I met Giovanni in a winding back alley in Venice.

After wandering the quieter edges of the city that morning, stealing a few moments from the crowds, I came upon a well-dressed Italian man walking three sleek, rust-colored dogs with ears as pointed as tortilla chips.

I stopped to ask if I could say hello to his dogs. As I crouched down, they immediately stepped their tiny front paws onto my white linen dress and greeted me with kisses.

Giovanni and I skipped the pleasantries and went straight to the heart of things. Life, art, the paths we take and where they ultimately lead us. Anything but the weather.

At some point, he said, “Your footsteps. Your art. Your breath. Your mind.”

The words struck me.

Before we parted, we exchanged numbers and made a loose promise to meet again during my time there. Giovanni offered to show me his Venice, the one lived beyond the crowds.

Later that evening, a message lit up my phone. Would I like to see Venice from his boat in the morning?

Sunrise came.

Giovanni first invited me to “see a real Venetian home.” His.

I learned Giovanni was an architect, and stepping inside his home felt a little like entering the inside of his mind. Old-world Venice mingled with the places and traditions that had shaped him. Books lined nearly every wall, sometimes becoming the walls themselves. Architecture. Eastern philosophy. Poetry. Old Italian recipes. An entire section devoted to yoga and spirituality.

Giovanni compared the shelves of books to notes on a page of music. I understood the devotion. Books have always been teachers to me, portals into worlds beyond my own.

A Ganesha statue greeted us near the entrance. Nearby hung a photograph of a much younger Giovanni with his teacher in India. The house kept revealing itself, and with it, something more of the man who had created it.

Shelves concealed rooms. A bed descended from the ceiling. Even the narrow wooden staircase seemed to have its own philosophy.

“Start with your left foot,” Giovanni instructed as we began to climb. “And then don’t think about it too much.”

I followed.

At the top, we emerged into a small rooftop garden suspended above the city. And there, among the rooftops of Venice, a single red rose had found its way into bloom.

Staying hasn’t always come easily to me.

I know the tendency to lean toward what comes next. To chase the next “big” moment. To anticipate. To reach. To look just beyond what is already here.

An almost imperceptible unsettledness in the body, the mind drawing me someplace else.

When it was time to head for the water, we made our way back downstairs. To my delight, getting on the boat meant climbing through a window.

Giovanni went first, dropping down below. Then he reached up for my hand and guided me down after him. I’ve climbed out of a few windows in my life. This was by far my favorite.

We pushed off while most of Venice was still asleep.

Without the gondolas and crowds, the canals were nearly silent. Laundry hung overhead. The smell of something sweet drifted from an open kitchen window. Houses mirrored back to themselves in the morning light. As we left the narrow passageways for more open water, the breeze picked up and the city slowly receded behind us.

Giovanni kept drawing my attention back to what was around us: the cicadas. The birds he described as royal, from Egypt. And the fishermen.

Somewhere along the way, Giovanni told me about a rare illness he had survived years earlier. For a time, he could do very little. It was then, he told me, that he learned how to breathe.

Suddenly, the words I had heard the day before landed differently.

Your footsteps. Your art. Your breath. Your mind.

We watched fishermen sitting quietly with their lines dropped in the water. Giovanni spoke about time and space, about the waiting itself as meditation. Nothing to do but sit, watch, wait. Time passing without needing to fill it.

“I do not run,” he said.

I sat there, the warm summer breeze against my cheek, the boat drifting sideways with the small waves, unmistakably inside a moment I knew I wouldn’t forget.

I had spent much of the summer moving from place to place, often without knowing exactly where I was headed next. There had been space between destinations to see what might unfold. Room to wander. To get lost.

And somewhere in all that movement, I began to notice what stayed. It was rarely what I expected.

Sitting on a rooftop by candlelight during a citywide power outage. Lying in the sunshine beside a dear friend, our toes dipped into a garden swimming pond. Strawberries picked by a six-year-old hand. Wandering through an unlocked door and finding myself alone in a musty attic filled with old theater costumes.

So much of what I had gone looking for that summer had arrived this way. It was a familiar invitation: to let the day find me.

