Yoga and the Courage to Stay Open

Some relationships teach us how to trust more deeply. Others quietly show us how to armor up and protect ourselves. Without realizing it, the relationships we experience begin shaping the way we relate not only to one another, but to ourselves, to life, and perhaps even to our Creator.

They also mold our bodies. The way we stand. How we breathe. The tension we carry in the shoulders, jaw, and around the belly. Whether our hearts instinctively open or quietly brace before a word has even been spoken. Our bodies are always telling the story of how we've learned to relate to life.

For much of my life, relationships have felt confusing, exhausting, and, at times, almost impossible to navigate. Looking back, I can see that many of the ways I learned to meet the world were formed long before I ever understood they were happening. I learned to be on my own at an early age, and it directly impacted relationships and life. I am deeply grateful that it taught resilience, and self-reliance. Most importantly, it fostered a relationship with God that has been an anchor through seasons I could not have endured alone.

But every gift has another side.

Without realizing it, I also came to believe that people were often living in their own worlds. I learned they could be unpredictable. I learned they could be unsafe. I even experienced that innocence could be taken in only a few moments. Somewhere along the way, I unconsciously concluded that protecting myself was wiser than remaining soft and naturally open.

Then yoga graciously entered my life. At first, I believed I was simply learning postures. Looking back now, I realize I was entering into another kind of relationship. Unlike many relationships, yoga has never asked me to become someone other than myself. It has never tried to manipulate or walk away from me. Instead, it has patiently reflected me back to myself.

It has also revealed something I never expected. It is often easier to recognize the ways other people have hurt us than to recognize the ways we have been hurting ourselves. There was a season when I believed progress meant pushing harder. For several years I practiced with relentless intensity until my body responded with overwhelming inflammation and exhaustion. I thought discipline required force. Yoga gently revealed that transformation rarely arrives through force. More often, it unfolds through steadiness, kindness, and the quiet willingness to remain present. It was inviting me into a different relationship with myself. Every relationship asks something of us. Yoga has consistently asked me to become more intimate with myself, with others, and with what is most true.

I began noticing how quickly my body prepared for battle, not because I was facing physical danger, but because I intuited that someone felt untrustworthy, or perhaps a conversation felt uncertain, or an old wound had quietly awakened. The shoulders would subtly round. The jaw would clench. Even the breath would become more shallow. Before the mind had fully formed any stories, the body had already habitually learned how to protect itself.

The yogic teachings have always offered other possibilities and outcomes.

“What if awareness could come before defense?”

“What if I met perceived threats with something other than armor?”

“What if love, discomfort, and uncertainty could all coexist?”

This doesn't mean abandoning wisdom or pretending everyone is safe. Healthy boundaries are an expression of love as well.

But yoga has slowly shown, that guarding the heart and closing the heart are not the same thing.

When these moments arise, I often think of Arjuna standing on the battlefield in the Bhagavad Gita. Before a single arrow was released, his greatest battle was already unfolding within him. Fear. Grief. Doubt. Confusion. His transformation didn't come from pretending those feelings weren't arising. It came from remembering something deeper than them.

Sometimes I quietly ask myself, “What would it feel like to stand as Arjuna eventually learned to stand?” Not rigid. Nor armored. But upright. Steady. Open. Guided by something wiser and more mysterious than fear.

There is a posture called Kurmasana, or Tortoise Pose, that has been one of my greatest teachers. When I first began practicing the posture, it often brought feelings of confinement to the surface. A subtle fear. A desire to escape. The impulse to brace. My instinct was to push through those sensations. Yet over time, yoga invited something very different. Rather than resisting what arose, I learned to remain present with it. Breath by breath, I softened instead of hardened. What fascinates me is that those same feelings rarely arise anymore. The posture became easier mostly because something within had shifted.

Rather than hardening against the experience, I soften within it. I remind myself that the practice of yoga graciously gives the safest of spaces to notice fear without becoming consumed by it. Each breath can become an opportunity to choose openness over contraction. It’s deeply humbling that something as simple as a yoga posture can become preparation for living.

Each time we choose:

• to let go a little instead of bracing,

• to remain present instead of resisting,

• or to choose curiosity instead of certainty,

we are quietly practicing how we hope to meet the rest of life. Including its ending. Because beneath so many of our smaller fears rests the one we all eventually face, the fear of death. My deepest hope is that when that final transition comes, my heart already knows how to let go and who to turn toward.

Yoga has not banished life's heartbreaks. It has gradually shown me that the more willing I am to meet life as it is, the less I suffer. When I first began practicing, I thought yoga was teaching me how to move this body, this temple.

What I never imagined was that it was teaching me how to relate. To myself. To others. To fear. To love. And more deeply to our Creator. Perhaps that has been yoga's greatest gift. Not that it has offered a perfect relationship with life, but that it has to capacity to be a relationship that continually invites us to return—again and again—to that which is true.

Perhaps, little by little, our bodies begin telling a different story—not one of fear or protection, but of trust, presence, and a heart that is learning to remain open.