That might sound like a small distinction. It’s not.

For most of my adult life I led with yoga. It was my identity, my career, my community, my purpose. And somewhere in there it also became my excuse. I was a yoga person in sobriety, which sounds like a good thing, and in some ways it was. But it also gave me permission to skip the real work. I had the practice. I had the community. I had the credentials and the platform and the students who looked up to me. I told myself that was enough.

It wasn’t.

The recovery work I avoided didn’t disappear just because I was doing sun salutations every morning. It just went underground. And things that go underground don’t stay there forever.

Over the last nine months, something shifted. Not all at once. Slowly, the way most real things happen. I lost the platform. I lost the title. I lost the elevated position that fifteen years of teaching had put me in. And what I found underneath all of that was something I hadn’t felt in a long time.

Relief.

There’s no pressure anymore to be a yogi. No image to protect. No brand to maintain. I’m just a sober person who gets on the mat and does the work. I’m imperfect. I’ve made serious mistakes. I’m in the process of making amends for those mistakes, one conversation at a time. And somehow, practicing from that place, as a flawed human being with no pedestal to stand on, my practice is deeper and more connected than it’s maybe ever been.

That’s the thing nobody tells you about ego. It doesn’t just distort how other people see you. It distorts your own experience. I was so busy being a yoga person that I stopped actually practicing. The form was there. The sequence was there. But I was performing it, not living it.

It took everything falling apart for me to find that out.

I’m not grateful the way people say you’re supposed to be grateful for hard lessons. Not yet, anyway. But I do know this: the version of me that’s showing up on the mat right now is more honest than the one who was teaching rooms full of people a year ago. And honesty, I’ve learned, is the only place anything real can grow from.

I’m a sober person who does yoga. That’s it. That’s enough.

Atha Yoganusasanam.