The room was minimalist by default, not design. Thin polyester mats, meek, malnourished pillows, an armory of folded tables and chairs pushed against one wall, and a single wrinkled lamp standing in the corner. There were no mirrors, no candles, none of the things the spaces I usually teach in would consider the bare minimum.

By every measure of a modern yoga studio, this room was all wrong.

I have worked with people in recovery before, but always one at a time, never as a group, and I went in that afternoon not really knowing what I was walking into. If I’m being honest, I still don’t know much. I couldn’t tell you what got them there, what they were recovering from, or what they had done before they arrived. By the end of the 90 minutes, however, I had stopped trying to work it out, because it had stopped seeming like the point.

They were people on mats, and we were going to do some yoga.

I kept it simple. We began seated, taking long breaths to steady the body, a few quiet minutes to let the mind settle.

Then gentle work for the neck, then the spine, moving in every direction it knows — folding, extending, twisting. I explained we were doing Yin today, and what that meant, the long holds, the stillness that’s harder than it looks, and we moved into butterfly and a seated fold, resting back to the mat between each shape. Cat-cow. Child’s pose. Lizard, then pigeon. Then a long savasana, close to 10 minutes, and several of them fell asleep.

It was during savasana that I felt something stir inside me. The participants were still, some of them already asleep, and I felt the weight of something settle over the room — not their stories, which I didn’t know about, but something underneath the stories that didn’t need telling to be felt.

It took me back to the last morning of my Men’s Retreat last year.

I had gone to the studio earlier than usual, to meditate, and I couldn’t. I kept thinking about what it must have taken for each of my participants to be there — to show up, step forward, and turn toward the light while still inside the dark. And thinking about their darkness, I encountered my own. I had meant to sit with their pain and instead I was sitting with mine, and the line between the two had gone, and I broke.

This class was not the retreat. But the room carried a similar weight, and I could see it in their bodies, in ways I won’t describe here, as they’re not meant to be displayed.

There was nothing in that room arranged to produce this feeling of release. Yet it arrived anyway, unaccompanied, and because nothing had been set around it to help it along, it made me wonder, not for the first time, how much of what we as yoga teachers build into our studios is for the practice, and how much of it is for us.

Afterwards one of the participants came over to tell me the class was exactly what he had needed. These simple words filled something in me I hadn’t known was empty.

Making room

There is research now that suggests there is more to this than a general sense of wellbeing. A clinical trial in Bengaluru added a gentle two-week yoga programme to standard medication for men going through opioid withdrawal. Those who practised reached minimal withdrawal symptoms in a median of five days, compared with nine days for those on medication alone. The yoga was not addiction treatment in itself; its more plausible role was physiological: giving a nervous system caught in withdrawal a way to settle.

Another trial, with adolescents whose gaming had become compulsive, found a similar pattern: less distress, steadier attention, and reduced symptoms observed in people with Internet Gaming Disorder.

Both studies point to an increasingly important way of understanding addiction: not only as a disorder of behaviour but as a disorder of regulation, and that yoga can serve as practical nervous-system training offered at the moment the body most needs it.

None of these interventions took place in a studio. A hospital ward, a school hall — rooms with nothing in them — were enough, and may even have been the point.

In the studios I teach in, we give a great deal of attention to the environment — the mats, the lighting, the playlist, the décor adjusted until everything is right — and I don’t think that is wrong, because the right environment can make a real difference to how an experience lands.

But I have started to wonder whether some of what we build is for the practice at all, or whether it has become the thing we perform — and whether, from the inside, a teacher can even tell the two apart. The wrong room made that difference clear to me in a way the right ones never have.

When the work actually starts, the room falls away, and what is left is the thing itself: people in a space that felt safe enough to be with themselves, finding their way back into bodies that perhaps had felt, for a long time, like somewhere to escape rather than return to.

These are people who would probably never walk into a yoga studio.

That afternoon, they didn’t need one. And neither did I.

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Government officials said roughly 35,000 people had gathered at the historic ceremonial boulevard — a stretch more accustomed to military parades and Republic Day spectacle — to move through the Common Yoga Protocol, the standardised 20-minute sequence the Indian government has spent a decade exporting.

West Bengal’s chief minister put the day’s wider figure in the millions; the state, he said, had logged some 257,000 formal registrations and expected participation across Kolkata to break every previous record. Whether or not the arithmetic holds, the image did its work. The longest day of the year began, as it now reliably does, with the Prime Minister of India on a mat.

This was the 12th edition of a day that did not exist before 2015, and that fact remains the most interesting thing about it.

International Yoga Day is not an ancient observance. It is a young one — proposed by Modi at the UN General Assembly in 2014, endorsed within months by widespread support from member states, and observed every June 21 since, timed to the northern summer solstice which is a date regarded as significant in many yogic traditions.

What began as a single mass class on Delhi’s Rajpath has become something closer to civic infrastructure: a recurring global event with a protocol, a handbook translated into more than 20 languages, an annual theme, and a diplomatic apparatus to carry it abroad.

This year’s theme was “Yoga for Healthy Ageing,” and of all the slogans the day has cycled through, it may be the least cynical.

The framing is timely. The World Health Organization estimates that by 2030, one in six people on the planet will be 60 or older, and the 2026 theme maps cleanly onto the WHO’s Decade of Healthy Ageing.

Modi leaned into it in Kolkata with a line built for the papers — the aspiration, as he put it, to be more flexible at 40 than at 20, more energetic at 50 than at 30, more resistant to lifestyle disease at 70 than at 50.

It is a good line. It is also, beneath the symmetry, a defensible public-health claim: gentle, weight-bearing, balance-oriented movement does in fact measurably reduce fall risk and support mobility in older adults. For once the marketing and the evidence are pointed in roughly the same direction.

A day that travels

The more striking story is geographic. By the government’s own accounting, more than 210 Indian diplomatic missions, coordinated through the Indian Council for Cultural Relations, staged events at nearly 2,500 locations worldwide.

Three days before the solstice, the United Nations’ North Lawn in New York became an open-air studio as some 800 people unrolled mats facing the East River, opened with a collective “Om,” and moved through asana practice as the evening light fell between the Secretariat towers.

Secretary-General António Guterres marked the occasion with a message that folded the day’s theme into the UN’s own ageing agenda — a call, in his framing, to extend care to the older members of the human family.

In the United States, the celebrations spread well beyond the institutional.

