My Yoga Journey- Yoga Didn’t Fix Me — But It Helped Me Live Better – Part 1

This reflection explores yoga and embodied practice through the lens of psychology, lived experience, and long-term wellbeing. Drawing on over 25 years’ experience in mental health, group facilitation, and therapeutic work, I reflect on what yoga can realistically offer — particularly in relation to stress, burnout, injury, identity, and emotional regulation. This is not a story of healing or transformation, but an honest account of how embodied practices can support everyday life when approached with care, humility, and integrity.

Spirituality and yoga and intertwined and I want to write a few articles based on my views experience and academic learning to show what its meant to me and how its evolved for me over the years

I didn’t grow up spiritual.

I was born in the 60’s and I grew up in a working class, single parent household, practical, street wise and independent — in a household that rejected religion outright. (I’ve talked about this in my podcasts on YouTube in Reflections) Spirituality wasn’t something we talked about. Apart for the ghosts my mum saw and the occasional strange things i experienced. If anything, anything “spiritual” sat firmly in the category of odd, unreliable, or not for people like us. I was already seen as a bit weird so i kept my interest in the esoteric private for a long time. It was the 70s and 80s after all.

And yet.

Throughout my life, at pivotal moments, I found myself sitting across from tarot readers — The first time when I was 18 , usually by chance, sometimes through friends, sometimes through sheer coincidence. I sought them out obsessively, and I never handed my power, but io knew the significance of the guidance i received.
But I did notice something: they seemed to arrive at moments when I needed perspective, when I was standing at a crossroads, when I needed reassurance that I hadn’t lost my way.

I didn’t call that spirituality at the time. I called it curiosity. Or coincidence. Or timing. There weren’t any books on the topic, I didn’t search it out, apart from stumbling across a deck of Tarot cards when I was about 10.

I carried on building a life, then switching careers after the birth of my second son onto a grounding in therapy, psychology, education, mental health, and work that made sense. I was obsessed with understanding the world and why people suffered.
I trained. Then I taught. I facilitated groups. I learned how minds work, how stress accumulates, how people survive difficult childhoods, difficult relationships, difficult systems.

Spirituality, if it existed at all, stayed on the edges.

That changed when I married into a British Asian family. I knew very little about religion apart from the odd occasions i went to Mass with my Irish friends .

Suddenly, spirituality wasn’t abstract or optional — it was woven into daily life, culture, ritual, and expectation. Hinduism wasn’t something you “believed in” so much as something you lived alongside. Ceremonies, traditions, family roles, naming practices, rites of passage — all of it carried meaning, history, and continuity.

It was also the period when my own identity was shifting rapidly.

I went from single to married.
From no children to motherhood.
From travelling for work to living with in-laws.
From independence to negotiation.

When you marry into another culture, there’s often an unspoken assumption that you will become something — in my case, a Hindu. I was respectful. I participated. I observed. I learned. But I also noticed something important: spirituality here was inseparable from culture, family dynamics, hierarchy, and tradition. It was both a culture shock, shift in worldviews and a journey of self and other discovery that as I have written before made me look more deeply at race, culture class and gender and now , on how we raise self confident kids in a society that had a range of views on religion marriage and mixed race families. But like others around me I’ve always chosen what fit me , for however long it fit.

I loved the music — the strings, the rhythm, the emotion that poured through classical Indian compositions. I was drawn to the epic dramas, the Mahabharata stories unfolding on television — politics, power, loyalty, betrayal, devotion. I didn’t speak Hindi, so I absorbed it through atmosphere rather than language. We loved music generally . It was a big part of our lives and still is. I can be transported to another space just by music alone. To me thats a spiritual experience …

Spirituality, at that point, felt vast, symbolic, and distant — something inherited rather than chosen.

Then my body intervened.

Years of pushing myself hard — punishing gym routines, overtraining, under-eating, ignoring fatigue, carrying stress, carrying responsibility — finally caught up with me. Burnout had already visited me twice. I couldn’t return to the level of fitness I once had without getting ill. Sore throats. Exhaustion. Breathlessness. Eventually, my lower back went into painful spasm.

I didn’t choose yoga because I was spiritual.
I chose yoga because I couldn’t bend down to my feet.!!!

The first classes weren’t magical.
A dusty school hall. Noise echoing in the corridors.
Then a cramped conservatory where mats were squeezed together like sardines.
Nothing about it felt sacred. nor enjoyable .

Until I found a small hall a few miles away — and, almost accidentally, found Kundalini yoga.

I didn’t know what Kundalini yoga was. I didn’t seek it out. But something in that space felt different. The teacher was calm. Grounded. Soft-spoken. There was no pushing, no competition, no correction frenzy. We warmed up slowly. We were guided to tune in rather than perform.

I had meditated before. I’d trained in hypnotherapy and NLP. I understood the mind, suggestion, attention, focus. Meditation already made sense to me. But this — this was different.

There was chanting. Strong breathwork. Music that moved through me rather than over me. Sensations I didn’t have language for. And, for the first time in a long time, I noticed how disconnected I had been from my own body. Year of stress and obsessive thinking becoming even more obvious.

I went once a week and made it non-negotiable.

Some weeks, I fell asleep sitting upright before we even reached the mat. I couldn’t keep my eyes open. At the time, I didn’t realise how abnormal that was — how exhausted I already was — because exhaustion had become my baseline.

No one panicked.
No one rescued me.
No one made me feel like I was failing.

The teachers simply held the space.

People cried. Sometimes that person was me.
No one rushed in.
No one made meaning out of it.
It was allowed.

Yoga became a place where I could let go of everything I was holding up — the roles, the competence, the emotional labour, the constant vigilance. For one hour, I didn’t have to be anything.

Slowly, almost without intention, yoga began to influence the rest of my life.

I realised that one hour a week wasn’t enough. The calm didn’t last. The contrast between how I felt there and how I felt everywhere else became impossible to ignore. So I went twice a week. Then I began adding five-minute meditations at home. Small pauses. Small spaces.

This wasn’t about transcendence.
It wasn’t about becoming enlightened.
It was about surviving my own pace of life.

I began to see clearly how much I was over-giving — to work, to family, to responsibility — and how little permission I gave myself to rest. Yoga didn’t fix that. But it showed me the cost of ignoring it.

And this — this is where my relationship with yoga really began.

Not as a belief system.
Not as a performance.
Not as a cure.

But as a way of learning how to live in my body with more honesty, more gentleness, and more awareness.

Yoga didn’t fix me — but it helped me live better. in the next few blogs I will share more of what happened next and how we change as we age, what to consider and how I still value my ordinary working class attitude and way of looking at life …

Who this is for

This reflection is written for people who practise yoga, those curious about embodied approaches to wellbeing, and yoga teachers who want to think more carefully about what we offer — and how we offer it — particularly in the context of stress, injury, ageing, and everyday life.

Yoga

Who this is for

Further Reading & Context