Before I left Venice, my path crossed with Giovanni once more. I was stepping out of a bookstore just as he passed by with the dogs.

In my bag was a collection of poems by Mary Oliver I had bought for him, a small offering for his shelves. I had been meaning to reach out before I left to find a way to give it to him.

It turned out I didn’t have to.

Rwanda doesn’t let you stay on the surface for very long.

The moment I stepped off the plane, the warm early morning air wrapped around me, carrying that familiar scent of earth and sweetness. My shoulders softened without effort.

Some places do that. They land in you before you land in them.

Not all of me had fully arrived.

An afternoon drive to the lake. We’d been talking for a while when Augustine asked if it would be okay to take a detour to pick something up at his home just outside of Kigali.

The lake was on my mind. A place to sleep off the jet lag. To be in nature. To land.

“Of course,” I said, reminding myself to hold the day loosely, even as part of me was already somewhere else.

As we pulled into the gates of his home, his young daughter came running out. “Daddy!”

The front door wide open, thresholds blurring the line between outside and in.

His pregnant wife stood barefoot in the doorway in a long dress, one hand resting gently on her expanding belly.

Two dogs announced their presence from the back of the house. An older woman swept the front walk. Cars lined the driveway, part of the business he was building, his dream taking shape in front of me.

Maeve came straight over, hands sticky from the orange she was eating, nose running, and wrapped her little arms around me. She took my hat off my head and placed it on hers, leaving faint orange smudges along the brim.

“Say hi to aunty,” her mom said. It was the first time we met. A name offered without question. I gladly accepted.

We played peekaboo, Maeve underneath the table while I sat talking to her mom. About life. About this time. Two women connecting somewhere in the middle of it all. Laughter. The kind that doesn’t need language.

Back in the car, Augustine pulled off to the side of the dirt road and bought me a pineapple. “I don’t know how to cut these,” I said, half laughing, half shy. He smiled.

As we made our way further from the city, he pointed to the farm he grew up on. I asked how he met his wife. He shared a love story.

Outside the window, life slowed. The land moved past in color and rhythm. Women in bright fabrics, baskets of fruit balanced on their heads, walking down winding hills to market. Children playing along the side of the road. Conversations unfolding under the shade of Acacia trees. Fabric catching light as it passed.

A living portrait.

I arrived at the lake, a restlessness still moving through my body.

I practiced on the deck. Slow, deliberate. Letting my feet press into the wood, letting the breath come and go without needing to shape it. I sat outside my treehouse and watched the birds move between branches.

It wasn’t loud. Not anxious exactly. Just a subtle pull. Like there was somewhere else I should be. Even here.

Later, out on the water, the stillness stretched wider, as the paddle dipped in and out. The surface held reflections so clearly it was hard to tell which way was up. Trees above, trees below. Sky and water folding into one another like a pair of lovers.

There was nowhere to go. Nothing to get to.

That night, I met two women at dinner.

A long table set for just the three of us for a shared meal. Outside, the air still warm.

There was a set of conversation cards on the table. With some resistance, we answered slowly. Thoughtfully. Some people recognize each other instantly. Tea in our hands. Sounds of evening nesting just beyond us. The sky shifting as the light faded to faint shades of pink and grey.

At some point, it stopped feeling like a game and eased into a conversation.

They invited me to a performance at the genocide memorial in honor of Kwibuka—Rwanda’s commemoration of the genocide, now in its 32nd year. I had landed on the start of the 100 days of remembrance. A time of pause.

On the night of the performance, there was a chill in the air. We sat toward the front in stadium seating, candles passed hand to hand. Around us, a quiet that only comes when many people are holding something at once.

The hot wax dripped slowly down my fingers.

The play was delayed. And in that waiting, my new friend began to speak. Her voice came into the silence, steady, almost soft enough to miss if she weren’t leaning in.

She told me about her step-father sleeping on the roof of her home for three nights, hiding. About eight of his eleven siblings who were killed.

The cold. The wax. Her voice.