In Times Square — perhaps the most improbable yoga venue on earth, and by now one of the most familiar — thousands were expected across the day’s free sessions on the Broadway plazas, this year led by the Bengaluru-based yoga educator H.R. Nagendra.

Washington’s Indian embassy convened practitioners at the Lincoln Memorial. Events were slated for the Texas State Capitol in Austin, for parks in North Carolina, for cities from Seattle to Miami.

In Fairfield, New Jersey, organisers staged what they described as the first US Yoga Day event built specifically to accommodate participants with special needs across age groups — a small detail, but the kind that suggests the day is occasionally being taken at its inclusive word.

Across Europe, missions in Slovakia, Hungary, Portugal, Austria, and the Czech Republic ran their own programmes.

Back in India, the choreography was note-perfect. The defence minister practised in Shillong; chief ministers led sessions in Ahmedabad, Jhansi, and Jaipur’s Albert Hall Museum; the army, navy, and air force ran sessions from high-altitude border posts to naval decks.

By Pangong Lake, an Indo-Tibetan Border Police battalion held a session at over 4,000 metres. In Vadodara, women practised aqua yoga in a swimming pool.

The Common Yoga Protocol is, by design, the same everywhere — that is its entire logic. One sequence, one morning, one nation breathing in formation, and a watching world invited to breathe along.

Pose for the camera

It is worth saying plainly what is easy to miss inside the warmth of the occasion: International Yoga Day is among the most successful soft-power exercises any modern state has run.

India took a practice that had already travelled far beyond its origins and gave it a date, a protocol, a ministry, and an origin story with the Indian state at its centre.

The day does not merely celebrate yoga; it allows India to assert a stronger role in shaping how yoga’s history and origins are understood globally.

Critics in the Indian press have noted the tension that runs underneath the consensus. Abroad, Yoga Day reads as benign cultural diplomacy, endorsed by a UN where India secured a record-breaking 177 co-sponsoring nations out of 193 member states, allowing the resolution to pass unanimously without a formal vote.

At home, it reflects the tides of domestic politics — and this year’s choice of Kolkata was its own kind of statement, coming weeks after the BJP formed a government in West Bengal for the first time.

Red Road has long been a stage for the state to show itself to the rest of the country. Placing the national yoga event there, weeks after a political realignment, turned a wellness programme into something with more layers than the morning light let on.

And there is a quieter critique, the one that should matter more to anyone who actually practises.

A day built on a single synchronised protocol, led from the top, performed once a year and dispersed by sundown, is a strange expression for a practice whose entire premise is daily, internal, unspectacular repetition.

The Prime Minister said as much himself, almost against the grain of the event — that yoga should not be confined to occasions, that it belongs in the ordinary architecture of a life. He is right. The irony is that the largest yoga event on earth is, by construction, an occasion: a magnificent exception to exactly the daily discipline it exists to promote.

Many yoga teachers would regard that debate as secondary. For practitioners, the significance of International Yoga Day lies less in questions of diplomacy than visibility. The annual observance introduces yoga to people who might never otherwise enter a studio or community class, and provides a rare moment when the practice occupies public space rather than the marketplace.

Somewhere in those 2,500 locations, a person who had never tried yoga sat down on a borrowed mat because the whole world seemed, briefly, to be doing the same thing. And some of those people will still be practising in October, long after the cameras have folded their tripods and the hashtags have gone quiet.

That is the part the protocol cannot stage and the soft power cannot claim. It happens later, alone, in a room no one is filming. Which is, of course, where yoga was always supposed to be.

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Throughout history, certain ideas have travelled beyond boundaries and transformed societies. And yoga is one of India’s oldest traditions, whose journey has moved from ancient scriptures to global recognition.

The word yoga – derived from the Sanskrit root yuj, meaning ‘to yoke’ or ‘to unite’ – encapsulates a comprehensive system of philosophical inquiry and practical discipline aimed at the union of the individual self (jīvātman) with the Universal Consciousness (Paramātman).

The earliest seeds of yoga are found in the Ṛig Veda (c. 1500–1200 BCE), where the concept of tapas (austerity) and dhyāna (meditation) are referenced.

These ideas were further developed in the Upaniṣads, which articulated many of the philosophical foundations of yoga. It was, however, the Yoga Sūtras of Mahariṣhi Patañjali (c. 200 BCE–400 CE) that gave Yoga its most systematic framework – the classical aṣṭāṅga yoga or eight-limbed path – comprising Yama, Niyama, Āsana, Prāṇāyāma, Pratyāhāra, Dhāraṇā, Dhyāna, and Samādhi.

Beyond Patañjali, the Bhagavad Gītā presents yoga as a dynamic philosophy for living. Set against the backdrop of the battlefield of Kurukshetra, the dialogue between Lord Krishna and Arjuna offers profound insights into human duty, purpose, and spiritual growth.

Among the various paths described in the Bhagavad Gītā, Karma Yoga (path of selfless action), Jñāna Yoga (path of knowledge), and Bhakti Yoga (path of devotion) are the three great roads to liberation. India, therefore, is not merely the birthplace of yoga – it is the living civilisation from which yoga grew organically, over millennia, as part of its spiritual, cultural, and philosophical fabric.

However, during the period of colonial influence, sections of educated Indian society increasingly came under the influence of Western intellectual frameworks, and traditional systems of knowledge, including yoga, were often viewed as less relevant in the changing world.

At this important time, Swami Vivekananda emerged as a powerful voice who helped people rediscover the value of yoga. Through his teachings and his historic speech at the World’s Parliament of Religions, he brought global attention to India’s spiritual heritage and inspired a new confidence in the timeless wisdom of yoga.

He shared the ideas of vedanta and yoga with people from different parts of the world and showed that yoga was not only a religious practice but also a path for personal growth, inner peace, and self-development.

The respect and appreciation he received abroad helped Indians regain confidence and pride in their own ancient traditions and culture. His lectures in Chicago — and subsequently across the United States and Europe — introduced the West to the concept of Rāja Yoga (the royal yoga of mind-control), Jñāna Yoga (the yoga of intellectual discrimination), Karma Yoga (yoga of selfless service), and Bhakti Yoga (yoga of devotion).

His book Rāja Yoga (1896), based on Patañjali’s Yoga Sūtras, became one of the earliest and most influential introductions of yogic philosophy to Western audiences. In his lectures on Rāja Yoga, Vivekananda presented yoga as a systematic and experiential discipline for exploring the inner dimensions of human consciousness.

