On Bird of Paradise, losing my practice, and the extraordinary experience of coming home to myself.
There are certain things in life that you don't realize you're going to lose until you try to reach for them again.
For me, one of those things was a bird.
Not a real bird, of course. Although, as this story unfolds, you'll find that the distinction becomes increasingly less important.
I'm talking about Svarga Dvijasana, Bird of Paradise. An extraordinarily demanding yoga posture that requires strength, balance, flexibility, and a rather unreasonable amount of trust in yourself.
For a long time, it was mine.
And then, somewhere along the way, it wasn't.
But I'm getting ahead of myself.
Into the Fire
My relationship with yoga has never been entirely linear.
For years, it was something I moved toward and away from. Seasons of extraordinary devotion followed by seasons when my mat collected dust. I loved the practice, certainly. I believed in it. But believing in something and consistently showing up for it are two very different things.
Then came Manipura.
It was 2023, the year I would eventually move to Maui. I was looking to intensify my physical practice, to try something heated, something that would challenge me beyond the familiar rhythms of the yoga I already knew.
Enter Baptiste-style power yoga.
If you've never practiced this particular style, allow me to introduce you to the furnace.
They are not messing around over there.
Manipura is aptly named for the third chakra, traditionally associated with the solar plexus, personal power, and the element of fire. I can assure you that you will locate every muscle in your abdomen within approximately fifteen minutes of entering that room.
The heat is relentless. The sequences are demanding. And the practitioners? Some of the strongest, most dedicated yogis I've ever had the privilege of practicing alongside.
I was hooked almost immediately.
There was something intoxicating about being in that environment. The collective effort. The sweat. The concentration. The extraordinary experience of discovering that your body has another gear, and then another one after that.
And somewhere in that furnace, I found myself regularly attending the class of a woman whose reputation for core-heavy sequences is, frankly, well deserved.
A total madwoman.
I say that with the utmost affection and admiration.
She is the kind of teacher who asks something extraordinary of you and somehow makes you believe you might actually be able to deliver.
I would hear her call out variations as we moved through the standing sequences.
"If you have your Bird, you can find that now."
Bird?
What bird?
I was usually so consumed by my own breath, alignment, and immediate survival that I barely looked up to see what anyone else was doing.
Until one day.
The First Flight
We were somewhere around Extended Side Angle.
I had taken the bind, wrapping one arm beneath my thigh and the other behind my back, finding the clasp of my hands. Chest to the sky.
My teacher happened to be standing nearby.
"Go for Bird."
I looked at her.
"I don't even know Bird."
What happened next remains one of the most remarkable experiences I've ever had with a movement teacher.
Without hesitation, she guided me into the posture.
She positioned herself, supported my body, and maneuvered me through a transition that I would never have attempted on my own. It was skillful, intuitive, and almost choreographic in its execution.
And suddenly, there I was.
Standing on one leg, the other lifted and extended, my arms bound around it, my body arranged into a shape I hadn't even known existed moments earlier.
In the heat. In the exhaustion. In a room full of people who seemed to possess superhuman strength.
I was doing it.
But what stayed with me wasn't simply the accomplishment.
It was the way she had seen the possibility before I had.
She didn't need me to know the posture. She needed me to trust that I could find it.
And for one extraordinary moment, I did.
I became completely obsessed.
I practiced it whenever I could. I studied the mechanics. I wanted to understand how to lift, how to extend, how to balance without fighting myself.
It wasn't until I looked up the posture afterward that I discovered something rather wonderful.
Bird of Paradise wasn't named for a bird in flight.
It was named for a flower.
And that is where this story begins to take on a life of its own.
Paradise, Everywhere
Not long afterward, I traveled to Hawaii for a group thirtieth-birthday celebration.
And the flowers were everywhere.
Everywhere.
The brilliant orange and blue blooms, rising from their long green stems like tropical creatures preparing to take flight.
Birds of Paradise.
Suddenly, this strange, difficult posture that had captured my imagination back home was blooming all around me.
I practiced it everywhere I could.
On the beach. Against the mountains. In the warm Hawaiian air.
I was thirty years old, standing at the threshold of an entirely different chapter of my life, although I couldn't possibly have understood that at the time.
On that trip, I would meet a person who would become an enormous part of the years that followed.
And one morning, at the summit of Haleakalā, I found my Bird.
There is a photograph from that morning that became the centerpiece of my Instagram.
Me, balanced in Bird of Paradise, high above the island, surrounded by that extraordinary volcanic landscape.
Looking back at that photograph now, I recognize something in the woman standing there.
Not perfection. Not some enlightened, untouchable version of myself.
Something much simpler.
Possibility.
She was adventurous. Strong. Curious. Unafraid to go somewhere unfamiliar and see what might happen.
She was standing at the beginning of a story she hadn't yet lived.
And she had absolutely no idea how much life was about to ask of her.
The Things We Lose Along the Way
The years that followed were not gentle.