Later, during the performance, she leaned in close and whispered translations from Kinyarwanda to English into my ear, her voice just above a breath as mine got caught in my throat, tears rolling down my cheeks.

On my final afternoon in Kigali, I walked up one of the hills, the path steeper than it looked from below. The sun sat high, the air thick. My body felt heavy. Each step took more effort than I expected.

There was a sadness there. Not sharp. Not even fully formed. Just something low and steady in my body.

I kept walking for a bit. And then, without really deciding to, I stopped.

I sat down. Then lay back, letting my body meet the ground fully. The grass pressed up against my arms, my back. No effort required. The earth held me.

The need to get somewhere loosened its grip, just slightly.

I turned my head and saw them — a group of kids playing football further down the hill. The ball moving quickly between them, feet hitting the ground, laughter rising and falling in bursts.

No one holding back. No one trying to be anywhere else.

Just here.

Not joining. Not analyzing. Just observing.

And somewhere in that, something in me cracked open.

Not joy exactly. Not relief. But a kind of quiet recognition.

Grief and beauty, held in the same breath.

*

If this space has been meaningful to you, I’m beginning to open a paid subscription tier — a way to support the continuation of this work and allow for deeper offerings ahead, including longer reflections, practices, audio recordings, and more intimate community spaces.

I’ll continue sharing many pieces freely here. But if you’ve been wanting a way to support this work more directly, becoming a paid subscriber truly means a great deal.

You can become a paid subscriber here.

With warmth,

Sarah

This Yoga Nidra, or yogic sleep, invites deep rest while gently opening awareness, so you can feel, release, and return to yourself.

A space to listen, trust what is emerging, and rest in the quiet unfolding.

Find a comfortable place to lie down, get warm, and allow the body to fully soften.
Inspired by the energy of the May full moon, this practice invites clarity, gentle expansion, and a return to what feels true.

I thought I would sit and write. Instead, I moved.

Back in Los Angeles for a few days after guiding a retreat to nearby Ojai, something dense settled in my body. A weight low in my spine. Deep in my womb. Nothing sharp, nothing loud, just a quiet presence asking to be noticed. To be felt.

So I took to the trails.

City dust rising beneath my feet. Ribbons of mustard blooms scattered along the path. Soft rhythm of breath. A steady incline beneath the hills. Above me, wide California sky expanding open. Tall palm trees silhouetted against white peaks. The faint outline of the Hollywood sign, a backdrop to the city I once called home. And the earth, as these mountains have so many times before, holding what I could not yet name.

I let the feeling move through me.

Just days before, I had been held in so much love.

A circle of divine women gathered. Morning light spilling through the studio windows. Time spent in nature, seated on warm stone in the sun, writing to our senses, pulling up a seat to the altar of earth. Hawks overhead. Endless varieties of sage brushing the air. The sound of breath moving in unison. The quiet intimacy that forms when we allow ourselves to be seen. A recognition that I was right on time.

I could feel my body integrating it all. There was a palpable sadness, the kind that arrives after something meaningful ends, almost a coming down. A gentle ache. Perhaps what the city still holds of me.

I teach this all the time, how to feel, how to witness, how to let sensation move through us. And yet sometimes I struggle to allow it myself.

We speak about letting stuck energy flow, about allowing the body to metabolize what it holds. The body’s first wave of feeling is brief if we let it pass through, but we rarely do. We distract. We override. We busy ourselves with doing rather than feeling. We numb.

Later, in a small coffee shop in Echo Park, I scribbled a line from Yeats in my notebook: A weariness comes from those dreamers.

Yes. The quiet fatigue that can follow beauty. The tenderness that comes after touching something luminous. The subtle exhaustion of keeping the heart open when it has been taught to close.

Returning this week, I could feel it all moving within me at once: the wide-eyed twenty-two-year-old who first arrived searching, the one who broke open there, the one who moved with certainty, and the one who wandered in doubt.

The land remembers the versions of ourselves we once were. Beauty and breaking. Becoming and unraveling.

So I kept walking.

The body knows how to process what the mind cannot. Sensation rising, cresting, dissolving. Grief becoming space. Heaviness becoming breath. Nothing truly leaves us. Where would it go? It simply shapeshifts, transforms, and becomes part of the landscape of who we are.