For Vivekananda, India’s greatest contribution to humanity lay in its spiritual wisdom, with yoga representing one of its most profound and enduring expressions. His ideas attracted the attention of prominent intellectuals and thinkers of the period, contributing to a broader Western engagement with Indian philosophy.

What is perhaps less celebrated — but equally significant — is the manner in which Vivekananda's work in the West catalysed a renaissance of yoga within India itself.

When he returned to India in 1897, he did not come back empty-handed. He brought with him a renewed self-confidence — a reconstituted sense of pride in India’s spiritual inheritance that had been galvanised by his reception in the West.

Vivekananda delivered lectures across the country, inspiring people to rediscover Indian spiritual traditions. On May 1 1897, Swami Vivekananda founded the Ramakrishna Mission in Belur Math, Howrah — situated on the western bank of the Hooghly river, just a short distance from where Rāmakṛiṣhṇa had passed his final years at Dakshineswar.

This institution became the global headquarters of a movement that propagated the ideals of vedānta, service as worship (Śiva jñāne jīva sevā), and the practical application of yoga philosophy.

Despite being the land of spiritual pioneers like Ramakrishna Paramahansa and Swami Vivekananda, the public visibility of yoga in Bengal gradually reduced with changing times. Yoga gradually moved away from the centre of public life due to changing lifestyles, modern priorities, and social shifts. Yet, its roots remained alive through spiritual institutions and dedicated practitioners.

On September 11 1893, beginning with the immortal greeting, “Sisters and Brothers of America,” Swami Vivekananda introduced the world to India’s spiritual wisdom through his historic speech at the World’s Parliament of Religions.

Now “Sisters and Brothers of West Bengal, in your own home, witness the homecoming of yoga — from Chicago’s global stage to the banks of the Hooghly.” These words carry a deep emotional connection, reminding us of the historic moment when Vivekananda introduced India’s spiritual wisdom to the world. His message travelled from India to the world, spreading the values of yoga, harmony, and inner peace.

What returns to the banks of the Hooghly today is not yoga itself — which never ceased to exist in India — but the renewed global recognition and appreciation of yoga that began with India’s ancient sages and found a new expression through Vivekananda’s message to the world.

It has returned — reinvigorated, re-recognised, and re-established — to the Hooghly riverbank in Bengal, where Belur Math stands to this day as a living monument to that journey. Today, as yoga is practised globally, and as the world recognises yoga as an Intangible Cultural Heritage — it is essential to remember that yoga’s global journey has its axis in Swami Vivekananda’s historic mission.

Today, with the celebration of International Day of Yoga in Kolkata, it feels like a beautiful homecoming of yoga to the land from where its message began its journey to the global stage.

The banks of the Hooghly once again witness people coming together to celebrate a tradition that crossed oceans and returned with greater recognition and respect. This journey from “Chicago to Hooghly” is not merely the journey of a practice; it is the journey of an idea — and indeed an emotion — that continues to connect humanity through balance, compassion, and self-awareness and the pursuit of inner harmony.

This message was written by Prataprao Jadhav, who is India’s Union Minister of State (IC) for Ayush and Minister of State for Health and Family Welfare, to commemorate this year’s International Day of Yoga. The Ministry of Ayush oversees India's traditional medicine and wellness systems (Ayurveda, Yoga, Unani, Siddha, Homeopathy).

International Yoga Day. The world rolls out its mats. And somewhere in me, a voice asks: A day for this?

For me, yoga is not an “occasion”. It’s what I do on a Tuesday morning before anyone is awake. It is the breath I return to when the day falls apart, or when I do. It is so much a part of my every day that the idea of marking it on a calendar feels a little like being asked to celebrate breathing.

So I always come to International Yoga Day feeling already a little awkward. This year, I thought I’d write about it.

Because once I started asking why a day for yoga felt strange to me, a more interesting question surfaced: When the world celebrates yoga, whose version of yoga is being celebrated? And whose yoga is made harder to see?

Wallpaper yoga

International Yoga Day was proclaimed by the United Nations in 2014, after a proposal led by India, and first observed the following year. June 21 was chosen to coincide with the northern summer solstice — a day associated with light and balance. The official language is generous: yoga as an ancient practice of body, mind and spirit, a holistic path to wellbeing, India’s gift to the world.

There is truth in that, and there is real good in it too. The day has returned yoga, at least symbolically, to its Indian origins after decades of Western wellness culture repackaging it as though it sprang fully formed from boutique studios and expensive leggings. It has created free public access. It has introduced the practice to people who would never walk into a studio.

But that visibility comes at a price.

The images that travel on June 21 are, almost without exception, beautiful. Rows of bodies in symmetry. Aerial shots of mats arranged like tilework. Monuments in the background, dignitaries in the foreground, a carefully chosen theme — peace, harmony, unity, health. Mats fill Times Square. Trafalgar Square becomes a temporary shala. In Singapore, people gather under the Supertrees.

I understand the appeal. There is something genuinely moving about people breathing together in public, in cities where most of us live behind screens and deadlines.

But the yoga that photographs well is a particular kind of yoga. Yoga as calm. Yoga as unity. Yoga as wellness.

The practice I know is more than that. It is discipline, discomfort, restraint, self-study, devotion, inquiry.

It is the student who spends most of a class lying down, learning to breathe again after illness. It is the older body moving slowly in a community hall, intelligent in a way no camera rewards. It is the teacher working without sponsorship or production values, in a room where nothing is being sold and no one is watching.

I have stood in those rooms. They are where I have done my most meaningful teaching.

But they are nowhere in the frame on June 21.

This is not a call to reject the day. I don’t think that would be fair. There is value in public ritual, in setting aside the usual barriers of price and membership and body-anxiety so that someone can encounter yoga for the first time without flinching. Celebration is not the problem.

The problem is when celebration leads to simplification.

The more global yoga becomes, the more it has to be translated into a form that travels easily — across cultures and economies, safe enough for sponsors and tourism boards and Instagram.

In that translation, it tends to become wallpaper — pleasant and non-offensive, which sounds lovely until you ask what had to be scrubbed away for it to become so universally palatable.

Caste. Religion. Colonial history. Commercial extraction. The guru scandals.

We are happy to celebrate the practice of breath and posture; we are quieter about its fractures. These are not reasons to abandon yoga. They are reasons to practise it with more honesty.

If the day must reduce yoga to a public message, this year’s theme at least points in the right direction.

