One Degree
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©NICOLE BRATT
Dear ones,
There’s a visual I find myself coming back to again and again with clients: a ship changing course by just one degree. It doesn’t look like much in the moment. But over time, across open water, that single degree sends the ship somewhere completely different.
That’s what I’m after in my work.
I recently received a pretty awesome message from a private client. He had come to me with a goal that was simple and honest: to be more comfortable as he aged. That meant finding his way back to dedicated practice, and remembering to listen to a body that was making itself heard through recurring pain. He wasn’t asking for a miracle. He just wanted to start practicing again and have less pain.
Here’s what he wrote me:
HUGE success working this weekend and using my yoga to keep my legs from becoming useless painful rigid sticks!! SERIOUSLY transformative experience. Honest. Any heavy activity or walking/standing on concrete for hours on end has destroyed me for DAYS. But now? I have the tools, techniques, and knowledge I need to keep my body happy. This is a gift for me… I can’t express how valuable this is to me. —Private client
That message made my whole week.
What people often want when they first come to me
Most people arrive hoping to change a lot, fast. We live in a culture that promises quick fixes – the right pill, the right protocol, the right program, and you’re cured! I understand the appeal. Pain is urgent. Discomfort is motivating. The desire to feel better now is completely human.
But yoga therapy doesn’t work that way – and honestly, that’s the point.
I’m not here to cure you. I’m here to help you draw out your own wisdom, pair it with Yoga, and discover new ways of moving toward what you actually want. That includes something a lot of my clients resist at first: making friends with their whole selves as they age.
That’s what most of my clients are after, when you get to the heart of it. Not to turn back the clock. Just to be more comfortable in their bodies as they age – and to stop spending energy fighting what they can’t control. So much of the suffering I see isn’t just physical. It’s the grief and frustration of fighting a body that is, inevitably, changing. What I’m interested in is helping you stop fighting and start listening. That shift alone can be transformative.
Slow is not the same as stuck
Here’s something worth sitting with: you breathe somewhere between 16,000 and 25,000 times a day! Yes, really! Your movement patterns, your emotional habits, your ways of bracing and guarding and holding – these have been forming for decades. A five-minute pranayama (breath) practice isn’t going to change the way you breathe overnight. And it doesn’t need to.
What small practices can do is introduce space for possibility, for something different. They can open the gap between stimulus and response. They can create new habits, new ways of being – small at first, and then, with consistency and time, something that genuinely shifts the course.
When a client starts to feel even a little change, something interesting happens: it inspires them. They practice more. They come back more curious. The 1-degree shift begins to compound.
If I can help someone make that 1-degree shift in our first four to eight weeks together, I consider it a success.
This work is yours
No two clients walk through my door with the same life, the same body, the same goals. Yoga therapy is highly individualized – the client is the driver in this work, not a passenger. I don’t hand them a fixed program and send them on their way. We discover together where there is space for possibility and re-patterning, and we build from there.
What I’ve seen, again and again, is that the clients who experience real change are the ones who show up for themselves – not perfectly, but consistently. I can offer the tools, the insight, and the support. But the practice has to be theirs. And so does the decision to begin.
With love and springtime energy,
Nicole
©PATRICK KERN