I believe that yoga is for everyone, everywhere.

Every day, as I practice yoga asana in sync with my breath, I remember yoga is very simple.

You don’t need to be super-flexible. You don’t need a certain kind of wardrobe or to look a certain way.

Yoga is for all of us.

All you need is your breath and an intention to focus your mind.

It does not matter what posture your body allows you to achieve. With time, you may progress toward more advanced moves, but if you don’t, that’s fine.

It’s not a performance, no matter what social media tells you.

Whatever your asana looks from the outside is irrelevant. Ask yourself:

Do I know my mind?

Do I know its precious spaciousness?

The simple (not necessarily easy) act of concentrating your mind away from thoughts and onto breath and movement creates room for wisdom and clarity.

It shows you how your mind can be a powerful tool for good.

In its simplest form, yoga requires very little except some time. It is available to all of us.

You can do a version of yoga in a studio or at home. On the beach or at the park. you can practice yogic breathing (pranayama) in an airplane or while standing in line.

And each time you do, openness and peace grow just a tiny bit.

Learning to teach

My path to becoming a yoga instructor was inspired by many things. It was slow, meandering, and probably unexpected if you’d asked my younger self. But in the tapestry of life it is not surprising; little by little the pattern made itself known. From above you can see the stepping stones like when years ago, chance showed me the book The Power of Now. It led to my first full experience of the present moment, of the spacious mind. A few years later, I was drawn to meditation as a way to inspire creativity. When I look back, I find many separate examples of awareness growing and dots connecting.

More recently when I started learning with a wise and gifted yoga teacher it all started to click. Even if what I had learned before wasn’t really yoga, in her Dharma talks and commentary during class, simple yogic truths became easy to understand. I wanted to get closer to this ancient wisdom, to learn and to share it with others as a precious gift of presence and peace.

At first, you just want to stretch or something.

Most of us including me attended their first yoga class seeking physical benefits or perhaps a balance of mind-body-spirit. Back in the day, I attended classes at the local YMCA, enjoying the yoga poses and experiencing temporary bliss during Savasana (the ending meditation pose lying on the mat).

Then you see how yoga changes your mind.

People know the exercise but really, yoga is more about the mind.

Not because it’s at the center of everything, as in, “I think, therefore I am.” Rather, in yoga, the mind is something to manage, to tame.

According to Patanjali, the sage who centuries ago collected and codified the many different schools of yoga into one book — The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali — yoga is “the stilling of the fluctuations of the mind”.

Fluctuations are essentially thoughts; Yoga is the quieting of our thoughts.

And with no detectable thinking activity, the mind becomes empty and spacious.

Make your mind spacious and empty.

It’s not like you scoop out all thoughts and place them aside for later use, necessarily.

But with time, you become really good at focusing on something other than your thoughts.

At will, you learn how to empty your mind.

“Why should I want my mind to be empty?”

It’s not so easy to imagine an empty mind because it’s always so full!

All of us experience thousands of thoughts (some tiny and almost imperceptible, others not) on any given day.

So an empty mind can seem like a black space, a void. A cursor on a blank screen.

Think of it more like a clear sky, a restful place. Thoughts will return soon enough.

This clear mind is poised to better serve you instead of pulling you in this direction and that, away from your deeper wisdom, just reacting to its endless chatter.

“But my mind is very powerful. My mind can do many things!”

That’s true. But the power of mind can be deceiving. Because without wisdom, understanding, and discernment, our minds can lead us astray.

There is such a thing as too much thinking.

Us and the ancient yogis alike experience minds filled with plans, hopes and dreams, anxieties and noise, filling up every nook and cranny of the space between our ears.

Is it good for our minds to be filled to the brim? Probably not.

Yoga helps us pause the endless inner dialogue so more space can be created. Then we can better understand and make a choice to react (or not) to any given thought that enters.

I think even the most peaceful among us have woken up in the early hours, bothered by random thoughts.

Create mind space for better things.

It is said that the mind is a great servant but a terrible master.

We can, and should, use our minds for the tasks it does best: organize, work, plan, make ideas come to life.

But we don’t want noisy inner dialogue, unwise ideas and misunderstood realities rule the world. We don’t want cluttered mind to cloud the brilliance we carry.

Reveal the brilliance beyond mind.

What do I mean by brilliance?

The brilliance beyond mind is like a mirror reflecting sunlight, or a sparkle you glimpse in the eyes of another.

Some may say, this is the light of the soul.*

When you take a break from living in your head, you can see it.

Yoga teaches us to put thoughts aside so we can see the brilliance.

When we say Namaste, we say – the light in me sees the light in you.

* Now, you can believe in the existence of a soul, or you can believe in electrical impulses reacting to stimuli in the environment as long as you are alive, and it’s all over when life ends. Personally, I think we’re both. Electrical connections, neurons, and a soul.

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Thousands of years ago, some people in India lived a spare life away from the rest of society, and through daily meditation they came to a detailed understanding of the ever changing nature of our minds. Before any of the technologies we know today, their lives undoubtedly shaped by natural rhythms and the limitations and dangers of living in the wild, these ancient beings chose to go within. And what they found is still, miraculously, relevant today.