing: it is simple. It’s just not easy. There’s a difference.

1. Breath (Pranayama)

This is the most direct route. Slow, rhythmic breathing, especially with extended exhales, directly influences vagal tone. When you lengthen your exhale beyond your inhale, you’re activating the parasympathetic brake. You’re literally telling your nervous system: There is no emergency. We have time. We can slow down.

Diaphragmatic breathing, where the belly rises on the inhale and falls on the exhale, massages the vagus nerve as it passes through the diaphragm. Gentle ujjayi breath, with its soft restriction in the throat, stimulates the vagus nerve’s laryngeal branch. Even simple breath ratios, inhale for four counts, exhale for six, can shift your entire physiological state in minutes.

This isn’t woo. This is measurable. Heart rate variability (HRV), the variation in time between heartbeats, is one of the most reliable measures of vagal tone and nervous system health. And breath practices directly improve HRV.

But here’s what no one tells you: at first, it might feel worse.

When I first started actually paying attention to my breath, I realized how much I’d been holding it. How shallow it had become. How much effort it took to breathe into my belly because I’d been armoring my torso for so long.

Relearning to breathe felt vulnerable. Exposed. Like taking off armor I didn’t know I was wearing.

And that’s okay. That’s part of it.

Every time you choose to deepen your breath on the mat, you’re choosing regulation. You’re rewiring the neural pathways that determine how your body responds to stress. But you’re also choosing to feel. And sometimes feeling is the hardest part.

2. Movement Quality

It’s not just that you move, it’s how you move.

Fast, aggressive movement can trigger sympathetic activation. I learned this the hard way. For years, I thought I needed intense, sweaty, push-yourself-to-the-edge yoga. I thought that’s what “real” practice looked like.

But my nervous system was already maxed out. I didn’t need more activation. I needed permission to slow down.

Slow, mindful movement, especially gentle spinal motion, supports vagal signaling. The vagus nerve loves predictability, rhythm, and non-threatening motion.

Cat-cow, moving with the breath. Gentle twists. Forward folds that create a sense of being held, protected. Restorative poses held long enough for the body to actually believe it’s safe to let go.

This is why yin yoga works. Why restorative practices aren’t “lazy.” Why, sometimes, the most healing thing you can do is move slower, not faster.

And I’m going to be real with you this was hard for me to accept. Because in a culture obsessed with “crushing it” and “no pain, no gain,” slowing down felt like failure.

But it’s not. It’s wisdom.

In your next practice, ask yourself: Am I forcing or allowing? Am I pushing my body into shapes, or am I inviting it to arrive?

The vagus nerve responds to invitation, not demand. And if you’ve spent your whole life being demanded of, this might feel revolutionary. Or terrifying. Or both.

3. Sound and Vibration

The vagus nerve innervates your throat and vocal cords. When you hum, chant, or tone, you’re creating vibration that directly stimulates the nerve.

This is why om isn’t just tradition, it’s technology. The vibration of sound moving through your throat, your chest, your skull creates a gentle massage of the vagal pathways.

But here’s what I want you to know: if making sound in yoga class makes you uncomfortable, you’re not alone.

For years, I’d mouth the om silently. I couldn’t let it sound out. It felt too vulnerable, too visible, too much.

And then one day, in camel pose ustrasana something broke open.

I was in a regular class. Nothing special about the day. The teacher cued us into camel, and I dropped my head back, opened my throat, let my heart lift toward the ceiling. And suddenly, without warning, I was sobbing.

Not pretty crying. Ugly, gut-wrenching sobs that came from somewhere I didn’t even know existed.

I held the pose and cried. I came out of the pose and kept crying. I rolled up my mat, got in my car, and cried for the entire forty-five-minute drive home. When I got there, I went straight to bed. I didn’t eat. I didn’t talk to anyone. I just crawled under the covers and let whatever had broken open finish breaking.

I didn’t understand it then. I just knew something had shifted in my chest, in my throat, in the place where I’d been holding everything together for so long.

