I came back from the mountains, always a little sad to leave them. The air up there does something to you: crisp, thin, rivers loud over rock, the kind of quiet that isn't actually quiet at all. Something in me exhales up there. I create. I sit in solitude watching the aspens flutter. The re-entry into heat and routine takes a minute. But that's the practice: the mountains and the plains, the ups and the downs. They don't stop coming. We just keep learning how to move through them.
While I was away I received news that stopped me.
There's something about hard news arriving when you're far from home — in the middle of beauty, thin air, open space — that has no clean place to land. I put the phone down and prayed for sleep. Prayed against the overthinking. Against the late-night tide of memory that grief stirs up when it arrives uninvited. You know that kind of night.
Grief asks questions we can't answer.
The yoga sutras name this: abhinivesha, the deep human ache around impermanence. The way loss reminds us that nothing stays exactly as it is. It doesn't try to fix it. It just names it. And in the naming, somehow, it becomes a little more bearable.
In the way we teach, every breath is already practicing this. Something comes in. Something leaves. We don't always call the exhale what it is, but there's a quiet release in naming it. In feeling grateful that your lungs accept the air, that your body keeps choosing to continue, and saying there it goes and meaning it. That small act of letting go is where the relief lives.
What keeps coming back is this: the sangha. This overall community has been one of the steadiest things in my life. Some stay, some go, and I've come to understand that is its own lesson. To all of you, wherever you are in that, thank you. From the deepest part of this heart. We are exactly where we need to be, at this moment, for this breath.
In honor of one of our own — a student who came faithfully, week after week, and laid her mat down in the same spot every time — we have opened a mat up in her spot for remembrance. A plant, a candle. It will stay there for a couple of weeks as a gesture of deep gratitude. For the space.
For the practice. For the inspiration she was to everyone around her. She kept showing up until she no longer could — until her last exhale came and there was no inhale after it. I will miss seeing her in her spot. And I know I am not alone in that — so many who came to the daytime classes will too.