I moved to Maui. I built a life. I worked hard, sometimes far too hard. There was the relentless pressure of work, the financial stress of living in the most expensive place on planet earth, the exhaustion that accumulates when your livelihood depends so heavily on your own body and energy.
There was love. There was uncertainty. There were things that worked and things that fell apart.
And then my father became sick.
And then my father died.
There are ways that grief changes a person that have very little to do with crying.
Sometimes it changes your relationship with time. With ambition. With your body. With the things that once brought you joy.
Sometimes the energy that once went toward becoming stronger is redirected entirely toward getting through the day.
My personal yoga practice suffered.
Not all at once. Not dramatically.
It simply became less central to my life as other things demanded more of me.
And Bird of Paradise is not a posture that waits patiently for your return.
It requires maintenance. Open hips and hamstrings. Shoulder mobility. Deep core strength. Balance. Coordination. A willingness to enter a challenging shape without becoming overwhelmed by it.
You don't simply wander back onto your mat after months of inconsistency and expect your body to remember everything.
At least, I couldn't.
I had lost my Bird.
And for a while, I didn't particularly care to go looking for it.
There is another layer to this story that I hesitate to write about, although it feels dishonest to leave it out.
My father's nickname was Bird.
Bird.
And here I was, years after first discovering a posture called Bird of Paradise, having lost both my father and, in a much smaller and entirely different sense, my ability to find that shape.
My father had gone to what so many people call paradise.
And I had lost my Bird.
I don't share this because I believe the universe arranged these events into some elaborate message meant specifically for me.
Life is far too complex, and grief far too sacred, to reduce either to a convenient spiritual explanation.
But I do believe that human beings are meaning-making creatures.
We find connections between the things we love, the things we lose, and the things that somehow find their way back to us.
And sometimes a coincidence can be beautiful without needing to be anything more than a coincidence.
A Different Kind of Devotion
There were other seasons of devotion along the way. Other studios, other teachers, other periods when I found myself returning wholeheartedly to the practice, only to drift from it again when life changed around me.
For a while, I mistook that inconsistency for a failure of commitment. Now, I'm beginning to understand that returning is its own kind of practice.
Perhaps devotion isn't measured only by how long we manage to stay, but also by our willingness to begin again.
Eventually, I began practicing again.
Not with the same intensity that had once driven me into a heated room several times a week.
Something quieter was happening.
I was returning to my mat with a different understanding of what I needed from it.
I had spent years approaching yoga through the lens of what my body could accomplish. How deeply I could fold. How long I could hold. How much strength I could cultivate.
And I still love those things.
I love the athleticism of yoga. I love the extraordinary intelligence required to organize a human body into complicated shapes. I love the feeling of working toward something that initially seems impossible.
But I was beginning to understand that the posture itself was only one part of the practice.
The other part was everything happening inside me while I attempted it.
What happened when I encountered resistance?
Did I become frustrated? Did I immediately assume I couldn't do something? Did I grip harder, force more, hold my breath?
Could I recognize tension without automatically creating more of it?
Could I remain present when something became uncomfortable?
Could I approach a challenge with assurance rather than apprehension?
These questions began to interest me more than whether I could achieve a particular shape.
Because life had already given me plenty of opportunities to practice discomfort.
I had endured heartbreak, burnout, uncertainty, and a kind of grief that permanently altered the landscape of my life.
I knew, by then, that I could survive difficult things.
What I wanted to learn was how to move through them without always bracing for impact.
And that is where yoga began to take on a different meaning.
I wanted my practice to become a vehicle for understanding my own reactions to pain.
My own resistance.
My own tendency to grip when I might be better served by softening.
I believe that, through repetition and attention, we can change our habitual responses. That practicing steadiness in the body can help us recognize steadiness elsewhere. That learning to breathe through a demanding posture can become one small rehearsal for meeting difficulty without immediately surrendering to fear.
Not because yoga makes life painless.
But because it gives us somewhere to practice how we respond when it isn't.
Back Into the Furnace
Recently, one of my fellow yoga teachers suggested that we go to Manipura together.
I laughed.
"Girl, this is going to be absolutely INSANE. Get ready."
I knew exactly what we were walking into.
Or at least I thought I did.
Because when we arrived, I discovered that the woman teaching our class was the very same woman who had first introduced me to Bird of Paradise all those years ago.
Of course it was.
We began moving.
And she delivered exactly the kind of class I remembered.
Relentless. Intelligent. Beautifully sequenced. Absolutely badass.
Sweat was pouring off my body. My muscles were working. My breath became the most important thing in the room.
But something was different.
I felt solid.
Not invincible. Not effortlessly capable of everything she asked of us.
Solid.
There were moments when I took Child's Pose. There were extra Chaturangas that I very consciously declined.
And I felt absolutely no need to apologize for either.
I knew when to push and when to pause.
I knew how to find my breath again.
I knew how to stay with myself.