Now I know: it was my heart chakra, anahata, meeting my throat chakra, vishuddha. It was years of unsaid words, swallowed grief, and silenced truth, finally finding a way out. It was my vagus nerve, running through both those centers, saying it’s safe now. You can let go.

The throat holds what the heart can’t carry alone.

And sometimes, opening the chest means finally giving voice to what’s been locked inside.

In a culture that often teaches us, especially women, especially trauma survivors, to keep quiet, to swallow our words, to make ourselves small, the practice of intentional vocalization is both physiological and political.

Your voice matters. Your vagus nerve knows this.

And if you’re not there yet, if chanting still feels like too much, that’s okay. Humming in the car works too. Singing in the shower. Laughing with friends. Speaking your truth out loud when it feels safe to do so.

All of it supports vagal function. All of it is practice.

But know this: when the opening comes, it might not be gentle. It might not be convenient. It might happen in the middle of a Tuesday evening class, and you might have to cry all the way home.

And that’s okay too. That’s not a breakdown. That’s a breakthrough.

4. Stillness and Interoception

This might be the most challenging pathway. And the most essential.

Interoception is your ability to sense what’s happening inside your body to feel hunger, thirst, the need to use the bathroom, the flutter of anxiety, the warmth of contentment. It’s internal awareness, and it’s the foundation of self-regulation.

Many of us have learned to override these signals. To ignore fatigue. To push through pain. To disconnect from sensation because feeling was too overwhelming, too dangerous, too much.

I used to wear my ability to “power through” like a badge of honor. I could work all day without eating. I could ignore when my body said rest. I thought that made me strong.

It didn’t. It made me disconnected.

Practices like savasana, yoga nidra, body scans, and seated meditation rebuild interoceptive capacity. They teach you to feel again slowly, safely, in doses your nervous system can handle.

The vagus nerve needs this feedback. It needs to know what’s happening in your body so it can respond appropriately. When you lie in savasana and actually feel the weight of your bones on the earth, the rise and fall of your breath, the settling of your heartbeat you’re giving your vagus nerve the information it needs to do its job.

But I’m not going to lie to you: this part is hard.

Because when you start actually feeling your body again, you feel everything. Not just the good stuff. The grief you’ve been carrying. The anger you’ve been swallowing. The fear you’ve been running from.

I remember the first time I felt safe enough to completely let go in child’s pose (balasana).

I’d been in the pose a thousand times before. But this time was different. This time, I melted into my mat. Not metaphorically. Literally. My body just... released. Every muscle, every held breath, every piece of armor I’d been carrying dissolved into the floor.

And then this sound came out of me.

A huge, audible sigh. So deep, so loud, I couldn’t believe it came from my body. It shocked me this involuntary release that seemed to come from my bones, from some place I didn’t even know existed.

That’s what happens when the vagus nerve finally gets permission to exhale. When the parasympathetic system kicks in, and your body remembers:

Oh. This is what letting go sounds like.

After that sigh, I couldn’t get up.

Not because I was physically unable to. But because my nervous system was finally, finally getting the message: You’re safe. You can rest.

When the teacher cued us to come up, it was all I could do to lift myself. My arms felt like they weighed a hundred pounds. My head was so heavy. It took everything I had to press into my hands and sit back up.

And you know what? That was one of the most healing moments of my life.

Because for the first time in longer than I could remember, my body believed it was safe enough to fully rest. To let go. To stop bracing for impact. To release whatever I’d been holding so tightly that even my breath had become small.

That’s what happens when you rebuild interoceptive capacity. You don’t just think about resting. You actually let your body do it.

And that’s terrifying. Because when you start actually feeling your body again, you realize how long you’ve been running. How much you’ve been holding. How tired you actually are.

But here’s the truth: the only way through is through. And your body has been waiting for you to come back.

After your next savasana, before you rush to roll up your mat, ask:

• What shifted?

• Can you feel the hum of your nervous system settling?

• What do you notice now that you didn’t notice before?

And if the answer is “nothing yet,” that’s okay too. This is practice. Not performance.

