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There are days when something shifts without warning.
A message,
a conversation,
a piece of news,
a silence you didn’t expect…
and suddenly your body is not the same.
Your breath gets heavy,
your chest tightens,
your mind fills with stories
that sting,
that unsettle,
that scare you a little.
There are moments when one single thing—
big or small, but significant—
can knock everything inside you out of place.
Moments that pull you off center
and remind you that life sometimes moves
faster than you know how to hold yourself together.
And right there,
when something hits your heart hard,
when your inner world trembles,
when the emotional weight is heavier than your muscles,
practice becomes almost impossible.
Not because you don’t want to,
but because you know practice
will show you everything you’ve been trying not to feel.
The mat, unlike the world,
won’t let you distract yourself.
It won’t let you run.
It won’t let you pretend to be “fine.”
The mat reveals you.
It reflects you.
It confronts you.
And, quietly, it holds you.
On days like this, unrolling your mat
is an act of silent courage—
a simple, honest admission:
“I’m not okay… but I’m here.”
Because when something hits you deeply,
the mind wants to solve it all at once—
to rush,
to control,
to find answers fast.
Intense emotions activate entire neural networks.
They change your breath,
your posture,
your muscle tone,
your clarity.
The amygdala fires a warning
in under 100 milliseconds—
so fast
your conscious mind never even gets a say.
But the body…
the body moves slower.
It processes from a different vocabulary.
It feels long before it understands.
This is your biology
trying to protect you
the only way it knows how.
And that is where yoga steps in.
Not to minimize what happened.
Not to distract you from it.
Yoga steps in
to give you a place to feel
without falling apart.
A place where the body can process
what the mind cannot hold alone.
A place that reminds you that even in chaos,
there is a rhythm that still belongs to you.
Patanjali called it abhyasa—
the steady, gentle, human practice
you return to even when part of you
wants to disappear.
And he spoke of tapas,
the inner friction
that transforms
without forcing,
without breaking you,
without demanding instant results.
The Bhagavad Gita describes the same truth:
when Arjuna faces something larger than his heart can handle,
his body trembles,
his mind clouds,
his emotions freeze.
And still,
the teaching is not “feel ready,”
but:
breathe, and begin where you are.
This is what yoga does
when something shakes you deeply:
it brings you back to the present,
to the one inhalation you can control,
to a presence that doesn’t require you to heal today—
only to hold yourself today.
Some practices feel beautiful.
And some practices simply keep you standing.
Both count.
Because that day when something hurt you,
confused you,
shook your ground,
broke a piece of your heart—
and you still sat down to breathe,
to move,
to stay…
That day, you practiced.
That day, you grew.
Neuroscience explains why:
when you move slowly,
you activate internal regulation systems;
when you breathe deeply,
the vagus nerve sends safety signals to the brain;
when you connect with sensation,
you integrate what happened,
what scared you,
what impacted you.
The body knows how to return
long before the mind does.
It just needs you
to walk with it,
to not abandon it,
to allow it to feel
without punishing it for feeling too much.
In chaotic moments,
yoga doesn’t ask for strength.
It asks for honesty.
For presence.
For one real inhalation.
And from there,
things begin to settle.
Not all at once,
but with sincerity.
One breath
becomes two.
One movement
becomes space.
One simple posture
becomes a moment of clarity.
And slowly—almost secretly—
you come back to yourself.
Not because you’ve “moved on.”
Not because you understand everything now.
Not because the pain is gone.
But because you chose
not to disappear from yourself.
Yoga on difficult days
doesn’t fix your life.
But it gives you just enough center
to keep living it.
It reminds you that strength
is not the absence of feeling,
but the willingness to feel
and stay.
That even when something breaks your rhythm,
your breath is still there,
waiting for you.
That even when you can’t carry yourself,
your practice can carry you
until you find your ground again.
And that part of you—
the one you return to,
the one you nurture,
the one you practice coming home to—
becomes your inner shelter.
The place you return to
when everything outside
falls out of place.
Today was one of those days for me.
I stepped onto my mat with my heart in my throat,
cried through most of my practice,
and still, I breathed.
And I understood—again—
that yoga never asks me to be okay.
It only asks me
not to abandon myself.