The official theme — “Yoga for Healthy Ageing” — offers a corrective approach, if we are willing to take it seriously.

Healthy ageing is not glamorous in the way modern yoga likes to be glamorous. It is not handstands or deep backbends or the performance of peak human capacity.

It is mobility, balance, humility, and adaptation: Can you get down to the floor and back up again? Can you stay in relationship with your body as it changes, and love it for what it can do, without punishing it for what it can’t do?

That is a very different image from the one that dominates my feed. It is also much closer to the heart of the practice — which has never really been about the shape, and always about the quality of attention you bring to it.

The word yoga comes from the Sanskrit root yuj, usually translated as “to yoke” or “to unite.” But union is not uniformity. To unite is not to erase difference; it is to stay in relationship with it.

So let the mats fill Times Square. Let people come through whatever doorway opens first — health, curiosity, grief, ageing, stiffness, the simple need to breathe. I will be glad they came.

But I find I can’t celebrate the reach of yoga without also asking what the reach makes invisible: Whose yoga is being seen. Whose yoga is being sold.

And whose yoga has been there all along, quietly practised on an ordinary Tuesday, or any other day of the year.

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These days, almost every embodied space I enter seems to describe itself as a “safe space”.

Pole studios say it. Yoga studios say it. Retreats, workshops and wellness communities say it too. The phrase is usually offered with good intentions: a promise that people will be welcomed, respected and allowed to arrive as they are.

But the more time I spend in these spaces, the less certain I am that safety is something a room can simply declare.

A space can be warm and still not feel equally easy for everyone to enter. It can be inclusive in principle while still carrying assumptions about whose bodies, desires, movements and ways of expressing themselves belong most naturally there.

I started thinking about this after recent conversations in the pole community, where a controversy over an Israeli poler teaching at an Israeli-owned studio in Singapore reopened familiar claims that pole is political, and that pole studios are meant to be safe spaces. I understood the force of that response. But it also made me pause over the phrase itself.

What do we mean when we call a space safe? Safe from what? Safe for whom? And who gets to decide when that promise has been kept?

I say this as someone who trains in pole as a cisgender man, which means I often experience these spaces from an unusual position. I am inside the space, participating sincerely, while also feeling just out of rhythm with it.

For many of the women I train with, pole genuinely offers something meaningful. I have watched people become more comfortable occupying space with their bodies, supported by an atmosphere that is intentionally affirming: students cheering one another on, instructors encouraging people not to apologise for themselves, and a shared understanding that confidence is something many people have had to reclaim.

This matters especially for women, whose bodies are so often made public objects of judgement. It is powerful to have a space to explore sensuality, confidence, and visibility on their own terms.

So when pole studios describe themselves as safe spaces, I do not think they are being disingenuous.

But safety does not settle onto everybody in the same way. There are moments in class where something is assumed to be instinctive — a movement quality, a way of embodying sensuality, a kind of softness — and I realise I am thinking about it much harder than the people around me seem to be.

I remember learning a simple leg wave combination that was meant to look sensual and “juicy”. The movement required opening the legs into a wide V-shape while creating a fluid wave through the body.

Everyone around me seemed to melt into it naturally, while I found myself struggling with the sheer physicality of it. My hips felt tight, my hamstrings resisted the shape, and instead of softness, I was thinking mechanically: how far should my legs go, where should the weight shift, why does this look effortless on everyone else?

What unsettled me was not simply that the movement was difficult, but how quickly difficulty turned into judgement.

I found myself comparing my body to everyone else’s in the room. Certain lines looked cleaner, certain movements looked more sensual, more effortless, more “right”. Even though nobody was criticising me — in fact, the instructor was incredibly encouraging — I still started criticising myself. I became intensely aware of whether my body looked awkward, stiff, or unnatural next to everyone else moving with ease.

After a while, I realised the room already carried an unspoken idea of what beautiful movement looked like, and I had quietly started measuring myself against it.

That experience made me realise that spaces do not only teach movement. They also teach ways of seeing oneself.

Over time, through repetition, choreography, mirrors, demonstrations, compliments and social affirmation, certain aesthetics begin to feel natural. Some bodies align with those aesthetics more immediately. Others have to negotiate their relationship to them more consciously.

Sometimes this appears in small ways: the language instructors use, the emphasis on softness and fluidity, or cues to embody a particular kind of sensuality.

None of this is necessarily malicious. People are often very kind. Pole is difficult, and part of me still wonders whether this feeling is simply a long way of saying I lack technique.

But technique alone does not fully explain what I am trying to describe. The question is not only why certain movements are difficult for me. It is why some movements feel immediately “correct” the moment they enter the room.

That is where the language of safety becomes more complicated.

A space can be affirming without being neutral. It can be generous without being equally legible to everyone. It can welcome many kinds of bodies while still rewarding particular forms of expression, confidence and beauty more visibly than others.

I notice similar things in yoga spaces too.

Yoga often frames itself as universal: open to everybody, beyond aesthetics, available to any body willing to practise. But even there, certain bodies appear more often in marketing. Flexibility and stillness carry subtle prestige. Calmness has a look. Strength has a look. Ease has a look.

Even a category like “men’s yoga class” is revealing. Such classes are often intended as invitations, and they can be genuinely useful. But the very need to mark men as a separate category suggests that the supposedly universal yoga class already has a default participant in mind. The category shows whom the space has been shaped around, and who is being asked to enter it as an addition.

The visual language may be different from pole, but the feeling is familiar. Some people walk into these spaces and immediately understand what is being asked of them. Others need more time to negotiate their relationship to it.

I do not think pole studios fail as safe spaces. Nor do I think yoga studios are wrong to use the language of welcome and inclusion. These promises are important. They can make rooms less intimidating. They can help people arrive with a little more trust.

But I have started thinking about safety less as something that a space simply declares itself to be, and more as something it gradually produces through repetition: through what is demonstrated, praised, mirrored, corrected, photographed and encouraged over time.

Maybe the more useful question is not whether a space is safe.

It is what kind of safety it offers, whose body recognises that safety most easily, and what the rest of us have to learn — or unlearn — in order to feel that we belong.

In a regulatory filing last week, the athletic apparel company said talks with Wilson had failed after the two sides tried unsuccessfully to settle his campaign to install three directors on Lululemon’s board.

The company said it had delayed filing its definitive proxy statement in the hope of reaching an agreement, but that Wilson’s latest counterproposal marked a “significant departure” from earlier discussions.

