On the days yoga doesn’t save me: because yoga was never meant to be a quick fix.

Let me be honest.

Lately, I have been thinking a lot about the way we speak about healing.

Everywhere I look, there seems to be this quiet promise that if we breathe deeply enough, move slowly enough, meditate consistently enough, we will eventually arrive at some permanent state of peace. As if healing is a destination. As if yoga can smooth out the sharp edges of being human. I have found even myself promissing this to my students, and maybe that is what I once hoped for too.

I remember when I first began practicing, I carried this secret expectation that yoga would fix me, that yoga will repair me, will give me the solutions. I thought it would make me calmer, softer, less affected by life. All I wanted was relief more than awareness, I wanted to escape more than to be present.

Looking inwards was extremely uncomfortable…so much so, that I remember my first Savasana as it was yestaday. I felt so moved by that stillness that I needed to run away. And so I did….I could not manage the stillness.

I have always said that yoga finds you whenever is your time. And my time arrived and I kept showing up. Over time, the practice also started revealing something entirely different to me.

My practice was never asking me to escape myself, my practice was actually asking me to meet myself. When I finally understood that concept, everything came much clearer.

Keep showing up.

There are days when I sit on my mat and feel absolutely nothing spiritual at all.

Some mornings my mind is loud before I even open my eyes. Some evenings I arrive to practice carrying exhaustion in my body and sadness I cannot explain. Sometimes I spend an entire class distracted by my own thoughts, unable to land fully in the present moment no matter how many times I return to my breath.

And to be honest, years ago, I would have seen this as failure, but now I know this is actually what the practice is all about.

Yoga is a bit like life. Not everything is going to be about the beautiful moments, or the peaceful ones. And actually if you keep showing up, the willingness to remain there honestly, without trying to turn yourself into someone more enlightened than you truly are, will just naturally apear.

I think we have romanticized yoga into something too polished. Something visually pleasing. Flexible bodies, serene expressions, beautiful outfits, perfect routines performed under soft morning light. But the most transformative moments I have experienced through yoga have never looked beautiful from the outside, actually quite the oposite.

My best practices have been not even wearing yoga clothes, but my pijamas. Not even been in my mat, but being able to hold myself in the chaos. And they actually looked like discomfort, like restlessness.

I learned the hard way, but I finally discovered that sitting in silence long enough to hear the parts of myself I spend most of my life trying to outrun, is actually what yoga is all about.

Yoga has confronted me more that it has comforted me.

Yoga teaches me lessons everyday. It has shown me how disconnected I can become from my own body when life feels overwhelming. How quickly I search for distractions instead of stillness. How often I confuse self-awareness with self-improvement, as though my existence always needs to be optimized or fixed. And this is maybe the reason why I no longer believe in quick solutions, for sure not in this so called wellness path or the healing path.

Because some things and some situations cannot be breathed away in a single class, for sure wounds do not dissolve after one meditation and seasons of life ask us to sit in uncertainty much longer than we would like.

What yoga has given me is not an escape from those moments, but a way to stay with myself inside them, a powerfull way to witness my life instead of abandoning myself every time things become uncomfortable.

Creating spaces for real stories.

I think that is also why I care so deeply now about creating spaces for real stories. And I am not talking about spaces where people feel pressured to appear healed or endlessly positive or where spirituality becomes another performance. I am talking about spaces where people can arrive exactly as they are: messy, confused, grieving, growing. Actually as a true human.

Because the older I get, the more I realize that healing is rarely graceful while it is happening. Most of the time it feels invisible, very slow, extremely repetitive and quietly ordinary.

And you might be asking, but how? I have seen it, this so called healing looks like showing up for yourself on days when you do not feel transformed, or continuing to practice even when your mind is restless and your heart feels heavy, learning that presence is not something you achieve once, but something you choose again and again in very small way.

A place where I become honest.

And actually this is what yoga has become for me, not a place where I go to become perfect, but a place where I go to become honest. An actual place where I stop trying to escape my own life long enough to actually inhabit it.

And honestly, some days that feels unbearable to sit with yourself without distractions or even to hear your own thoughts clearly, or to notice the ache beneath the constant movement of everyday life.

Listen to this, there is also something deeply sacred hidden there, because when I stop trying to perform wellness, I can finally begin to experience something real, not perfection, neither enlightment, but JUST PRESENCE.

Just the quiet decision to remain with myself exactly as I am that day, and lately, that feels far more meaningful to me than any promise of becoming someone else.

So I invite you to practice presence and honesty. Presence in each of the moments or activities of your day, and honesty on your words, thoughts and actions.

Yoga in the journey of the self, through the self, to the self

Bhagavad Gita