A Path

As I’ve been working on the planning and curriculum of our regular classes and some of the special things happening in 2026, I’ve been thinking a lot about what having a yoga practice means to me. We all already have practices that shape our days and, therefore, our lives. This piece is about how I understand a yoga practice fits into our bigger whole-of-life patterns.

A practice is a ritualized commitment to personal health and longevity. Through a combination of regular, self-directed, and communal practice, we learn how to organize our time, attention, and energy—finding freedom through structure, and clarity through consistency. Over time, the body’s intelligence reshapes both our physiology and psychology.

A practice is a ceremonious re-contracting of the body’s literal and astral relationships between the angles and arrangements that hold our center, allow movement, and make adaptation possible. We literally explore our circumference and refine, define, and organize it. We eventually forge into areas we haven't been, taking the load off the places that have been overused. Eventually, reestablishing the center of our twelve synovial joints from where we articulate upward.

In a culture that moralizes and evaluates bodies, a practice visits objectivity upon us, not as another way of objectifying, but as a route to de-internalizing culture. Yes, it is the reclaiming of subjectivity, but not for subjectivity's sake. Rather, subjectivity serves to build a stable container. There is a paradox to practice. When climbing mountains, you must not be only about getting to the top. You must be able to walk for the sake of walking, climb for the sake of climbing. Because ultimately, you don’t climb a mountain to be good at climbing a mountain. You climb a mountain to meet yourself, and to come back more aware, more open, and more available to the experiences of life. You climb a mountain to open up your frame of reference. A practice of any kind is to imbue the taste and smell of the mountaintop in all the moments of the day. It is to ritualize the attunement of our bodily comportment within the mind field.

A practice also resists the impulse to render the body transcendent and untouchable; instead, it keeps us in contact with matter — vulnerable, resilient, and alive across time. A practice is a way to trust bodies again. It is a daily visitation upon that trust. In so doing, it is a meeting with something more than the self.

Rilke said that there are two lives, the one we live and the one that lives within us. A yoga practice that opens up the framework of the mind is the burning hot desire to find the coherence between those two lives. You must be vigilant whenever possible.

The mystics knew that their first task was to keep the body well.

The foundation of their practices was physical, for when the physical body was functioning well, it had the capacity to bring in more expanded states of awareness. The mind can be more open when it is not occupied by the background noise of a body that is not functioning well. That is why all yoga begins with physical practices. And because the body changes over time, we continue to need physical practices for the different phases of life. But not for the sake of the body itself. Health is always for the sake of expanded experiences. Health is currency. To waste it on smallness—on chronic resentment, self-erasure, or fear—is the most expensive habit a human can have. Functioning well allows the soul to live in a body that feels incredible, so it has the time to do the things it came here to do, to evolve, and to free itself from cycles of suffering.

So you don’t have a yoga practice for the sake of doing yoga well. You have a yoga practice so that your body can be the cathedral to house your spirit. So that your soul can experience, in time, the coherence between the life you are living and what lives inside you.

---

---