“Yoga attempts to create a state in which we are always present – really present – in every action, in every moment.” p.6 – The Heart of Yoga: Developing a Personal Practice by TKV Desikachar
i saw another thing today on Instagram, a quote… something to the effect of, depression is an obsession with the past, anxiety is an obsession with the future, and sanity is the present moment. it wasn’t that. not exactly anyways, but that is what i took from it because maybe that is what it feels like to me?
i have told a story about my brain a few times since starting YTT in the fall. it goes like this:
in, like, 2007, i was in a marriage, i had three kids under 7, i had a job, i had a house with a big fat mortgage, but i was not happy. not that i really had any idea what happiness is (a topic for another post), but i at least knew that i wasn’t feeling it. and as a person who has an innate need to solve problems (or maybe just be working towards solutions, anyways), i began to search for ways to be less unhappy. the real solution to the bigger problem was one i would eventually find a few years later, but i digress.
the internet told me that mindfulness was a thing. meditation could be the key to finding some kind of peace and, just imagine, happiness with ones life. and so i set out to find ways to meditate in a small town north of the sixtieth parallel.
to my great fortune, i found a group of folks who gathered once a week to meditate together. they followed a shambala tradition and met monday nights at our local college to practice a half hour of seated meditation and then a half hour of walking meditation (in a circle in a small classroom), followed by group reading aloud from a text and tea.
at some point, after months of attending a once a week group practice, and listening to the occasional dharma talk on the insight meditation society’s website, i remember becoming aware of having developed what i think i can only call the skill of being present. and honestly, i can’t even describe it, really. i just noticed, one day, that i was more ‘at peace’…? but those words don’t explain it and i am not sure really if i can. explain it, i mean.
i felt more content. more comfortable. more confident. less anxious. less nervous. less unhappy. my life had not been fixed, but maybe a small part of my brain was better able to process my situation. and i felt less miserable.
fast forward almost twenty years.
in the fall of 2026, i saw a sign, in the building where i work, advertising a yoga teacher training program. it was scheduled to start the week after i was scheduled to complete the marathon i was training for. there had been other points in time between 2007 and now when someone was teaching yoga teacher training in yellowknife. and while i had, every time i saw it advertised, wanted to do it. there was something in my life that prevented me. family obligations. lack of money. inability to take a month off work. etc. but this one…. fit my schedule and my bank account. and it really just felt like, the universe put kate and this program in my path and meant for me to take this training at this time. i know it sounds hokey, or like woo-woo. and maybe it is. but i don’t care. it felt right.
and so i signed up for it.
and the next journey began. our littel group of four students practiced together four days a week, some of it classroom learning, and some of it physical asana practice. it was a hybrid program and during the middle period we were all in locations that were note yellowknife, but continue to learn and practice togethr. we read and talked about the yoga sutras, and i read anodea judith’s hot takes on the chakras, and i watched my fellow students come more fully into themselves, and we did the same asana practice from october to february every tuesday and thursday morning.
and at some point between the second week of october 2025 and the last week of february 2026, i realized that the only other time in my life when my brain felt as at ease as it did, was when i was practicing weekly meditation way back in 2007.
i related this to a friend recently and she asked me about running. and whether i felt this same sense of peace/presence with running. and the answer is no. for me, the activity of running provided a place to process. it was like a therapy session, all alone. i would go for a run over lunch and if there was something, some interaction or situation, that was sitting wrong with me, i would use the run to totally hash it out – to play it and replay it in my mind’s eye until something snapped and i could let it go. i would think about it and think about it again, and then run through possible future scenarios in my head, and then run through what happened again… running gave me a way to move the mental crunchiness through my body and out of my head, but it did not give me the skills to be able to avoid the mental crunchiness from the beginning.
when i started practicing yoga again regularly in october as a part of this program it refreshed those pathways in my brain that had been developed through mediation twenty years ago. that was the last time i felt this comfortable in my own head. that was the last time the actual skill of being present was being practiced diligently enough to have made a difference in how i move through the world.
and now, here i am.
i have the time and the space to focus on this. focus on yoga. and what it can do for me, and try to find ways to teach that to other people who may be in a place where they are ready for it…. or not.