What Emerge & Lighten Means for Me

Every month inside my online Yoga and Ayurveda community, I choose a theme. A thread that runs through the classes, the teachings, and the practices we share together. This April, that thread was Emerge & Lighten.

And I had a vision for how it would go.

We would move through spring-inspired practices together, shed the heaviness of winter, lighten the load on our digestion and our energy, and I would lead the way. I even re-released the Radiant Reset, my free 7-day Ayurvedic meal plan, partly because I wanted to share it again, and partly because I genuinely intended to do it myself.

It’s the second last day of April. I made two meals from that plan. Two.

Not seven days. Not even three days. Two meals.

And here’s what I’ve been sitting with since I admitted that to myself. The reason I wanted to do the reset wasn’t purely about nourishment or seasonal cleansing or supporting my digestion. The honest reason, the one I didn’t say out loud until sitting down to write this, is that I’ve put on a few pounds the last two years and I thought seven days of clean eating might just be the boost I needed to help me commit to taking care of that.

And in some ways, it I did.

The weight I’ve been carrying isn’t only physical. It’s the old, familiar belief that as a yoga teacher, I should look a certain way. That my soft mid-section is somehow at odds with the work I do, the life I live, and most importantly, the woman I am becoming. That I need to be a certain shape to be credible, worthy, and inspiring.

That belief is a lie. And I am slowly, imperfectly, learning to stop telling it to myself.

This is what Emerge & Lighten actually became for me this month. Not the two meals. Not a flatter belly. But the gradual, humbling, quietly courageous practice of seeing my body not as something separate from my journey, but as part of it. The soft mid-section, the extra pounds, the mornings I didn’t practice what I had planned. All of it, is part of the journey.

This is not a neat and tidy realization. In fact it’s one that has taken me years, no decades, to understand. Yet this is the nature of this work, this thing we call yoga — slowly but surely, I’ve been weaving my way into clearer understanding.

In class last night, the mantra Sa Ta Na Ma came to mind mid practice. It’s a beautiful mantra that symbolizes beginnings, creative existence, transformation, regeneration or rebirth… aka full cycle living. And what I’m reminding myself of today is that we are always somewhere inside that cycle, always in the middle of becoming something. And becoming, I’m learning, doesn’t require perfection. It requires presence. It requires the willingness to keep going even when you have no idea what is waiting for you around the next corner.

The Radiant Reset is still there, still free, and ready whenever you are ready. Or me for that matter. Not as a quick fix. And not as a punishment either. But as a gentle, nourishing week of options to support you coming back to yourself. I’ll be doing it again in the near future. And most certainly not perfectly either.

As April closes and May begins, I’m not wrapping this up with a bow. Because these practices don’t end when the calendar flips. Like everything else in life we want to understand more clearly, it takes consistent, and sometimes persistent, action in support of the direction we want to go. One small step. One honest moment. One meal, or two, or none.

That is the practice. And that, is enough.

Who are you still becoming? And what small action can you take today to support that?

Yours in practice,

xoM