And slowly, spaciousness returned. Not because the feeling disappeared, but because I stopped resisting it.

“There are a thousand ways to kneel and kiss the ground; there are a thousand ways to go home again,” Rumi tells us.

A thousand ways to return.

Sometimes we write.
Sometimes we cry.
Sometimes we pray.
Sometimes we move the body.
Sometimes we call a friend.
Sometimes we make tea.
Sometimes we walk until the earth reminds us who we are.

There is no single path. There are as many ways toward healing as there are human hearts. And sometimes the pause is not stopping, but listening. A stillness found within movement.

The light fell differently this time in Los Angeles.

A love letter rising for this city and the life I have lived here. She has witnessed all of it.

Sometimes we take it for granted when we live inside it. We must step away to see clearly.

The way dusk settles across the layered hills. The familiar scent of spring drifting through a neighborhood cookout. Smoke and sweetness mingling in the evening air. A city shaped by dreamers and drifters, by those who arrive searching and somehow find a place to belong.

I am reminded that what we continually choose shapes the architecture of our lives.

And so I return again to the power in the pause.

To stop.
To feel.
To let the body speak.
To let the land hold what words cannot.

I will begin sharing guided meditations and recorded practices here soon, for those who wish to continue practicing together.

Last summer, I was driving across the country, alone with the road, my white Wrangler, and my wilting monstera plant.

After long days of terracotta desert highways and mountain passes, with memories slipping through the rearview, my sense of distance began to blur somewhere around Iowa. Cornfields stretched on for miles, interrupted only by an almost empty gas tank, rest stops, and bad cups of coffee meant to keep my heavy eyelids from clamping shut.

The radio faded to silence, mostly by choice.
My phone lost service, mostly to my delight.

The landscape flattened into long, repeating blurs of faded mustard and sage, punctuated by clusters of black-and-white shapes, barely lifting their heads as I passed.

Resistance gave way to something quieter, more spacious.

I wanted to keep moving, not to break the spell.

But I remembered the way they danced in that old country kitchen, the way he photographed her without her knowing, the way she stood dreamy-eyed on the bridge.

Before I knew it, my Jeep was following signs to Roseman Bridge.

I hopped out in my worn boots, camera in hand.

And then the sky opened up.

Warm summer rain started pelting down on my skin, mixing with whatever I’d been holding, blurring the lens of my camera. It was sudden and alive, like the sky had made her decision.

Late-summer bugs chirped their season-ending tunes from the tall grass.
The air smelled like damp soil, thick and alive.

I stood there for a moment, face turned up, letting the rain hit my lips, before running under the shelter of the covered bridge.

I had it to myself.

Wooden panels blocked most of the rain. A few drops slipped through the cracks and hit the planks beneath my feet.

The world felt hushed, as if everything had agreed to take a sacred pause.

Something in me softened.

I wasn’t thinking about where I had come from or where I was going. I knew what I was heading toward. I just wasn’t ready to arrive yet.

I wasn’t calculating miles.
I wasn’t imagining what came next.

I was just there. The present moment, unfolding mile by mile, breath by breath.

It felt like the path had disappeared.
And that’s when I felt most inside it.

I’ve long known these words by David Whyte:

“How do you know that you are on your path? Because it disappears. That’s how you know.”

This time, like any great poem, these words met me exactly where I was.

I’m not sure what comes next.

I tried really hard to follow the agenda.
The contrived path.
To check the boxes.

Lately, I’ve been moving through unfamiliar places, learning what it feels like to listen for what’s warm and true in my body, even when I don’t yet have language for it.

Leaning into trust.
Into surrender.

In yoga, we call this īśvara praṇidhāna: devotion and surrender to God. Not in a passive way, but as a willingness to meet what’s here. To stay.

What I’m beginning to understand is that not knowing doesn’t mean I’m lost.
It means I’m paying attention.

