Beyond Asana Blog

 We are like migrating birds,

The sadness of our departure

Is mitigated by

The joy of our reunion.

 - Author Unknown

We’ve all been there – that moment when you finally step onto your mat and realize that you haven’t truly inhabited your body for days.

Moving through life on autopilot - answering emails, getting things done, caring for others - takes its toll. Meanwhile, some essential part of you has been waiting quietly for your return. Only now, with this breath, do you notice how far you’ve drifted.

This is the “departure” the poem speaks of. It’s not dramatic or deliberate; it’s the subtle drifting that happens when life pulls you outward and you forget to draw yourself bac...

I have a well-meaning friend who knows a lot about yoga - yet rarely practices.

Recently, she tried to convince me that box breathing was superior to lengthening the exhalation for stress relief. Mind you, she’d barely tried either technique – she’d just read about them.

Here's what I wanted to tell her: knowing about resilience practices doesn't make you resilient. Reading about breath work doesn't calm your nervous system. Understanding the theory of grounding doesn't help when the ground shifts beneath your feet.

In times like these—when everything feels uncertain and the systems we've relied on are crumbling—we need more than concepts. We need embodied capacity. We need practices t...

You know that feeling when the ground beneath you shifts? When the identity you've worn like a second skin no longer fits? When the job, the relationship, or the version of yourself you've known dissolves, leaving you standing in the space between who you were and who you're becoming?

It can be disorienting, unsettling, sometimes terrifying.

Rilke wrote “every happiness is the child of a separation it did not think it could survive." What if these endings are actually the beginning of something you can't yet imagine?

There's a word for this in-between space: liminality. From the Latin limen, meaning "threshold." It's the transitional space where one way of being has ended but the next ...

What if the warrior you've been waiting for already lives inside you, waiting to be awakened?

It's Navaratri, the Hindu festival of nine nights devoted to the goddess. At its heart is Durga, the invincible warrior goddess who defeated the demon Mahishasura when even the gods could not.

She embodies the strength that cuts through fear and illusion to reveal your true power—the same ferocious love that dwells in each in of us.

Durga's name means the invincible. Picture her: draped in red, riding a lion (or tiger) with grace and fierce resolve, her eight arms wielding weapons gifted by the gods. She was created to restore harmony and stand unshaken in the midst of chaos. Her myth reminds ...

Back in 2020, La Presse journalist Ève Dumas described my teaching as slow, lasting, profound—and my personal favorite, almost anachronistic. 

In a world of swipes, scrolls, and instant everything, there's something beautifully rebellious about slowing down to dive deep.  

What could be more radical, in our age of acceleration, than practices that root us in presence? What could be more needed than spaces that allow us to recharge and remember what truly matters? 

If you've practiced with me, you've heard it again and again: one of yoga's greatest gifts is steadfastness—the willingness and wherewithal to keep showing up. Every breath, every class, every time you return to your mat or c...

What if I told you that every time you practice yoga, you're joined by thousands of invisible well-wishers? That you are accompanied by the subtle presence of every yogi who ever struggled with the same discipline, asked the same questions, and sought the same peace you're seeking right now?

Every breath you take on your mat has the power to connect you to an invisible network of support that spans centuries. The question isn't whether this lineage exists – it's whether you're ready to avail yourself of it.

Right now, we're in Pitru Paksha the Hindu fortnight (September 7-21 this year) dedicated to honoring the ancestors. This isn't just about lighting candles for departed relatives - i...

Humankind stands with its feet planted squarely on the earth, as in Tadasana (Mountain Pose), and its head in the sky.

- BKS Iyengar

Have you ever noticed how Mountain Pose can feel both utterly simple and impossibly complex? You're just standing there - yet something profound is happening.

In that moment of seeming stillness, you embody one of yoga's most transformative truths: the paradox at the heart of all practice.

Your feet stand firmly planted on the earth, grounding you in the finite—your body's sensations, your mind's fluctuations, your personal identity with its quirks and limitations. At the same time, your spine extends upward, aspiring toward what is mystical, boundless, ...

Sounds silly, right? The idea of grading performance in yoga so obviously contradicts the most fundamental reasons for practicing in the first place.

After all, yoga isn't about external validation or performance metrics—it's about something far more profound and authentic. Seth Godin captures this tension perfectly:

The prevailing system of the educational-industrial complex puts the fear of a ‘C’ in us. The entire point of twelve (or sixteen) years of our lives isn’t to learn anything, it’s to get an ‘A’…What if instead, we decided to opt in to a different path, the path of always learning?
 
Yoga embodies this revolutionary approach to learning. It's not just a destination—it's an ongo...

Oh, our dear minds.

Like butterflies, they flit and flutter — sometimes restless, sometimes weary — until they find a place to land.

In yoga, that landing can feel inward: settling into your breath, grounding in the body, or arriving into presence itself.

And yet, the inward journey is never only inward, and our experiences in yoga aren’t ever truly separate from our world.

Each breath has the power to usher us into the remembrance of our shared existence. Every sensation can return us to the web of gravity and ground. Each mindful movement can reunite us with the wider rhythms of Earth herself.

Landing inside yourself doesn’t have to mean retreating from the world; it can be a redis...

Oh, not to be separated, shut off from the starry dimension
By so thin a wall.
What is within us
If not intensified sky
Traversed with birds
And deep
With the winds of homecoming?

—Rainer Maria Rilke, Uncollected Poems, translated by Joanna Macy and Anita Barrows

It never ceases to amaze me how simply approaching yoga as a practice of homecoming can soften edges I didn't even know were holding me separate and small.

These invisible walls—woven from daily stresses, old patterns, and the weight of constant doing—seem to dissolve the moment we shift our perspective and turn inward.

Life has a way of narrowing our sense of self. The demands of work, relationships, and survival can gradually clo...