The collapse of those talks has pushed the dispute into a more confrontational phase. Lululemon, once the defining name in yoga apparel and now a global performance and lifestyle brand, is trying to convince shareholders that Wilson is not the answer to its current problems.

Wilson, who founded the company in 1998 and owns about 8.6 per cent of its shares, argues that Lululemon has lost the product discipline, cultural sharpness and brand authority that once made it distinctive.

The company’s response was unusually direct.

“His actions have been damaging to the brand and harming the very stakeholders he claims to represent: shareholders, guests, and employees,” Lululemon said in a letter to shareholders. “Electing any of Mr. Wilson’s nominees would endorse his misguided perspectives.”

The board fight comes at a vulnerable moment for Lululemon.

Its shares have fallen sharply over the past year as design missteps, slowing momentum and fading brand appeal have raised questions about whether the company can still command the premium position it built in the yoga and athleisure market. The company has also lost ground to newer rivals such as Alo Yoga and Vuori, both of which have captured parts of the wellness and lifestyle market that Lululemon once dominated.

Wilson’s critique is that Lululemon has lost its “cool” factor. Lululemon’s counterargument is that the founder’s reading of the brand belongs to an earlier era.

According to the company, Wilson’s counterproposal would have allowed him to install three directors of his choosing. That included the immediate appointment of two nominees and a third director selected from a pool he proposed. He also asked for quarterly meetings with incoming chief executive Heidi O’Neill and several directors.

Wilson said he believed the two sides were moving towards a settlement and that the board had not made clear where the remaining disagreements lay. He said he remained willing to be constructive and rejected the idea that he was trying to dictate strategy to the company.

“The notion that I want to dictate strategy to Lululemon is just wrong,” Wilson said, adding that his nominees would bring brand and marketing expertise at a time when the company needs it.

Lululemon is urging shareholders to support its own three directors up for election, including former Levi Strauss chief executive Chip Bergh. The company described its nominees as “vastly superior” to Wilson’s picks and said shareholders should back the board as it works through a broader turnaround.

That turnaround now rests partly on Heidi O’Neill, the former Nike executive named as Lululemon’s incoming chief executive last month.

Her appointment was intended to signal a reset after the departure of former CEO Calvin McDonald, whose exit followed a period of slowing growth and concern over the company’s competitive position.

While some investors have praised O’Neill’s background, the company’s shares fell after her appointment, suggesting that the market remains unconvinced that leadership change alone will solve Lululemon’s deeper problems.

The fight has also unfolded alongside pressure from activist investor Elliott Investment Management, which built a stake of more than US$1 billion last year and had urged the company to consider former Ralph Lauren executive Jane Nielsen for the chief executive role. Elliott has not publicly commented on O’Neill’s appointment.

For Lululemon, the proxy battle is not simply a governance dispute. It is a contest over authorship.

Few brands have done more to shape the commercial image of modern yoga than Lululemon. It helped turn the studio uniform into everyday clothing, and yoga apparel into a global category.

But the very success of that expansion has made the brand harder to define. What began as a company closely associated with yoga teachers, boutique studios and a certain kind of aspirational practice is now a much broader retail business competing across performance wear, lifestyle fashion and wellness culture.

That is why Wilson’s campaign carries symbolic weight. His argument is not only that the board needs different directors, but that Lululemon has drifted from the instincts that once made it influential. The company’s response is equally pointed: that returning power to its founder would not restore relevance, but trap the brand in an older understanding of itself.

This is the larger challenge facing Lululemon. Yoga gave Lululemon its original authority, but the market around it has changed. Wellness is now broader, more fragmented and more style-driven. Alo Yoga has turned studio culture into celebrity-coded lifestyle marketing. Vuori has built strength around performance, comfort and a softer California sensibility. Lululemon, once the category-maker, now has to prove that it can still lead rather than simply defend.

That makes the phrase “outdated perspectives” more than a corporate insult. It is the company’s attempt to draw a line between its founder’s past and its own future.

Shareholders will decide next month whether Wilson’s nominees deserve seats at the table. But the more difficult question for Lululemon will not be settled by a vote alone. The company has to show that it still knows what it stands for, who it is speaking to, and why consumers should desire it in a market full of brands fluent in the language it helped invent.

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This time, the claim comes through Linda Carl, a certified yoga instructor turned critic, whose new book, Yoga Unveiled: My Spiritual Journey from Darkness to Light, published this month, argues that yoga is not neutral, that its postures and breathing practices are acts of devotion to Hindu gods, and that Christians who practise yoga may unknowingly be opening themselves to demonic forces.

It is tempting, especially as a yoga teacher, to dismiss this entirely.

I do not think we should.

Not because I agree with the claim that yoga is occult, or that Hindu gods are demons, or that every person moving through a sun salutation is participating in worship against their will. I find those claims theologically loaded, culturally troubling, and deeply unfair to the many Hindu, South Asian, secular, Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, agnostic, and non-religious practitioners who encounter yoga in wildly different ways.

But there is something underneath the panic that is worth taking seriously.

Yoga is not “just stretching.” It never has been. It carries history, philosophy, ritual, language, commerce, colonial distortion, spiritual aspiration, and modern reinvention. The problem is not that critics say yoga has meaning. The problem is that they often reduce that meaning into threat.

And that is where the conversation becomes less about yoga and more about fear.

Yoga is not one thing

One of the most persistent mistakes in public debates about yoga is the assumption that yoga refers to a single, fixed, unchanging practice.

It does not.

Yoga has been shaped over centuries across religious, philosophical, ascetic, devotional, therapeutic, nationalist, colonial, commercial, and global wellness contexts. The yoga taught in a boutique studio in Singapore, a temple setting in India, a physical education class, a gym, a Catholic parish hall, an ashram, or a physiotherapy-adjacent movement programme may share vocabulary, but they are not the same event.

This does not mean yoga is empty. It means context matters.

A posture may have a Sanskrit name. A breathing technique may have roots in older traditions. A mantra may carry devotional content. These things deserve to be understood, not erased. But understanding is not the same as assuming that every contemporary use of those practices automatically performs the same religious function across all settings and intentions.

That leap is where nuance collapses.

In modern yoga, the same shape can be taught as prayer, as exercise, as breath awareness, as nervous-system regulation, as cultural inheritance, as performance, as therapy, as community practice, or as something more ambiguous and personal.

That ambiguity is precisely why teachers have a responsibility to be clear about what they are offering.

