10/19/2026
What we do in a yoga class is not only movement.
🙏🏽
It’s been a while since I have been teaching yoga 🙂 15 years on October 31st since I finished my first yoga teacher training. I am grateful for the all the yogis and yoginis who have trusted me to guide their practice, and continue to support our studio.
But here is some food for thought, and why yoga is ever so important for us.
Introspection isn’t about criticizing ourselves—it is about learning to meet ourselves with compassion and ❤️love.
What we do in a yoga class is not only movement.
The physical practice gives us an opportunity to practice awareness—and awareness can move in three different directions:
Introspection — looking inward.
Can you notice your thoughts, beliefs, emotions, and patterns without immediately defending them or judging yourself?
Can you learn to look at yourself honestly, but also with love and compassion?
Self-awareness doesn’t mean finding everything that is wrong with you.
It means learning to see yourself clearly—and meeting what you find with kindness.
Extrospection — looking outward.
Can you observe the people and world around you without immediately creating a story about what you see?
Can you notice without assuming, judging, or comparing?
Interoception — listening to your body.
Can you recognize what you are physically experiencing—your breath, sensations, tension, ease, temperature, heartbeat—before your mind creates an explanation?
Can you listen to your body without judging it?
Because loving yourself also means learning to listen to yourself.
Sometimes the most loving thing we can do is slow down.
Sometimes it’s challenging ourselves.
Sometimes it’s resting.
Sometimes it’s accepting where we are today instead of constantly trying to become something else.
These are three different ways of paying attention.
And through our yoga practice, we begin to notice how we relate to ourselves, how we relate to others, and how we experience the world around us.
Awareness isn’t simply knowing yourself.
It’s noticing how you respond, how you interpret, how you feel, and how you relate.
And perhaps most importantly, learning to meet yourself with a little more compassion along the way.
Because before we can teach awareness, compassion, or love to anyone else,
we have to practice it within ourselves.
That is part of the real practice of yoga.
See you soon
Espe 🪬
