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There are moments when life moves so fast
your mind can’t keep up with what’s happening.
Moments you never saw coming,
that split your life into a before and after,
that knock you out of your center.
Without noticing, you’re doing everything you can not to fall apart too,
trying to stay steady
so you don’t collapse onto anyone else.
We’ve all been there.
In the unexpected news.
In the phone call that changes the day.
In the situation that breaks your internal rhythm.
In the kind of pain that doesn’t fit anywhere.
Sometimes it’s something outside of you,
and sometimes it’s something happening inside.
But in both cases, a quiet question appears:
How do I hold myself
when the world is moving faster than I can?
The first thing I learned is that the body always arrives first.
Before the mind understands,
the body already knows.
That pit in your stomach,
the short breath,
the feeling that the ground is slipping,
the electricity in your arms,
the tremble starting in your fingers.
Neuroscience explains this:
when something unexpected, painful, or intense happens,
the sympathetic nervous system fires in milliseconds.
It’s a built-in protection.
Stephen Porges, creator of Polyvagal Theory, puts it simply:
“The nervous system seeks safety before logic.”
First the body asks:
Am I safe?
Only then can it ask:
What’s happening?
That’s why when life shakes you,
you can’t think clearly.
It’s not that you don’t want to.
Biologically, you can’t.
Some things don’t give you time to prepare.
They just happen.
They hit.
They shift everything.
And there you are,
trying to hold yourself together
without collapsing with everything that’s falling around you.
Trying not to lose yourself in the process.
I learned this the hard way a year and a half ago,
when I moved out of my parents’ home for the first time.
That’s when life becomes real—
when the comfort of someone else fixing things for you
is suddenly gone.
It happened to me while living in Playa del Carmen,
far from my family,
when I went through what felt like my first real crisis.
And in that unexpected emptiness,
I realized something no one teaches you:
Sometimes you have to hold yourself.
There are seasons where
no one else can do that work for you.
Because we can accompany,
support,
hold,
embrace,
be present for someone…
But only if we don’t abandon ourselves first.
Mark Nepo writes in The Book of Awakening:
“You cannot avoid being transformed by what touches your heart.”
Something shifts.
You don’t walk out the same—
but you walk out more awake,
more attuned,
more present in your own life.
And that’s where yoga makes sense to me—
not just as a practice,
but as a refuge.
A place where you learn to regulate,
to breathe through the chaos,
to hold yourself without breaking.
It’s not just physical practice,
but a quiet training for the moments that don’t ask permission:
the moments where you need to anchor your breath
and keep yourself from collapsing inward.
B.K.S. Iyengar wrote in Light on Life:
“The body is the temple of the spirit.”
But he also said something deeper:
“Through the body, we explore our fragility.”
In a difficult posture, the body wants to run.
The mind wants to escape.
But you stay.
You breathe into the discomfort.
You practice trusting your inner support.
This is what applied neurobiology looks like.
When you breathe deeply in a demanding posture or moment,
you activate the parasympathetic system—
the same one that regulates fear,
anxiety,
reactivity,
shaking,
and overwhelm.
The breath doesn’t “calm” you.
It regulates you by physiology.
And sometimes life moves because something painful happens,
and other times because something beautiful does—
and beauty can be demanding too.
Recently,
the idea and reality of opening my studio
put me in that strange space between excitement and vertigo:
that place where your heart speeds up with desire
and your stomach tightens with the unknown.
A dream I’ve wanted for years
suddenly became real,
fast,
big,
loud.
And even though it was something good,
my nervous system didn’t know that.
To the body, “big” can feel a lot like “threatening”—
at least at first.
Your heart races.
Your mind asks a thousand questions.
Uncertainty shows up.
And suddenly you’re there,
trying to hold your dream
without losing yourself inside it.
Holding yourself also means this:
regulating the positive emotion that overwhelms,
finding stability inside what you do want,
breathing through a dream that’s finally unfolding,
making space for what you asked for.
Patanjali says:
“Sthira sukham asanam.”
Steadiness and ease.
Strength and surrender.
Effort and softness.
We practice it on the mat with postures.
We practice it in life with moments.
Because holding yourself does NOT mean:
– being strong all the time
– knowing what to do
– having clarity
– not feeling
– reacting perfectly
– controlling everything
Holding yourself means:
– not abandoning yourself
– not disappearing
– not losing your center
– regulating your emotions
– allowing yourself to feel
– staying with yourself
Neuroscience calls it self-regulation.
Yoga calls it tapas—the inner fire that sustains without burning.
Psychology calls it the window of tolerance.
Porges calls it inner safety.
Spirituality calls it presence.
All these languages
say the same thing:
You can hold yourself
even when life moves faster than you.
Holding yourself looks like:
– a hand on your chest
– one minute barefoot to come back to your body
– pausing before reacting
– crying to release tension
– asking for help
– writing what you feel
– saying “I need a moment”
– saying “I can’t do everything, but I can do this”
When life moves too fast,
slow yourself down.
Sometimes holding yourself
is not resisting the movement—
but lowering your own pace.
Letting the world go fast
while you walk slowly.
Breathing deeply.
Seeing yourself with compassion.
Honoring what you feel.
Being honest about what you need.
Eckhart Tolle says,
“The present moment is a refuge.”
And on the days when everything spins,
the refuge isn’t the future or the past—
it’s one single breath.
Holding yourself is care.
Holding yourself is love.
The most fascinating part is this:
your capacity to hold yourself isn’t fixed.
It’s neuroplasticity.
It’s training.
It’s presence practiced until it becomes truth.
Every conscious breath
reconfigures your biology.
Every pause you register
widens your window of tolerance.
Every return to yourself
strengthens the inner pathways that sustain you.
And if one moment can do that—
imagine a lifetime of them.
That’s where transformation begins.
The rest—your steadiness, your clarity, your calm—
is built quietly,
in every choice to return to yourself.
Because in the end,
that’s what holding yourself really is:
remembering you can always come back.
And each time you do,
something inside settles into place.
