Beyond the Outer Layers of the Mind

How often do you practice yoga these days? This question caught me off guard. 

I remember the days when #yogaeverydamnday was my ethos. Back then, yoga was a purely physical practice. If I didn’t break a sweat, I felt like the class didn’t count.

Ten years after becoming a certified yoga teacher, my view of yoga has evolved dramatically. These days, I am wildly grateful for the practice that allows me to purify the mind and has led me to feeling more moments of spontaneous joy and delight.

I first discovered yoga when I was managing a high volume retail store, spending most of my days in a mall. A regional manager mentioned she liked yoga more than running, and since running had always been one of my favorite workouts, I was curious. When I noticed a few yoga classes offered at the Equinox inside the mall, I finally decided to give it a try. 

I was hooked the moment I tried it. Lots of awkward and challenging postures with a nap at the very end! The more challenging the yoga postures felt, the more I appreciated the class. Savasana, on the other hand, always felt like a challenge and I generally wanted to skip out on those last moments of stillness. My mind would race with all of the emails I had to follow up on, all the operational tasks I needed to make sure I didn’t forget to do, and especially the challenging conversations I was dreading. 

It wasn’t until 4 years later, during my teacher training in Rishikesh, India, that something shifted. I don’t know if it was the fact that I walked away from my corporate retail work and no longer worried about sending emails, but I have a hunch it had more to do with the daily 30 min pranayama (yogic breathwork) practice and being so close to the Ganga river. 

I have a vivid memory of being in savasana after my favorite teacher, Surinder Singh’s, class and feeling something I don’t remember having felt prior to that moment. Words wouldn’t do that feeling justice, but I believe bliss comes close. It was like a homecoming. A wellspring of love. 

In the distance I could hear construction noise and every now and then, bird song, but savasana in his class was always without music and the silence in the room used to resonate deeply and nudge something awake from within. How was it possible that I wasn’t engaging in my usual reactivity to construction noise or the spiraling thoughts that come with most moments of silence?!

It felt like I was sensing something beyond my roles, beyond the identities I had been conditioned to perform. Something more essential.

Surinder used to love pointing out and cuing microadjustments that would require more inward awareness and when I was good about paying attention, it was truly delightful to sense the subtle currents of energy that allowed me to feel truly alive. How downward dog or even mountain pose could allow me to feel the spark of something more than my usual whirlwind in my mind was an enigma to me. 

And here is what yoga is to me these days. The enjoyment of finally interrupting the momentum of my narrative. I say finally because my goodness, my thoughts used to be annoyingly fearful and negative. They still can be pretty fearful, but at least now there is awareness and the intention to choose courage over fear. 

My most fundamental belief about yoga is from sutra 1.2 of Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras. “Yoga is the stilling of the revolutions of the mind.” Some people might prioritize the postures or asana the way I first did when I started my journey, but these days, to slow down the revolutions of the mind, I love cold plunges, breathwork, some yoga asana, cartwheeling, moments of awe, a really perfectly toasted buttery croissant dipped in a perfectly brewed cappuccino, and morning meditations with my community. Each of these activities help me slow down my thoughts and sense something that feels more like what I really am. They allow me to experience what some wisdom traditions refer to as our boundless nature, spacious awareness, inner radiance, or inner nobility. 

What I felt in that savasana in India, what some traditions call our true nature, is perhaps the same experience now being described through a different language. Within the context of contemporary science, I recently heard an MD and Harvard trained psychiatrist refer to it as a “divine state” beyond flow state. Researchers studying meditation, breathwork, and psychedelics often refer to this as the quieting of the Default Mode Network (DMN) in the brain. This DMN allows us to time travel and worry about the past or future, is responsible for self-referential narrative as well as the construction of our sense of self. A high activity in this region is linked to depression, anxiety, and over-rumination. When we start to journey inward, choose presence, become more embodied, we slow down that DMN and sense the reality beyond our constructed sense of self and can finally begin to feel fully alive.

But more important than naming the experience is how we begin to integrate it. 

How do I begin to integrate that feeling of connecting to something beyond my thoughts of who I think I am supposed to be? Of sensing the miraculous in the mundane moments in life?

Physical yoga helps at times, but I want to remember to choose to align to my true nature especially when life feels the most challenging. Breathing practices seem to be the most effective tool in real time to help regulate my nervous system, but I wonder about the next level yoga of just being able to be with what is, as it is. What allows me to be with things as they are is remembering my true nature is spacious and untroubled because it is the witness that can see all that arises and passes away.

Once we begin to still the revolutions of the mind, Patanjali then says in sutra 1.3, “Then, the seer abides in its own true nature.” I like the way Iyengar states it, “Then the Seer dwells in its own true splendor.” Maybe that is why that savasana moment in India all those years ago is still seared into my memory. One of my very first encounters with sensing my own true splendor. 

So when I’m asked how often I practice yoga these days, the answer is no longer measured in classes, but in how often I remember to return to my true nature.

And I’m curious about you.

When do you feel the most like yourself? 

What do you practice in order to help you sense your true nature?

What helps you return to that place?

And

What gets in the way of your practice?

Over time, I’ve come to see that it is not the experience of bliss that transforms us, but our willingness to continue returning, again and again.

One of the most supportive tools in that process has been creating space for self-INquiry and reflection.

If you feel curious about exploring this for yourself, I created the workbook below as a space to listen for what is asking to emerge.

Spring Equinox 2026.pdf

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