There’s a kind of listening that only happens when the usual noise falls away.
When you stop performing a version of yourself you’ve outgrown.
When you stop moving toward things because the world tells you you should.
When you begin to notice what your body does in certain rooms, around certain people, in certain silences.

The yogic path has never been confined to a mat for me.
It’s always lived in the in-between moments, the ordinary ones.

This has been the truest and most challenging form of yoga—the yoga of life.

It shows up in how I speak to myself.
In how I choose what to carry.
In how I listen for what feels steady.

All of it imperfect. All of it practice.

Standing under that bridge, waiting out the rain, I didn’t feel enlightened or healed or certain.

I felt ordinary.
Present.
Quietly okay.

When the rain slowed, I stepped back out onto the road.

My boots were damp.
My hair was messy.
The sky had lightened.

I got back in my Jeep.
And I kept going.

Not because I knew where I was headed.
But because I didn’t need to.

The new year arrives quietly, like the first winter snow, whether we are ready or not.

Even without resolutions or declarations, something in us feels the shift. A turning. An invitation inward. And yet each breath is already offering that same possibility, a chance to arrive right here, in the only moment that truly exists.

So often, without realizing it, we begin from the mind: grand plans, impossible promises, endless lists. From what we think should change. From who we think we should become.

But what if beginning did not require becoming at all?
What if we began from the body?

The body begins differently.

The body does not rush. It does not make promises. It listens first. It can only ever meet life in the present moment. The past and future live on as sensation, memory, and resonance.

I notice this awareness every time I roll out my yoga mat. Before movement, before conscious breath, before setting an intention, there is a moment of arriving. The body yielding to the support beneath me, allowing myself to feel held. To be breathed. Then comes the simple, honest information of sensation. Some days the body feels open and available, an empty vessel ready to receive. Other days it feels guarded or tender, asking for gentleness and care. The practice does not ask me to override any of it. It simply asks me to notice what I notice and meet myself exactly where I am.

The mat becomes a mirror to the rest of my life.
My practice, a prayer.

Not in effort, but in attention. Or, as Mary Oliver so beautifully says,“To pay attention, this is our endless and proper work.”

This past year carried me across many landscapes. What stayed with me was not the movement itself, but the feeling of standing at edges. Each place became a threshold, reminding me that it is often at the edges of land and of heart where we are shaped. On one of those edges, walking the land in Connemara with poet David Whyte, I felt this listening in my body more clearly than I could have named at the time.

What stayed with me most was this: true understanding rarely arrives as a thought. It comes instead as a settling. A quiet recognition beneath language. In the space between movement and stillness. Between effort and ease. A calm inner knowing.

We are taught to start the year strong. To set goals. To decide who we will be by the end of the year. There is nothing wrong with vision or direction. But when we begin only from the mind, we often miss the quieter wisdom beckoning underneath.

The body carries what the year has held. The joys and the heartache. The moments of expansion and the places where we learned to brace. Beginning from the body means letting all of that be here.

In yoga, we speak often about intention, or sankalpa. Not as a goal to achieve, but as a quality to embody. An intention is not something to chase. It is something to remember. It lives closer to sensation than strategy and emerges when we slow down enough to listen. It is the journey from the head to the heart.

Sometimes the intention is simple, though not easy: to breathe, to stay present, to soften where we have been gripping. Most times, it asks for trust when we were hoping for certainty.

I have learned that when I try to force clarity, it slips just out of reach. When I pause and feel my feet on the earth, when I let my breath move freely, when I allow my body to speak in sensation rather than words, something begins to take shape on its own.

This way of beginning changes how we move through the world. Boundaries grow clearer. Desire becomes quieter and more trustworthy. We stop asking what we should do and begin listening for what feels aligned and real.

This does not mean life becomes effortless. It means we meet effort differently, with more compassion, kindness, and a deeper sense of self-trust.

As this year begins, I am not interested in becoming someone new. I am interested in shedding what no longer fits. In listening more closely. In letting my body set the pace. In allowing clarity to arrive in its own time.

In paying attention as an act of devotion.

Wherever you are as this year turns,
may you begin gently.
May you begin honestly.
May you begin from the body.