And somewhere in the middle of all that heat and effort, I realized how much my practice had deepened.
Not simply because I was stronger, although I was.
But because I trusted myself more.
I was no longer trying to prove that I belonged in that room.
I knew I did.
As we moved through the Warrior sequence, I noticed something.
We hadn't practiced Extended Side Angle.
A small observation. Nothing particularly meaningful at the time.
We kept moving.
And moving.
And moving.
At one point, we endured a four-minute plank series, because apparently this woman has never encountered a core muscle she didn't want to personally introduce to suffering.
And then, toward the end of class, she brought us into Extended Side Angle.
I took the posture.
Found the bind.
And heard the words.
"If you have your Bird, you can find that now."
Oh.
Oh, wow.
There are moments when the distance between who you were and who you are suddenly disappears.
When years collapse into a single breath.
When you realize that you have somehow returned to the exact place where something began, except you are no longer the same person who first stood there.
I wanted to cry.
I know. I'm a sap.
But there I was, back in that furnace, with the same teacher, hearing the same invitation.
Only this time, I knew what Bird was.
I knew exactly what it would ask of me.
And I knew I could do it.
So I did.
I lifted.
I extended.
I balanced.
And I found my Bird.
Not tentatively.
Not by accident.
I found it with strength, control, and the extraordinary feeling of inhabiting a body that I had worked very hard to come home to.
And then, out of the corner of my eye, I saw her.
My teacher was helping someone else.
Guiding another student through the unfamiliar mechanics of the posture. Encouraging them. Supporting them. Showing them that something they hadn't imagined possible might actually be within reach.
Just as she had done for me.
Years earlier.
Before Maui.
Before everything.
And that, more than anything, nearly undid me.
Because I realized that the story had never really been about whether I could stand on one leg with my arms wrapped around the other.
It was about what happens when someone helps you recognize a possibility within yourself.
And what happens when, years later, you finally recognize it on your own.
What Comes Back to Us
I left that class absolutely zinging.
There is no more elegant word for it.
My body felt open. My mind felt quiet. My muscles felt alive. I was exhausted and energized in the same breath.
A full day later, I could still feel it.
That extraordinary sense of liberation that sometimes follows a truly demanding physical practice.
And I was reminded of something I never want to forget.
Sometimes the mind becomes quiet not because we have escaped the body, but because we have finally entered it completely.
There are countless beautiful expressions of yoga.
There is restorative practice, where we learn to receive support and soften. There is gentle movement, where we cultivate awareness without demanding intensity. There is meditation, breathwork, stillness.
I believe in all of them.
I teach from many of those traditions myself.
But there is something about the fire of a challenging physical practice that reaches a particular part of me.
It asks for my complete attention.
It brings me face-to-face with my resistance.
It reminds me that I can do difficult things without turning difficulty into punishment.
And when the effort is over, I often discover that I've left more than sweat on the mat.
I've left behind some of the noise.
Some of the hesitation.
Some of the tension I didn't even realize I was carrying.
This is why I continue to believe so deeply in yoga's capacity to transform us.
Not through a single spectacular posture or some promise of perpetual peace.
But through the quiet accumulation of experiences in which we learn that we are capable of meeting ourselves differently.
These days, my practice is becoming a much more devoted part of my life again.
My time at Tula continues to nurture me as both a student and a teacher. Pilates is strengthening and refining the foundations of my movement. And Manipura has reminded me that there is still an extraordinary amount of fire within me.
As I look toward my 300-hour yoga teacher training, I feel something I haven't felt quite this clearly in a long time.
Readiness.
Not because I have mastered the practice.
The more I learn, the more I understand how much there is left to discover.
But because I am genuinely excited to keep showing up.
To keep studying.
To keep challenging myself.
To remain a student, even as I continue growing into my role as a teacher.
And to remember that progress doesn't always look like moving forward.
Sometimes it looks like returning.
Returning to a room.
Returning to a posture.
Returning to a version of yourself you thought you had lost, only to discover that you have become someone entirely new.
I think about that photograph on Haleakalā sometimes.
The woman standing on the mountain, her leg extended toward the sky, believing she was at the beginning of something wonderful.
She was.
She just didn't know how much she would have to travel through to understand what wonderful could mean.
And I think about my father.
My Bird.
I don't know what, if anything, the universe intends with these strange and beautiful intersections.
But I know that I can hold them with tenderness.
I can miss him.
I can miss the life I once imagined.
I can honor the woman who stood on that mountain.
And I can still be here, in this body, in this moment, reaching toward something beautiful.
Perhaps that is the lesson I needed most.
Losing something does not always mean it is gone forever.
Sometimes it is simply waiting for us to find our way back.
And sometimes, when we do, we discover that the thing we were looking for was never just the thing itself.
It was the person we became along the way.
I found my Bird again.
And this time, I think I understand why it matters.
Bring on the fire. Bring on the next chapter.
I've got this.
