Dear ones,

Lately, I’ve been sitting with this idea: a teacher’s role is not to hand you answers, but to slow you down enough so you can find your own.

The teacher lights the path. That’s it. What you discover on that path is yours alone.

This is something I return to often when people ask what I do. Sometimes I just say: I teach people to slow down. Because that’s really what it is. The postures, the breath, the stillness – they’re not the final destination. They’re the clearing away. They’re how we wipe the lens clean so we can finally see what’s true.

In the yoga sutras, Sthira Sukham Asanam (II.46) describes the posture, or seat, as steady and easeful. A seat that is both stable and easy allows us to still the mind, because a quiet mind can finally listen to deeper truths. In the West, asana (the poses) often gets treated as the end goal. But it’s a doorway. A tool for getting calm enough to breathe, to sit, to meditate – and through all of that, to know yourself.

Your inner knowing is only as clear as your presence. Rushing – that reactive scramble born from never enough time and an endless to-do list – will never bring you closer to wisdom. It can’t. Wisdom asks you to pause. Wisdom asks you to listen. Because it doesn’t shout.

What we’re really trying to get to runs deeper than the poses, deeper even than the breath. There is something in each of us that is more than our blood and our bones. More than our thoughts, more than what we do for a living. A unique, unrepeatable spark that makes you who you are – call it your soul, your spirit, your divine spark, whatever word feels right. It’s unmistakably there. Yoga, at its heart, is the practice of learning to honor that spark, to get clear about what’s true for you, to find peace with it, and to find your steady and easeful place in the world.

That’s what yoga as a lifestyle means to me. Not a practice you “do” a few times a week, but a commitment to discovering and living your most purposeful life – what the yoga tradition calls dharma. A life so well-suited to who you are that when you reach the end of it, you feel satisfied. Full. Ready. Complete.

All of this has felt especially close to the surface lately.

My paternal grandmother died this past Saturday morning. She was 101 years old, had over a century of fully engaged living, and was sharp as a tack until her last couple of days. She had a good death. She did not practice yoga, per se, but she embraced her life fully, and when her death finally came, she was ready to embrace that, too – steady, and at ease. May her soul rest in peace.

With love,
Nicole

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A teacher lights the path, but only you know the answers

Nicole Bratt Yoga