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I’m writing from a small café/yoga deck/B&B in Kigali, where I’ve spent most of the past three weeks. The morning light settles in a soft pink haze across the distant hills, kites the color of charcoal circling overhead, the kind of light that makes everything feel quieter, softened, almost paused. Yet life is unfolding all around me: the faint sound of elders sweeping the streets, motos weaving into the early commute, the hum of a city waking up.

The backdrop is a thousand hills with a thousand stories. This morning, mine is just one.

This is my second trip to Africa this year. In February, I traveled with my doctor to observe the surgical training program he and his team lead at CHUK, the teaching hospital where Rwandan doctors are being trained to perform complex cervical cancer surgeries. The work is urgent and humbling, a story for another day. Today, I’m sharing reflections about these past few weeks.

Kigali has a way of inviting you in quietly. Not with spectacle, but with presence. With warmth. With a sense that you are meant to be exactly where you are, for reasons I do not yet (and may never fully) understand. But isn’t that life? A slow unfolding, a piece-by-piece interwoven story of moments that once felt random and, over time, reveal themselves as the quiet “aha.”

The Space Between Here and Home

When I boarded the plane to Rwanda from Los Angeles, I thought I was coming here to teach: Yin yoga immersions, somatics, and mind–body tools for teachers, healthcare workers, and community leaders. And all of that has happened.

But beneath the workshops, meetings, and conversations, something quieter has taken shape. Rwanda has become another one of those liminal spaces in my life, not a place I am just passing through but a living in-between. Between old chapters and whatever is quietly unfolding.

I came with a curiosity about how my work in psychology and wellness might meet this place, a country with a history and strength far deeper than I can ever fully grasp. What I did not expect was how much Kigali would begin rearranging me from the inside out.

What unfolded here felt less like a trip and more like a quiet homecoming. Over these weeks, I found myself in the company of people who quickly felt like family, drawn together from different corners of the world and meeting one another with warmth, humor, and generosity.

There was also a quieter thread woven through my time here. A dear friend I met on my first trip to Africa was walking alongside his mother as she lay in a coma, her health steadily declining while I was there. She did not pass until after I left, but the weight of that liminal waiting was very present. To simply show up, to sit beside him in the midst of so much uncertainty, felt like its own kind of practice. A reminder that being with one another, especially in moments of grief, is its own form of yoga.

I came here to teach Yin and Somatics, but really, I came to be in practice with others. To share space. To remember that yoga is so much more than shapes on a mat. It’s in the morning stillness before class, the breath that anchors you, and the long exhale that softens everything open. It’s also in the generosity of being welcomed again and again, into countless homes over these weeks, each one offered with warmth, care, a cup of tea, and an unspoken sense of belonging.

Much of this time was quietly held by the people and spaces that welcomed me in, where practice and teaching unfolded as part of a shared rhythm of care and presence.

But yoga is also in the weaving in and out of bright fabric stalls, choosing vibrant prints with new friends. It’s in evenings alive with rhythm and movement, in art that tells layered stories and bodies moving to music in ways that feel both celebratory and rooted. It’s in the shared meals that stretch into long, deep stories, the laughter that lingers, the everyday gestures of generosity that remind you how deeply connection can take root when you allow it.

The healing here was as layered as the hills. Sound baths that vibrated through subtle layers, movement practices that unwound places I didn’t know were holding, acupuncture sessions that opened new pathways, and theta healing that felt like meeting myself at a deeper layer. I was surrounded by mystics, healers, teachers, friends, each offering a different doorway back into the body and back into presence. Often, it was in the quieter moments between sessions, over cups of impossibly good coffee and unhurried conversation, that the practice revealed itself most clearly, philosophy, life, and soul meeting in unison.

And somewhere in the midst of it all, life kept unfolding in the most everyday-miraculous ways. I extended my stay at the gentle nudge of a dear friend, allowing space for conversations, curiosity, and the early shaping of connections that will find their own rhythm. Each one quietly reaffirmed why I’m drawn back here again and again.

Here, everything feels like yoga.
The connection.
The curiosity.
The generosity.
The willingness to show up as you are.

