Nine months, to be exact. And when you have that kind of time, when the noise stops and the social media goes quiet and the students aren’t in front of you anymore, you start to see things you couldn’t see when you were moving too fast to look.

Here’s what I kept coming back to: Ashtanga yoga is the best style of yoga you can practice. I believe that. Twenty years of it. It’s been the backbone of my sobriety and honestly the backbone of my life. I’m not saying it because I’m trying to sell you something. I’m saying it because discipline saved me. Routine saved me. Showing up on the days I absolutely did not want to show up, and doing the work anyway, built something in me that I didn’t have before. Self-esteem. Confidence. The knowledge that I could do hard things even when every part of me wanted to quit.

My teacher, who I respected and I would say adored, passed away. And losing him cracked something open in me. It made me start examining things that had been quietly bubbling under the surface for a long time.

Because here’s what Ashtanga can’t do for you, and what I had to learn the hard way.
It can’t do your inventory for you.

The practice will make you strong. It will regulate your nervous system, flood you with endorphins, give you a community and a container and a reason to get out of bed at 5am. Those things are real and they matter. But strength and flexibility and even spiritual language are not the same thing as looking at your side of the street. I started confusing the two.

Social media made it worse. I’m not saying anything you haven’t already felt. The camera out on the mat. The progress posts. The follower counts. Each person gets to decide what’s okay for them. I’m not here to judge the way anyone practices or shares their practice. What I know from my own life is that it created a bypass lane for me. Ego. Vanity. The crowdsourcing of self-esteem. Being liked became a thing I was quietly chasing, and being liked is not the same as being honest. Being popular and being in yoga, those things do not always belong in the same sentence.

And here’s the uncomfortable part: you can practice every single day and still not ask yourself the questions that matter. How am I supposed to live? Where did I do wrong? How do I make things right? How do I practice ahimsa, not just in the postures, but in the way I treat people? How do I live satya, actual truth, not the curated version? How do I let people be where they are? How do I practice forgiveness? How do I look at the mess I’ve made and say, this is happening for me, not to me?

I sat with those questions for nine months. I watched friends come and go. I got on my knees, literally and figuratively. And what came clear is that the hardest work, the depression, the anxiety, the cleaning up of your side of the street, was the work I had been skipping. We push through pain. We prioritize discipline over feeling. We love the rigor of it. I love the rigor of it. But rigor without self-examination is just endurance. And endurance, by itself, won’t save you.

Nothing is perfect. I’m not perfect. You’ve seen my failures loud and clear. My life fell apart, and I am perfectly okay with where I am right now, because it brought me to my knees in the best possible way. It asked me how I was supposed to live. It made me clean it up. It made me do the next right thing, even when I didn’t know what that looked like.

I’m a dad. I’m also human. And somewhere along the way, I got put on a pedestal in a way that made it harder, not easier, to be either of those things honestly. I was never better than anyone else. If anything I was further behind and had more to learn. I still do.

That’s where I am. That’s what I’ve been thinking about.