Dear Reader: This is Me.

Dear Readers,

I don't have a letter this week. No creaking knees, no existential spirals, no questions about whether it's okay to skip Savasana. (It's not. We'll talk.) This week, I want to talk about me. Specifically, about yoga’s impact on my life.

Ten years ago, I found yoga in a treatment center. Not because I was looking for it. Not because I thought it would change my life, though it did. I did it because I felt alive while I was on my mat.

What I found on the mat, without knowing I was looking for it, was agency. Agency is the felt sense that you are an actor in your own life, not just a passenger.  Yoga practiced thoughtfully over time builds agency whether you're trying or not. You start to notice that when I breathe this way, my nervous system settles. When I move with intention, my mind follows. These small observations compound into something that looks a lot like a life you're actually living.

There was also the community. Showing up to the same room with the same people week after week does something to the nervous system that no amount of solo practice can replicate. It says: you belong somewhere. People are expecting you. That mattered more than I could have articulated at the time.

And the mind. A focused mind is a relief. Not because thinking is bad. My busy mind can be exhausting, and yoga gave me somewhere to land. Over and over.

 Now I'm beginning my second ten years, and I'll be honest: balance looks different now.

I have a daughter — still a little unbelievable in the best possible way. I have a business with two locations, a teacher training, a therapy practice, and a rekindled love of writing. I have a body with opinions. And I have relationships.  Real ones, tended ones, the kind that took time and practice to build.

There's something I've heard said about yoga: that one of the signs it's working is that your relationships improve. Not because yoga makes you nicer, exactly, but because it sharpens your sense of what actually nourishes you. You start to hone in on the relationships that serve your deepest self and quietly you organize your life around those.

 The tools haven't changed, but what I'm being asked to do with them has. The yoga that got me here is not the same yoga I need for what's next. You don't need a ladder once you're on the roof.

 One of the frameworks I return to again and again is called the Yajna model — adapted by Robert Birnberg from the Krishnamacharya/Desikachar lineage, and it asks a deceptively simple question: what is nourishing you?

 The model identifies seven sources of nourishment or seven relationships that feed us:

Ritual. Nature. Community. Family. Close Relationships. Service. A Teacher or Mentor.

Not a hierarchy. Not a checklist. Think of it as a table with seven legs, and the invitation to honestly look at which ones are holding weight  and which ones are wobbling.

 Here's what I've noticed about my own table lately.

Ritual has been my anchor. My practice has had to get quieter and more portable — a shorter sit, a few breaths before I pick up my phone in the morning, pranayama in the car before I walk into the studio. It's more humble than it used to be.

Nature has been surprisingly restorative. I didn't expect that. But there's something about a walk without a destination or just standing in the backyard long enough to hear birds, that my nervous system is absolutely hungry for right now.

Community has held steady — which is its own kind of miracle. The people who show up at Firefly continue to nourish me even when I'm the one ostensibly doing the teaching. Sometimes, especially then.

Family is the leg that has shifted the most. We finalized Maggie's adoption in this month, and I am still absorbing what it means to have a daughter. The weight on this leg has increased dramatically, and joyfully, and sometimes also at 2 a.m.

Close relationships are the ones I'm tending more carefully. The people who know the whole story. Those relationships require more intentionality than they used to, more scheduling, more showing up on purpose. But they're also where I feel most myself.

Service is interesting right now because it's everywhere — in the clinic, in classes, in this column — and I'm learning to let it nourish me rather than to deplete me. That's a practice in itself.

And a teacher or mentor. The longer I teach, the more I understand how much I still need someone further down the road. That never goes away. If anything, it gets more important.

 What I find most useful about the Yajna model is that it shifts the question from what's wrong with me to what am I being fed by, and is it enough? That's a therapeutic reframe in the truest sense. We move out of pathology and into solution. You'd be surprised how much shifts just from being asked: which of these is holding weight, and which one have you shifted attention away from? 

Your turn:

Look at the seven — ritual, nature, community, family, close relationships, service, and a teacher or mentor. Which one is holding the most weight in your life right now? And which one have you been quietly neglecting? I'd love to hear. Reply here, or come find me at the studio.

Your Y.T.

The Ask a Yoga Therapist column is for general informational and reflective purposes and is not a substitute for individualized care.