As for what comes next, I don’t know. And for the first time, maybe ever, I’m not rushing to figure it out. That feels like part of the practice too. To trust the exact timing of this tender life, to stand in the space between here and home, right where my feet are, on soil that has held so much, between what was and what’s becoming. The practice is everywhere, if we’re paying attention.

If you’re curious about the inner landscape that led me here, I wrote about it in a previous piece, The Space Between.

I have been thinking a lot lately about the spaces that shape us.

The space between the breath.
The spaces that take our breath away.
The physical landscape of a place and the felt sense that lives inside the body.
The spaciousness that arrives when life is in flow and the tender, uncertain space in between.
The liminal space.

I am writing this from Rwanda, in the quiet in-between after leading a few teacher trainings here.

Not the big, decisive moments.
Not the dramatic endings or the triumphant beginnings.
I am drawn instead to the quiet stretch that holds everything together.
The part where nothing quite makes sense yet.
The part where you are no longer who you used to be, but not yet who you are becoming.
The part where the body knows long before the mind understands.

For the past few years, my life has been one long in-between.

A marriage ending.
A home uprooted.
A business grown and shed and reborn again.
A return to Self.
A return to places that feel like compass points I somehow felt intuitively called toward.

A motherhood dream undiscovered, even as new ways of mothering quietly emerge.

People often ask how I keep finding myself in these spaces.
Why these long flights and border crossings.
Why new friendships and new classrooms in corners of the world I never expected to touch.
Why I continue to say yes to unfamiliar landscapes and unfamiliar versions of myself.
Why this path keeps unfolding in ways I could never script and that I can only attribute to a plan greater than anything I could have imagined.

I rarely know how to answer in a short sentence.
The truth is simple, not easy. The path chose me. I did not choose it. I simply learned how to listen.

It began long before any of these journeys.
Long before I packed a suitcase or booked a flight or walked into rooms where strangers would become family.

It began in the years when everything in my life was quietly unraveling and then suddenly loudly unraveling all at once.
When I no longer recognized the shape of my days.
When all I had was a pulse of intuition, a few steady practices, and the presence of strong friends, yoga community, and family who kept reminding me:

“You already know. Trust what your body is saying.”

Those who stood in their truth.
Those who showed me how to soften without collapsing.
Those who walked me back to myself with honesty and tenderness, even in the moments — especially in the moments — when I felt most lost.

Over time, the way I move through the world softened.
The way I listen deepened.
The way I show up for myself shifted from effort to honesty.
I stopped performing strength and began honoring tenderness.
I stopped pretending I was fine and let myself unravel.

And it is still a daily dedication, a practice, and a work in progress. As a lifelong student, there is no end. As my dad reminded me today in a phone call from across the world: every ending is a beginning, and every beginning is an end.

Those inner shifts carry me across oceans, across seasons of my life, and into communities that continue to shape me.
They carry me into conversations and collaborations that ground me.
They carry me back to myself in unexpected ways.

What I have learned is that healing—and life—happen in the in-between.
In the spaces where you rebuild not from who you were, but from who you are becoming.
In the moments when the path reveals itself only when you take the next tiny step.
In the small, steady softenings that teach the body it is safe to breathe again.

In yoga, I often remind students that the transition is just as much a part of the posture as the shape itself.
That life, like a pose, is lived in the transitions.
That there is nowhere to get to.
That the practice begins after the pose.

And through all of this I have learned that we do not heal alone.
We heal in community.
We heal in story.
We heal in witnessing and being witnessed.
We heal when someone says, “I know that ache. I know that beauty. I am here too.”

This is why I am writing.
For the in-between moments.
For the questions that do not have tidy answers.
For the spiritual lessons found in travel, curiosity, service, and coming home to the body.
For the experience of starting again, and again, and again.
For the courage it takes to leave a life and build a new one.
For the beauty that saves us, moment after moment.
And mostly for the hope that sharing my story may help one person feel seen.

If you are here, thank you.
I hope these letters help you feel a little less alone and a little more like yourself.

Welcome to The Space Between.
I am so glad you are here.

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