The Royal Road

When I started yoga in my twenties, I could "do" all the poses. With a naturally flexible body and a background in dance and gymnastics, even some of the most advanced asanas came easily to me.

Yet despite my physical abilities, my inner dialogue was anything but yogic. Long-standing patterns of perfectionism and self-judgment dominated my mental chatter. It wasn't until I learned about yoga's deeper vision of the human being that this began to shift.

The nondual philosophies of yoga view each of us as expressions of a singular, unified, and divine consciousness.

While all paths of yoga recognize an essence within each person that is fundamentally good and noble, it’s only the nondual traditions that see the entirety of who we are, including our bodies and minds, as sacred.

The Sanskrit word raja means “king” or “royal.” Though Raja yoga is commonly associated today with the path outlined in Patanjali's Yoga Sutras, the term originally referred to the state of yoga itself, as well as all practices leading toward it.

I’ve always loved this vision of yoga as a royal road toward reclaiming our innate goodness and nobility, a path of affirming and honoring the majesty of the human spirit through the form of the body.

This perspective is both timeless and startlingly novel—even subversive—within our consumer culture that profits from our feeling inadequate and incomplete.

When we carry this inner posture onto our mats, our practice is elevated. Rather than reinforcing limiting or even harmful ways that we might view ourselves, we begin to foster an attitude of reverence - toward ourselves and others.

Yoga, then, stops being another arena for falling short of self-imposed expectations. It becomes a practice of radical self-acceptance, a way of coming home to ourselves.

This shift toward yoga as a path of self-honoring transformed my relationship with myself - and later became central to my teaching. Yoga's most profound gift isn’t physical flexibility or stress relief - it’s a complete reorientation: a return to our inherent dignity and, by extension, a deep honoring of the dignity of all beings.