How Twenty Years of Practice Changed What I Thought Yoga Was

Yesterday, my son started talking to me while I was on my laptop, and I closed it. That’s the whole moment. I’m starting there because if you’d told me twenty years ago that closing a laptop counted as yoga, I would have thought you were being a little precious about it.

I started yoga about twenty years ago, and not for any noble reason. I’d had my daughters eighteen months apart, and my ex husband wanted me to “work out.” I picked yoga because it was the laziest option I could find. It was a class at the gym, and the teacher was Linda, Linda Rossy if my rusty memory has it right.

I’d already been meditating for a while, and meditation had given me moments of quiet that honestly shocked me, because I had no idea how loud it was in my head until it wasn’t. But I didn’t connect any of that to yoga. Yoga was the easy class at the gym.

I loved that first class. I went back the next day, and the day after that, and pretty much every day until someone stole my yoga mat out of my car. Good old Tacoma, Washington. I had never heard of Yoga Sutras at that point, and I wasn’t looking for enlightenment. I was a mom with two babies who had found something she liked.

I had no idea it would end up running through basically everything for the next twenty years. I practiced it, taught it, opened businesses around it, trained teachers, spent seven years leading international trainings, questioned it, walked away from parts of it, came back, and now I’m in a master’s program studying it from directions I didn’t know existed when I started.

For a long time I measured progress the way most of us do at first. Could I go deeper into the pose, was I stronger, could I do the thing I couldn’t do six months ago. Once I was teaching, the measuring sticks just changed. Certifications, trainings, students, studios. Being the person in the room who was supposed to know what she was doing.

I liked that. I liked being good at it, being able to do hard things with my body, knowing the language, walking into a room and leading it. I’m not going to pretend otherwise.

What nobody really warns you about is that once you’ve taught long enough, people start assuming you’ve got the part about being a person handled. You don’t. I’ve taught classes on equanimity and then gotten annoyed in the parking lot afterward. I can explain nonattachment to a room full of people and still really, really want something to go my way. For a lot of years I think I mixed up being good at yoga with yoga actually doing its work on me, and I’m not sure I could have told you the difference back then.

Plenty of things chipped away at what I thought I knew over the years. Teaching did, running studios did, training teachers did. But the real break came after I closed my yoga teacher academy in December of 2021.

By then I’d practiced for years, taught for years, helped other people through their own stuff, and had meditations that were spacious and loving and, I’ll just say it, mystical. Coming out of the pandemic, though, I couldn’t get a grip on the industry I’d known so well. I didn’t know up from down anymore in business or life.

So we closed.

For about a month afterward, I went what I can only call blind. Any light burned my eyes. I spent that month in my bedroom in Dana Point, in the rocking chair by the window with the curtains closed. My son was about two. I rocked him for hours and hours while he slept, there in the dark, listening to audiobooks. I started a water fast, and I prayed with every ounce of devotion I had.

And that year kept going. I’d been healthy my whole life, and suddenly I wasn’t. I developed vertigo. I couldn’t drive. I couldn’t do even the simplest yoga, which is a strange thing to admit after years of training other people to teach it. For close to eighteen months, I felt like a drunk college girl, all day, every day.

I was overwhelmed and angry and scared, and some days I just felt lost. I kept thinking, I have all these tools. I know what peace and strength feel like. I’ve been there. And here I was, unable to trust the floor to stay still, running the same old patterns I thought I’d worked through.

When I could get on my mat at all, my practice was child’s pose. I’d lie there with my forehead on the floor and cry. That was it. No flow, no sequence, nothing I would have called a practice in any of the trainings I’d led. It took me a long time to accept that it counted.

Somewhere in there I stopped thinking yoga had failed me. I think I’d been asking it to explain all of being human, and that’s too much to ask of any one thing. Psychology gave me words for things spiritual language never quite touched. My body showed me things I’d understood intellectually for years and still hadn’t changed. My relationships showed me what I couldn’t see on my own. Even learning more about yoga’s actual history shook some of what I’d been taught. I needed more than one way of looking, and that’s shaped almost everything I’ve worked on since.

My practice now would probably look kind of unimpressive if you watched it. Some days I meditate. Some days it’s yoga nidra, or I’m sitting with a dream from the night before and trying to figure out what it’s pointing at. Some days I want a hard practice and I want to sweat. Some days I’m teaching.

And a lot of days the practice is noticing I’m overstimulated before I blow past my limit, or noticing what my body does when I’m irritated. It’s paying attention to what I actually do after I have an insight, instead of just enjoying having had it. It’s catching myself performing or controlling or trying to prove something, which I still do.

There’s rarely incense, and I’m usually not sitting somewhere looking serene. Younger me would probably be a little disappointed. But closing the laptop when my son is talking to me feels like as much yoga as anything I do on the mat, and the longer I practice, the less I care where the mat ends.

I also still want the handstand. I like getting stronger. I get a little thrill when my body figures out something new, and I haven’t risen above that and don’t plan to try.

For years it felt like yoga people had to pick a team. It’s not about the poses. It’s spiritual. Modern yoga isn’t real yoga. It’s about the nervous system. It’s about consciousness. I don’t really buy any of those when they’re said like they’re the only answer.

I’ve sat in meditation and felt more love and spaciousness than I know how to describe, and then gone back out into the world and gotten irritated with people for being people. I believe the body is impermanent and I still care about being strong. Something can feel mystical to me and I’ll still want to know what a neuroscientist would say about it. All of that lives in me at the same time, and I’ve mostly stopped trying to sort it out.

Maybe for you it isn’t yoga. Maybe it’s the thing you were good at, the thing people came to you for, and at some point it stopped working the way it used to. Maybe your body quit cooperating with the plan, or you closed something you spent years building and woke up the next morning not sure who you were without it. Maybe you’ve had a stretch where everything you knew how to do felt useless, and all that was left was the most basic version of it. I don’t know what that looks like for you. For me, it looked like child’s pose.

Twenty years ago I wanted to know what yoga was. I thought I’d figured it out a few times. Now I’m pretty sure one answer was never going to cover it.

Keep going: What Is Sadhana? is where I would start, and When the Life That Fit You No Longer Fits picks up where this one leaves off. When you're ready to practice, choose a practice here.