The story starts one Sunday on my yoga mat—the place where lots of my shifts happen. My yoga practice hasn’t been much of anything as of late, I wasn’t expecting much from myself or my practice.

I was doing my best to just show up.

It was Sunday morning. I was being led through an hour and a half inner guide practice. 

I guess the story starts a few months before that day…

Yet somewhere in the stillness of frog pose, something inside me loosened… something I’d been holding far too tightly without even realizing it.

It wasn’t an earth-shattering sensation.
No bright lights.
No sudden heartburst.
No obvious moment of clarity.

Just a soft warm feeling that began deep in my core and slowly expanded outward.
Quiet.
Gentle.
Steady.

Kinda like the sensation that covers your body when you slip into a warm bath, except this started on the inside and worked its way out. 

And in that gentle moment, I knew— the last few months of feeling lost, uncomfortable, and heavy were not for nothing. 

They were shaping me, preparing me, opening me.

That moment in frog pose I knew I would never be the same again.

The months leading up to that shift weren’t easy.

I had been deep in my “stuff.”
Deep in discomfort.
Sadness and confusion.

The kind of heaviness that makes you feel like you’re moving through molasses—where you question if you’re stuck, if you’ve lost your path.

My yoga practice had all but disappeared.
Not because I didn’t care, but because I felt lost.

I was struggling to find my way forward, struggling to trust myself, struggling to feel connected to anything.

And then life added another layer—the passing of my grandmother.

Her death threw me for a loop I didn’t see coming. She was 98, so I saw her death coming, it was the emotions it brought up that caught me off guard.

Not in a single moment, but in waves—over months
grief, memories, generational patterns, and old wounds that had never been explored.

Looking back now, I can see the truth:

I wasn’t lost at all. 

I was being guided.

Every emotion, every reaction, every dark corner I waded through… was part of exactly where I was meant to be.

I just hadn’t seen it yet. I hadn’t felt it yet. 

Every thing, moment and feeling was exactly what I needed to move forward in my journey. 

Back to that Sunday on my Mat.

In that moment— in the quiet, the stillness, the soft expansion—

I felt something heal inside me.

Somewhere through the years, the little girl inside me began to believe those stories were true.

She began to think she wasn’t enough.
She felt unworthy.
Not because of who she was…
but because of the pain, expectations, and patterns she inherited—quietly, unintentionally—from the women who came before her.

Their stuff had become my stuff without me even realizing it.

For years, I carried their stories as if they were my own— stories shaped by my grandmother’s wounds,nbeliefs passed through generations, thoughts formed by other people’s opinions of who I was, and who I was “supposed to be.”

I had been holding myself accountable to their lives and experiences. 

Not mine.

But that morning in frog pose, something shifted—softly, quietly, almost imperceptibly. I could finally feel the truth rising in me:

Their stuff is their stuff.
My stuff is my stuff.
And I don’t have to carry what was never mine to begin with.

I realized I had been judging myself through the lens of others—
people who didn’t truly see me, others who were carrying their own pain,
those who projected their stories onto me without ever knowing they were doing it.

It’s wild how often we do that, isn’t it?

How often we shrink or shape ourselves based on someone else’s beliefs or experiences.

We believe things about ourselves that were never true.

In frog pose, I learned something simple and life-changing:

What matters most is what I believe about myself.

Not what others say.
What they assume.
Or what they project.

Just me.
My truth.
My voice.
My worth.

And for the first time in a long time, I could feel that truth settling deep into my body.

I wasn’t stuck. I was unfolding.

That’s what I understood that Sunday morning:
I hadn’t been failing on my journey.
I wasn’t going backward.
I hadn’t been lost.

I was moving forward—slowly, quietly, imperfectly.

And sometimes forward feels like falling apart.
Sometimes it feels like confusion.
Sometimes it feels like heaviness.

Those are the moments that are leading us to where our deepest growth awaits us.

That soft opening on my mat didn’t fix anything… but it shifted everything.

It reminded me that healing doesn’t always look brave or bold.

Healing isn’t a straight line.
It can look like showing up even when you don’t feel like it.
Maybe it looks like stillness.
Sometimes it looks like frog pose on a Sunday morning.

Healing doesn’t need to be loud.

The quietest moments are often what change us the most.

And that day—
in a pose I nearly skipped,
in a class I almost didn’t attend,
in a season where I felt far from myself—

I remembered who I was.
And I took my next step forward.

On My Yoga Mat in Frog Pose on a Sunday Morning.