It is also why blanket condemnation does not help.

Downward dog, hidden demon

If there is a legitimate critique to make of modern yoga, it is not that students are secretly worshipping deities through lunges and forward folds. It is that yoga spaces are often far too casual about the meanings they borrow.

Sanskrit is used without translation. Chants are offered without context. Mudras, chakras, mantras, “energy work,” and “the universe” are sometimes dropped into classes as aesthetic accessories, stripped of lineage, philosophy, or theological weight. Teachers repeat phrases they have inherited from trainings without asking where those phrases come from, what they mean, and whether they belong in the room they are teaching.

That is a real issue.

But it is not solved by calling yoga demonic. It is solved by better education.

A yoga teacher should be able to explain what they are teaching and why. If a class includes chanting, students should know what is being chanted. If Sanskrit is used, teachers should not hide behind mystique. If a practice draws from Hindu, Buddhist, tantric, or other philosophical frameworks, that should be acknowledged with respect rather than smuggled in as vague wellness language.

Likewise, if a class is secular, movement-based, and non-devotional, teachers should be able to say that plainly.

Clarity is not a threat to yoga. It is part of ethical teaching.

Faith deserves respect. So does yoga’s origin

For Christians who feel uncomfortable practising yoga, that discomfort should not be mocked. Religious boundaries matter. If someone’s faith leads them to avoid chanting, deity imagery, certain forms of meditation, or yoga altogether, that is their right.

No student should be pressured into a practice that conflicts with their conscience.

But respecting Christian discernment does not require demonising Hinduism. It does not require describing Hindu gods as demonic entities. It does not require presenting an entire spiritual tradition as a trap for the unsuspecting.

That is where critique crosses into something more troubling.

Yoga has already travelled through a long history of extraction and distortion. It has been repackaged for Western bodies, sold through wellness capitalism, stripped of its Indian roots, and then periodically condemned for the very spiritual associations that Western markets first diluted for mass appeal.

There is an uncomfortable pattern here: take the parts of yoga that are useful, sanitise them, commercialise them, and then, when anxiety returns, cast the tradition itself as dangerous.

That is not discernment. That is cultural arrogance wearing religious concern.

Still, those of us who teach yoga have our own work to do.

We cannot insist, only when convenient, that yoga is an ancient, profound, transformative practice — then turn around and say it is merely stretching when challenged. We cannot borrow the authority of tradition for marketing and abandon the complexity of tradition when questioned.

Yoga is not neutral in the sense that nothing is neutral. A gym is not neutral. A church is not neutral. A school is not neutral. A newspaper is not neutral. Every space carries values, assumptions, power, language, and history.

The question is not whether yoga has meaning. The question is whether we are honest about the meanings we bring into the room.

For some teachers, yoga is explicitly spiritual. For others, it is somatic, anatomical, psychological, devotional, philosophical, therapeutic, or communal. Many classes contain elements of several at once. That is not inherently wrong. But it does require transparency.

Students should not have to decode what kind of space they have entered.

They should know whether they are being asked to chant, pray, breathe, move, meditate, sweat, rest, explore philosophy, or simply pay attention to their bodies.

And teachers should stop relying on vagueness as a shield.

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Fear narrows the conversation

What concerns me most about arguments like Carl’s is not only that they misunderstand yoga. It is that they make meaningful conversation harder.

There are serious questions worth asking about yoga today.

Who owns yoga? Who profits from it? Who gets represented? Who gets erased? How should teachers handle Sanskrit? What is cultural appreciation and what is appropriation? What are the limits of trauma-informed language? What does “spiritual but not religious” actually mean in a class setting? How do we teach breathwork responsibly? How do we separate evidence-based claims from wellness fantasy?

These are not small questions. They deserve better than panic.

When yoga is framed as darkness, danger, or deception, the discussion becomes moral theatre. There are heroes and villains, saved and unsaved, light and darkness. But yoga, like most human practices, lives in more complicated territory.

It can heal and harm. It can deepen self-awareness and inflate ego. It can support faith, conflict with faith, or exist outside religious categories altogether. It can be taught with integrity or with carelessness. It can be a site of liberation, commerce, community, confusion, beauty, appropriation, discipline, and escape — sometimes in the same room.

That complexity is the story.

The responsible response to yoga is not blind defence. It is discernment.

Ask what is being taught. Ask who is teaching it. Ask what language is being used. Ask what traditions are being referenced. Ask whether students are being informed, pressured, manipulated, or respected. Ask whether the teacher understands the material beyond performance and branding.

These are fair questions.

But discernment should open the mind, not close it. It should make us more precise, not more afraid.

For Catholics and other Christians, that may mean choosing movement-based classes without chanting or devotional content. It may mean avoiding yoga entirely. It may mean finding teachers who are clear about their framing. It may mean adapting practices in ways that honour one’s own faith tradition.

For yoga teachers, it means being more accountable: less vague mysticism, more context; less borrowed authority, more humility; less aesthetic spirituality, more honesty.

And for the wider public, it means resisting the lazy drama of declaring yoga either a sacred cure-all or spiritual poison.

Yoga does not need to be defended as perfect. It is not.

But it also does not deserve to be reduced to darkness.

The more honest position is this: yoga is powerful because it is layered. That is why it should be taught carefully, practised consciously, and discussed with enough intelligence to hold more than one truth at a time.

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Sometimes it is phrased as a lack of strength; other times, it is a blunt “I can’t do that.” But behind the physical critique lies a singular, pervasive assumption: that yoga is for someone who is “pre-qualified” — usually a woman, who looks a certain way, and who is naturally flexible.

Ok, I can see why that is.

If a student’s primary exposure to the practice is filtered through the high-gloss curation of social media or the aspirational aesthetics of studio marketing, they see only the “shape.”

And these shapes are almost exclusively inhabited by bodies of a certain type, moving through settings stripped of real-world constraints. Over time, the image becomes the requirement. By the time a practitioner enters the room, they have already decided whether they belong to the narrative.

This is where the first misalignment begins.

The visible vs the vital

In most modern classes, we do practice postures. We move, we hold, we balance, and we stretch. This is the physical work of asana, and the clinical data supporting its efficacy is now substantial. Research published in journals like The Lancet and Frontiers in Human Neuroscience consistently highlights yoga’s impact on the nervous system—improving sleep quality, mitigating chronic stress, and enhancing structural mobility.

But the posture is merely the container.

