my current yoga practice
My current yoga practice isn’t a vigorous vinyasa flow or a perfectly sequenced class. Though I still take those on. My current yoga practice is breathwork.
For the first time since beginning my yoga journey, I’m devoting myself to pranayama: daily, deliberately, and with a kind of reverence I didn’t quite fully understand before. I’ve circled these practices for over 15 years, returning to the same 4 or 5 familiar techniques, always staying near the surface. But something has shifted. I feel like I’m just a few steps behind a revolutionary truth, one that’s been patiently waiting for me since the Vedic period and the Upanishads, tucked into the wisdom that’s been here all along.
So yes, I’m very much “today years old” when it comes to really understanding the depth of pranayama. What’s drawing me in now isn’t trend or productivity, it’s a I-can’t-quite-put-my-finger-on-it-pull that has had me hooked for the better part of this year.
The pull has been quiet but persistent. A sense that breath is the next key in my own healing work. That these simple, ancient techniques are showing me a new way to access parts of myself that I’ve either avoided or never quite known how to touch - particularly emotions like anger. Not the explosive kind, but the buried, bound-up tension that, left unacknowledged, leaks out in other ways. Or the ones that turn in to real, stand-up-for-what’s-right action.
Breathwork, in its paradoxical way, is both activating and soothing and I’ve been trying to shake things up and get out of my comfort zone(s). It’s helping me hold more: more sensation, more stillness, more truth. It has helped me find my lungs. It’s helped me find the inhale in the exhale and the exhale in the inhale. It’s shown me the magic of the top of the breath when you hang out ther and the widsom of the bottom of the exhale when you hang out there. It’s shown me its intimate relationship with nature, in particular floating on waves. And in this season of perimenopause, where the inner landscape is shifting daily, it feels like a lifeline.
This isn’t a how-to. I’m not offering protocols. I’m just beginning, again, with breath as my teacher. And like any true teacher, breath doesn’t demand performance. It invites presence. It meets me exactly where I am—tired or clear, heavy or open—and asks only that I stay. That I keep listening. That I don’t rush past the discomfort or the silence.
So for now, I’ll keep showing up to the mat, or the couch, or the car seat with the windows cracked, with the people in the Trader Joe’s parking lot wondering what I’m doing. I’ll keep letting it lead with the moment, with what it means to be alive in this ever-shifting body.