I grew up believing that safety was something you earned through performance—through being indispensable, through making yourself small enough to not be a burden, through anticipating the needs of everyone around you so you could keep the storm at bay. I was the one quietly carrying buckets of water, plugging holes in what felt like a sinking ship. And I thought this kept me safe.
That was my first education in what it meant to be in a body: that my body was a problem to manage, a liability to control, a vessel for other people’s needs. My own needs were unimaginable luxuries.
When I first walked into a yoga class, I was a teenager who was drowning in trauma and suicidality. I went because I had learned to please people. So, when a friend invited me, when she was scared to leave me alone, I went along. I didn’t know what yoga was. I certainly didn’t expect it to change anything.
In that quiet room, for the first time, someone asked me to listen to my body. She didn’t suggest I control it. I was asked to listen to it. Be with it. Not to shame it. Not to escape it. To listen and feel with it.
I cried uncontrollably on the mat. A wave frozen, begging to crash. After class, she invited us to stay for tea. She didn’t ask for my story. She offered me tea and after a while, she asked a single question: “Will you come again tomorrow?”
For months, that was the bargain—one more day.
That teacher, through her gentle, subtle, steadfast holding of space, secretly gifted me my first Yoga Teacher Training. Not to make me a teacher, but to give me a space, a community, and language for my own healing.
Back then, I thought the safety was in her. Or in the room. I didn’t yet know it could be built within me.
What Yoga Actually Is
Here is what I have learned in the decades since:
Yoga is not about the poses. It never was.
The poses are a tool, one of many. They are not the point. The point is the experience. It is being with the resistance. The point is the relationship you build with yourself through the practice.
Yoga was never about how long you can hold a pose, or whether you can push through your fears, or if your forward fold touches the floor. No one cares. No one should care. And if a yoga teacher or a yoga culture has ever made you feel like that is what matters, they missed the point entirely.
Yoga is a toolbox. A collection of practices and ways of being that help us navigate the human experience. It includes movement, yes. But it also includes breath, attention, stillness, reflection, and the capacity to be with what is. It includes the hard stuff: the discomfort, the resistance, the parts of ourselves we would rather avoid. And it includes the simpler things: the breath, the quiet, the permission to be exactly where we are.
Somewhere along the way, we got confused. We started believing that yoga was about flexibility. About aesthetics. About achieving something. We turned a profound, ancient, multifaceted practice into a performance… something we could win at, or lose at.
That is not yoga. That is just another way of leaving ourselves.
A Story About What Happens When We Remember
Years ago, I worked with a student who was using yoga to control her body. She had an eating disorder, and the yoga mat had become another site of punishment and self-abandonment. Another place where she tried to bend her body into submission, to silence the voice that told her she was wrong, broken, not enough.
We worked together for months. Together, we worked on self-compassion and listening to her body’s communication. We worked slowly, gently, always with options, choices, and invitations—never prescriptions. I asked her to notice what she was feeling, not to push through it. We worked on her giving herself permission to pause, stop, to rest, to leave the practices entirely.
And then one day, something shifted.
We were checking in after a practice with asana and meditation, and reflecting on self-compassion. And then, I saw her sit back into the wall behind her. Her body softened. Then, her breath slowed its pace. Her face changed.
She looked at me with tears in her eyes and said, “I think my body isn’t my enemy. I think my body is communicating my needs to me. But I haven’t been listening. I’ve judged it, shamed it, controlled it.” For the first time, she saw it all differently.
In that moment, she wasn’t doing a pose. But she was doing yoga!
She was experiencing the union that yoga leads us towards. The reclamation of her relationship with herself. The eating disorder voice had been interpreting her body’s messages as something to fear, something to control. But what was really happening was simpler and more profound: her body was communicating her needs. And for the first time, she could hear it.
It was like watching someone come home to themselves.
That is what yoga is for.
Not to make you more flexible. Or to make you more calm and zen all the time. Not to give you a perfect body or a perfect life.
But to help you come home to yourself. To help you hear what your body, your mind, and your heart are trying to tell you. In a way that helps you live a life you love, even when it is hard. To help you be with the parts of life that can really freaking suck.
And in this case, continuing to lean into this part of yoga helped her process the shame she felt. Through yoga, she continued to develop her self-compassion, to re-establish her ability to listen to her body, and care for the needs it was communicating.
The Invitation
So what is Yoga? It’s union.
Our experiences in life can leave us with all these fragmented parts of ourselves, and Yoga is the toolbox for our journey back to wholeness.
In this way, Yoga is for everyone. Every body. Every moment of life. And it doesn’t take itself too seriously. It is not precious. Definitely not exclusive. It doesn’t require a mat, or expensive clothing, or a particular body shape.
And it does ask us for our curiosity. Our willingness to be with our experiences. All while offering support for how freaking hard that can be. It asks us to show up just as we are and dedicate ourselves to the practice of wholeness.
So, what’s next?
For that answer, let’s turn to the first yoga sutra. “Atha yoga anushasanam,” which translates to “Now, the instruction of yoga begins.”
This signifies that now, or this auspicious moment, is the time. A presence in the current moment with a readiness to learn. That Yoga is about union, integration, and seeing ourselves and the world around us with a clear, calm mind. And that we do this through instruction, self-responsibility, and leaning into the ancient wisdom of the teachings.
And the beauty is… You don’t need to know the whole path yet. You can start with the part that calls to you. That can look like starting with one question, one breath, one moment of listening to yourself.
Because Yoga isn’t something you do, it’s something you experience. And the point isn’t the pose. The point is the union—the reconnection to yourself, to your body, to your life.