In the Yoga Sutras, Patanjali defines asana not as a contortion, but simply as a “seat”—a stable, comfortable position intended to facilitate the settling of the mind.

The ultimate objective is not the depth of the fold, but the quality of the attention. It is the practice of citta vritti nirodha: the quieting of the mental fluctuations that occur while the body is under tension.

That work is invisible.

In a classroom setting, it manifests in the micro-habits of the practitioner. It is the student who holds their breath to find stability; the one who overrides a joint’s warning to satisfy an ego-driven alignment; the one who exits a pose early and labels the departure a failure.

None of these moments have anything to do with the length of one’s hamstrings. They have everything to do with habit, conditioning, and our relational response to discomfort.

Environment as architecture

When a student decides yoga is “not for them,” they are often responding to the variables—the temperature, the playlist, the teacher’s cadence—rather than the practice itself.

There is no singular, monolithic version of yoga to accept or reject.

The experience is shaped by the environment. A class can be too technical, too demanding, or too loosely structured for a novice nervous system.

Conversely, a well-held class can act as a steady container, offering a blend of instructional clarity and invitational space.

These differences matter more than the student’s innate ability.

The shadow of “tuning in”

There’s something else that’s less talked about in teaching and practice — and that is that there is another layer to the barrier of entry that remains largely unexamined in the wellness industrial complex.

For those navigating injury, chronic illness, or the invisible weight of grief, the instruction to “tune into the body” is not a neutral request.

If the body has become a site of trauma or betrayal, slowing down can be an act of radical vulnerability. In these instances, the simplistic promise that yoga is a “sanctuary” ignores the reality of what somatic excavation requires.

This is where the competence of the facilitator becomes the defining factor. A trauma-informed teacher understands that agency—the permission to step back, to modify, or to opt-out entirely—is not an interruption of the practice. It is the practice.

When I teach, this shows up in cues like giving the option to keep your eyes open during seated meditation or savasana, or to come out of a pose if it starts to feel too much for the nervous system.

I provide the space for exploration, but it is ultimately the student, ie you, who has to decide what is right for you, in that moment.

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The radical act of beginning

For the beginner, the obstacle is rarely technical. It is the belief that there is a “correct” way to exist on the mat.

In practice, most people benefit from a triplicate of basics: simplicity, consistency, and curiosity.

Ten minutes of focused breathing is often more transformative than an hour of forced movement. Over time, the body adjusts, but more importantly, the attention stabilises. The practitioner begins to distinguish between the “burning” of effort and the “pinching” of strain—a discernment known in Sanskrit as viveka.

Physically, the practice will always be a moving target. Some days offer steadiness; others, a disjointed restlessness. Mentally, the expectation of immediate calm is often a false promise. For many, quiet brings the noise of the mind into sharper relief. This is not a failure of the method; it is merely an unfamiliarity with the self.

Which brings us back to the original question of flexibility.

If yoga is defined by the aesthetic of the pose, it will remain a luxury for the few. But if it is understood as a technology or system for working with the breath, the mind, and the nervous system, the entry point changes entirely.

Yoga does not require you to fit into its shapes. It only wants you to stay long enough to hear what your body is saying when the noise finally stops.

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The result is a physiological mismatch. While the speed of information has accelerated, as humans, our biological capacity to handle it remains unchanged.

I notice it most in the room when I teach. People come in probably more stressed than they realise. I see it in their shoulders, how quickly they move, how hard they push in the first few minutes, how difficult it is to stay still even for a breath.

Across the fields of neuroscience and psychology, the diagnosis is consistent. When stress becomes chronic, it narrows our cognitive field. Attention fragments. Sleep falters. Decision-making skews reactive.

Over time, the body’s baseline — from immune function to energy recovery — begins to shift toward a state of permanent defense.

Stimulus interruptus

This is the context in which a movement practice becomes essential. Yoga is often marketed as an escape or a form of exercise, and while that’s true, in my experience, it functions as something more practical: a way of interrupting a stress cycle that would otherwise continue unchecked.

On days when I don’t practise, the difference is noticeable. My attention is more distracted. My fuse is shorter. Small things feel bigger than they should. There is less space between what happens and how I respond to it.

The elements of a practice are simple — breath, movement, attention — but they works on the system directly. Slowing the breath changes how the body regulates. Moving with some degree of control creates contrast to the rest of the day. Holding attention, even briefly, counters the constant pull outward.

These effects are not personal to me. Regular practice has been shown to reduce sympathetic activation — the “fight or flight” response — while increasing parasympathetic tone, the system’s primary engine for recovery and restoration. As heart rate variability improves, a clearer, steadier quality of attention often follows.

Mind the gap

This shift has implications that extend well beyond the mat. Under sustained pressure, the human brain becomes more reactive and less patient. The ability to pause — to notice a stimulus and choose a response rather than simply reacting to it — is not an innate personality trait; it is a trained capacity.

One of my favorite quotes, from Viktor Frankl, sums it up: “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”

To me, yoga is the training ground for that capacity. It develops what researchers call interoception: an internal literacy that allows a practitioner to recognise tension, fatigue, or agitation in the body before it escalates into burnout.

In a professional culture that rewards speed and constant engagement, the value of a practice that demands deceleration is easy to overlook.

Yet, this capacity to step out of the noise, even briefly, may be the very thing that allows the rest of our lives to function with clarity.

The question facing the modern practitioner is not whether yoga is a “nice-to-have” hobby. It is whether we have any other system in place that does the work of nervous system regulation as reliably.

For many — well, at least for me — the answer is clear: the mat isn’t where we go to hide from the world — it’s where we go to prepare for it.

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This year, it was reported that more than 1.3 million people applied for the 2027 London Marathon. That is roughly 1.8% of the entire UK adult population, a number that has more than doubled since 2024.

We are a culture that values the grind—measuring our worth in pace, distance, and the high-impact efficiency of a good run. It is the ultimate democratic exercise: no need for any fancy gear, just a pair of shoes, a stretch of pavement, and the willingness to keep going.

But as a former journalist who spent years chasing deadlines and now views the world through the lens of movement science, I can’t help but wonder: Are we running ourselves into shape, or just into a very expensive relationship with a physiotherapist?

When it comes ageing well, mobility rarely gets the same attention as strength, speed, or endurance, but it shapes almost everything we do. It is what lets us move through daily life — reaching, bending, climbing, turning, getting up and sitting down. Most of us only notice its value when it’s gone.

