The Yoga We Need Now

I remember waking up one morning in spring 2022 with a thought that seemed to arise on its own:

“I can’t keep teaching people five ways to do Triangle pose.”

For someone who had spent more than two decades exploring the richness of alignment-based asana and who loved the refinement and depth of that practice, this was surprising and slightly destabilizing.

In retrospect, it wasn’t really the asana I was tired of. It was that the situation in the world felt so urgent, and so in need of the qualities that yoga can foster. In the big picture of a planet in crisis, the details of alignment seemed trivial by comparison. I mean, who cares about the placement of the back heel in Triangle pose when the world is on fire?

It’s not trivial, of course. The healing our world so urgently needs begins with each of us, and the body is a powerful starting point. The power of the hatha yoga tradition lies in its vision of the human being as a microcosm of the universe. In that relationship lies the possibility of living into the truth of our essential oneness.

But as yoga has grown into a billion-dollar industry, it has all too often come to echo the values of Western fitness culture. In this context, yoga can become another form of hyper-individualized self-care, reinforcing the very sense of separation it’s designed to soften.

Alignment work isn't trivial in principle. It awakens consciousness in the body, deepens our sensitivity, and opens us to the intelligence of life moving through us. But refinement alone doesn't necessarily expand our awareness or open our eyes to the truth of our underlying oneness. Adjusting the way the skin of your inner ankle moves in Triangle pose doesn’t, by itself, help you recognize your interconnection with all of life.

Yoga philosophy expands and deepens the experience of physical practice. But even a profound inner transformation doesn't necessarily lead us to engage with the world and respond to its suffering.

A few weeks after I woke up with that thought, I discovered Joanna Macy’s Work That Reconnects—a form of experiential group work designed to restore our motivation and inspiration to act on behalf of life. This was the bridge I had been searching for, a way to bring the inner transformation and deepest understandings of yoga to bear on living through, and responding to, the uncertainty of our time. 

Joanna has said:

We are our world knowing itself. We can relinquish our separateness. We can come home again—and participate in our world in a richer, more responsible, and poignantly beautiful way than before.

As I have shared this work with students and colleagues over the past four years, I’ve been astounded by how deeply it resonates with the yoga communities I’m part of.

To me, it offers a missing link, a way to shift our practice so that it truly and concretely benefits all beings.

One of the most helpful ways to understand how yoga contributes to this larger shift is through Joanna’s framing of the Great Turning: the shift underway toward a regenerative, life-sustaining, and just society. It encompasses the many ways people around the world are working toward a sustainable future for life on Earth. The Great Turning is happening alongside the collapse of our systems—a new world is emerging even as an old one is dying.

To be a conscious, compassionate person alive right now requires us to be both birth doulas and hospice workers.

I believe the most critical spiritual evolution of our time is the shift in consciousness from separateness to belonging. Once we begin to recognize the truth of our fundamental interconnectedness with all of life, new possibilities emerge for how we live on this planet and how we treat each other.

To me, this is one of the most important contributions yoga can make, and it’s become the cornerstone of my work: fostering the recognition that we are part of a living web of connection.

This shift naturally awakens our compassion. And it offers us something else, too—the strength and clarity that come from knowing we belong to a living Earth, one that holds intelligence beyond our understanding and self-healing powers we can learn to draw on within ourselves.

This is the practice we need now. Not endless ways to refine a pose, but a path to remembering who we truly are.

I'm heading to Kripalu next month, and I'd love for you to join me. Rise Up, Rooted is a four-day retreat weaving heart-centered yoga and the Work That Reconnects—a nourishing long weekend immersed in the beauty of the Berkshires as autumn reaches its peak. Learn more and register here.