Yoga For Life is a collection of essays focused on one regular life as seen through the lens of yoga. In them, yoga's deepest gifts are discovered in the mundane activities of daily life - laundry, grocery shopping, raising children, going to work, friendships, gardening - you name it! These personal, insightful meditations bring yoga's ancient spirituality, wisdom, and mindfulness sharply into modern focus.
Yoga is a practice designed to help us find contentment, happiness and faith in every aspect of our lives. Yoga For Life is written to help you as the reader – no matter the level of your practice – embrace the positive thinking, mental resilience, and transformation that develops by taking yoga beyond the mat and into your life.
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The Christian season of Lent began this week. Rather than taking on a discipline or giving something up, this year I am feeling called to spend these 40-days pondering mortality – others’ and my own. While that may strike you as bleak, I believe that living with an awareness of death (another way of saying this is an awareness of the fleetingness and fragility of life) can make living a sweeter and more tender experience.
I hate messing up. I hate it even more when I “get caught” making a mistake. I hate it most of all when my mistakes splash on others. Yet making mistakes seems to be an essential part of the human journey. In fact, mistakes are not obstacles on our journey to becoming good people. They ARE the journey to becoming better people.
I don’t know why the human mind allows the negative to overshadow the positive, but it does. Especially in times like ours, we need to cultivate the habit of paying attention to even the tiniest good things in our lives. Doing so gives us the resilience to put our best foot forward no matter what is going on in the world around us.
My daughter planned a ski weekend for her birthday and we were thrilled to be invited. Yet I wimped out and chose not to go skiing. When I made my choice, I thought my fear of falling and hurting myself was keeping me safe – but it was really holding me back. Now that I understand this, I have to figure out how to choose differently next time.
Resilience is not about going back to the way we were before. It’s about moving forward as the person you’ve become because you’ve navigated something difficult and allowed it to form you into someone new, someone a touch wiser, someone slightly more evolved, someone filled with a little more humility and a little less fear.
Am I alone in thinking the world is a lot right now? It is natural to feel helpless in the face of the world’s needs. An old story from the Talmud reminds us that if we each do our tiny, little bit, it is good and it is enough.
Happy New Year! This year a single word is my New Year’s resolution, my intention for 2026, and my word of the year. The word is YES. You could say I came to this resolution the hard way and I’m grateful that I did. After years of challenging, painful, and scary life events, I have learned that these events themselves are not what causes me the most suffering. What sucks the life out of everything is my resistance to what is happening. So, mostly because I have learned the hard way that NO cripples the soul, I am all in as I greet this new year with a resounding YES.
Several months ago, after flipping through an old family photo album, a friend looked at me and asked, “What happened to you?” I won’t lie. His joke stung. But do you remember the old story, The Velveteen Rabbit? Like that little toy rabbit, what happened to me is that I became “real” or loved. From that perspective, I hope life keeps showing up on my face for years and years to come.
Caregiving is hard work. But what if, when we show up for people in moments of need and vulnerability, we are showing up right where God is? What if taking care of one another is also a way to pray?