The Yoga We Need Now

Little did I know, the timing my Evolving Your Yoga book tour was perfect. In the months following the book’s release in 2019, I visited over 20 local yoga communities. My travels concluded in February 2020, just weeks before the pandemic.

I wrote Evolving Your Yoga to help fellow practitioners get more out of their yoga practice. Drawing from insights cultivated over three decades of study and personal practice, I sought to distill those learnings into a guide that would help people expand and integrate the benefits of yoga in their lives.

It’s a different world now.

Fast forward four years, and the landscape of our lives - and the context for our yoga - have changed in ways we couldn’t have foreseen. We find ourselves living with a new level of stress, heightened uncertainty, and concern for the future we are heading into. Unquestionably, we are living in turbulent times.

What is the yoga we need for life in 2023?

How can yoga serve as a balm to rejuvenate our minds and hearts?
How can it help us to live with greater hopefulness, enthusiasm, and purpose?
What are the perspectives and practices we need most right now to take care of ourselves and
make a positive contribution to the world?

These are the questions I’ve been leaning into and exploring with others over the past months as I’ve pondered how to best support my online yoga community.

What’s emerged from this inquiry is a three-fold focus to weave our practices around. To meet the challenges - and embrace the gifts - of a changing world, we need to our yoga to help us build strength, resilience, and compassion.

We need strength to fortify and steady us. This includes the bone and muscle strength that’s essential as we age. Beyond the physical, we need strength of mind to anchor us and help us become more self-reliant. We need strength of spirit to restore hope and continue to embrace joy and beauty in an often-heartbreaking world.

We also need emotional and spiritual resilience to manage the daily stresses of life and bounce back from unexpected ups and downs. We need reliable tools to rest deeply, shore up our inner reserves, and return to center when we get thrown off.

And finally, we need the compassion that comes from seeing ourselves as part of a bigger whole. As we recognize our fundamental belonging and interconnectedness to all of life, the compassion that arises inspires us to show up for ourselves and others with kindness, generosity, and respect.

This powerful triad of strength, resilience, and compassion will form the bedrock of the themes I’ll be sharing in my brand-new livestream workshop series, Yoga for Turbulent Timesstarting next month.

I’m thrilled to be bringing this new direction to life throughout the next year in my online classes. Read more about what I’m creating - and how you can be a part of it - right here.