Having a full range of motion is not a luxury; it is a mechanical necessity for staying safe as we age. And while we often think of running as the gold standard for fitness, its repetitive nature can, ironically, make us stiffer and less functional over time.

Mobility vs mileage

Running is celebrated for its cardiovascular benefits, its ability to elevate the mood, and its capacity to build bone density. But it is fundamentally a linear, repetitive sport.

Mechanical efficiency in running actually rewards a certain lack of flexibility; the “spring” in your step depends on tendons and muscles that don’t give too much.

For the athlete, that is a tactical trade-off. For the human being trying to live a long, functional life, it can become a trap. By focusing solely on pounding the pavement, we often shorten the very muscle groups—the hamstrings, hip flexors, and calves—that need elasticity to absorb the shocks of movement.

Yoga offers the necessary counterbalance. Unlike the repetitive stress of linear movement, yoga incorporates multi-planar stretching, lengthening muscles and restoring the "slide and glide" to tissues that accumulate stiffness with age.

Recent research from Harvard Health found that adults who had never practised yoga showed marked improvements in muscle strength and endurance after just eight weeks of twice-weekly sessions. By holding postures until we feel the “stretch” sensation, we aren’t just pulling on muscles; we are recalibrating our nervous system to recognise safety in deeper ranges of motion.

After the finish line

In my own classes, I often see students arrive with “running-brain”—a mindset focused on “doing it right” and hitting a metric or goal.

They look at the shapes regular practitioners make and think they are beyond their ability, but yoga has never been only about the external form. When we move into a posture, we are not just twisting into a shape; we are noticing tension, noticing the breath, and noticing the way our mind resists or surrenders.

Every asana becomes a mirror. When the mind is less distracted, the body becomes less guarded, allowing us to restore elasticity to the joints.

Ultimately, the best exercise is the one you will actually do with consistency. If your goal is to navigate your 80s with the same agency you had in your 30s, the way you move or train your body must evolve.

Mobility is what keeps life negotiable — the ability to move through the day with ease, range, and confidence. Running may get you to the finish line faster, but yoga keeps you moving in the long run.

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The problem was not the clothes. It was not even the trip itself.

It was the feeling that she was leaving too many things unresolved — an inbox still active, a work week not properly closed, the low drone of work continuing in some corner of her mind.

Yes, she was about to go on an amazing holiday, but what she was really confronting was something less straightforward: how difficult it can be to transition from a day organised around urgency into one that’s about being still.

Many people imagine that a retreat begins on arrival, that when you step off a ferry or out of an airport transfer, you’ll simply enter a calmer state, as though relaxation were a matter of geography.

In practice, that’s not how the body works. The nervous system doesn’t instantly register that the week is over just because the view has changed.

I’m guilty of this myself. I’ll arrive at a beautiful location and still be checking my socials at the check-in desk. Usually on the first or second day, I’ll wake in the night, not because anything is wrong, but because my body has not yet understood that it is no longer being asked to anticipate the next demand.

If the beginning of your retreat feels strangely uncomfortable, even disappointing, it’s often because we mistake the process of transition for failure. We expect immediate peace when what is actually happening is decompression.

Rest assured

There is research to support this phenomenon: A 2013 study in the Journal of Happiness Studies, which tracked employees during and after vacations, found that health and well-being improved quickly during time away, but it peaked only around the eighth day, and then returned rapidly toward baseline within the first week of work resumption.

The study also found that what mattered most was not simply the duration of the holiday; the quality of the experience itself — relaxation, pleasure, a sense of control, and the ability to savour time away were all strongly associated with improved overall well-being.

A 2024 study of more than 3,000 doctors in the United States found that taking more vacation and staying away from their inboxes while away were associated with lower burnout, while spending 30 minutes or more each vacation day on work was associated with higher burnout.

In other words, time off is not especially restorative if you’re mentally still chained to your desk.

This is why preparing for a retreat has less to do with packing than most people think. The real work begins before departure, finishing what can be finished, deciding what cannot, and resisting the temptation to enter the retreat as though you’re just slipping out of life for a few days without any preparation needed.

So, how do we prepare? Here are some tips:

I. The protocol of practical detachment

Research in the Journal of Occupational Health Psychology suggests that “detachment”—the mental distance from work—is a skill that must be practised. It is not something that happens to you; it is something you build.

• Map your coverage: Burnout is closely linked to “inbox creep.” Before you leave, identify the specific tasks that will trigger anxiety if left unmonitored. Arrange for literal coverage—not just an automated “Out of Office” reply, but a colleague who has the authority to make decisions in your absence. True detachment requires the knowledge that the world will not stop turning because you have.

• Audit the open loops: David Allen, the productivity theorist, speaks of “open loops”—anything that has your attention that doesn’t belong where it is. Spend an hour listing every unresolved professional and personal “to-do.” Decide what can be finished, what must be deferred, and what can be consciously abandoned. The goal is to clear the mental cache.

II. The physiological downshift

If your daily life is built around high-intensity stimulus, the sudden silence of a retreat can feel like a crash. The body benefits from being introduced to a change in tempo gradually.

• The caffeine taper: If your morning is fueled by three espressos, a “detox” retreat will likely begin with a three-day headache. Begin reducing your intake five days out. By the time you arrive, you want your nervous system to be resting on its own merits, not propped up by stimulants.

• The circadian shift: Most retreats begin early. If you are a habitual midnight scroller, the 6am wake-up call will feel like a violation. Shift your sleep and wake times by 15 minutes each day during the week prior. You want to arrive in alignment with the sun, not in a battle with your alarm clock.

III. The ideology of the unreachable

In Singapore, busyness is often moralised. We have become so accustomed to being reachable that peace feels like a transgression.

• Define your availability: Be honest about how connected you intend to remain. If you must check email, schedule a “window”—30 minutes at 4pm, for example—and communicate that window to your team. A 30-minute boundary is far more restorative than a day spent in a state of “constant, low-level availability.”

• The ritual of the laptop: On the evening before you leave, physically clean your workspace. Close every tab. Power down the machine. This is a sensory signal to the brain that the “active” phase is over.

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If you arrive and your mind is still racing, don’t overthink it. It means only that you are arriving in stages. The body is unwinding from one rhythm and learning another; the mind is giving up its loops one by one.

To understand this is to become more realistic about the purpose of the space. A retreat is not a magical setting where stress evaporates on contact. It is a structured opportunity to recover.

And that recovery begins with the deliberate labour of making room.

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