But maybe one day, you’ll melt into your mat the way I did. Maybe you’ll hear that sound come out of you, the one you didn’t know you were holding. And it will take everything you have to lift yourself back up.

And you’ll know, oh. This is what safety feels like.

On the Mat: A Different Way of Practicing

Understanding the vagus nerve changed how I practice. Not what I do but why, and how I pay attention.

I used to think the poses were the point. That if I could just get into the “perfect” expression of a posture, I’d somehow arrive at peace.

But the poses aren’t the point. The regulation is the point. The poses are just the vehicle.

I started noticing that the transitions mattered as much as the shapes, the moments between, where I had the chance to notice if I was holding my breath, bracing, disconnecting. Where I could catch myself and soften. Where I could choose differently.

I realized that modifications weren’t failures; they were wisdom. That choosing child’s pose in the middle of a vigorous flow wasn’t weakness. It was my vagus nerve asking for what it needed. And me finally knowing how to listen.

I understood that the “yoga high” I used to chase that floaty, blissed-out feeling could actually be dissociation if I wasn’t careful. That true regulation isn’t about escaping my body. It’s about being so present in my body that I can feel both the hard things and the good things without needing to run.

I started practicing with questions instead of demands:

• What does my nervous system need right now, activation or settling?

• Am I breathing, or just holding shapes?

• Can I feel my feet? My sit bones? My connection to the ground?

• Am I practicing on my body, or with my body?

This is advanced practice. Not because it’s complicated, but because it requires you to be honest. To feel. To stop performing yoga and start inhabiting it.

And some days, I still get it wrong. Some days I push when I should rest. Some days I disconnect when I meant to be present. Some days, my nervous system is too activated to settle, and I leave the mat feeling more frustrated than when I arrived.

This isn’t a cure. It’s a practice. And practice means showing up imperfectly, again and again, and trusting that something is shifting even when you can’t see it yet.

The Deeper Truth

Here’s what I want you to understand: your yoga practice has been healing your vagus nerve, whether you knew it or not. Every slow breath, every mindful movement, every moment of stillness, you’ve been sending signals of safety through that long, wandering nerve. You’ve been teaching your body that it’s allowed to rest, allowed to feel, allowed to come home.

But now that you know? Now that you understand what’s happening beneath the surface?

You can practice with even more intention. You can recognize the moments when your nervous system is reaching for regulation, and you can meet it there. You can stop judging yourself for needing restorative poses or longer savasanas. You can honor the days when your practice needs to be gentle, because you understand you’re not being lazy you’re building vagal tone. You’re healing the very infrastructure of your capacity to be present.

The vagus nerve is not separate from your spiritual practice. It is your spiritual practice made manifest in tissue and nerve and electrical impulse. It’s the physical pathway through which grace moves. The biological mechanism through which you learn to trust life again.

This is the gift of embodied practice. We don’t transcend the body to find peace. We come deeper into the body, listening to its ancient wisdom, following its maps back to ourselves.

And I’m not going to tell you it’s easy. I’m not going to promise that understanding this will make everything better overnight.

But I will tell you this: it’s possible. Regulation is possible. Feeling safe in your own body is possible. Coming home to yourself is possible.

It just takes practice. And patience. And the willingness to meet yourself exactly where you are, even when where you are feels impossibly far from where you want to be.

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Over the next week, notice:

• When does your body feel safe enough to truly rest?

• What situations, people, or environments make you hold your breath?

• Where does your practice meet your life? Can you bring the same quality of attention you have on your mat into your daily moments?

• What happens when you ask your body what it needs and then actually listen?

Your mat is not separate from your life. Your practice is not separate from your healing. And your vagus nerve, that long, wandering prayer strand running through the center of you, has been waiting for you to remember:

You are allowed to rest.
You are allowed to feel.
You are allowed to come home.

Even if you don’t believe it yet. Even if it feels impossible. Even if every part of you is screaming that it’s not safe.

Your body is trying to tell you something. And maybe, just maybe, it’s time to listen.

Now, take a breath. A real one. And notice what happens.

And if you just realized you’ve been holding your breath throughout this article... well, that’s information, too.

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