My Story:The Work Beneath the Practice

A reflection on mental health, body budget, and what yoga really teaches us

I’ve often heard things like:

“But don’t you do yoga every day?”

“Shouldn’t you know how to handle all this?”

“You’re so strong.”

“How do you do it all?”

But here’s the truth:

Yes, I practice yoga. Yes, I teach it.

But that doesn’t mean I’m untouched by mental health challenges.

Yoga hasn’t made me immune. What it has done is taught me how to listen. How to pause. How to be in conversation with my body and mind; especially on the hard days.

We often forget this:

Mental health challenges are part of being human. They can look like stress, burnout, emotional overwhelm, or grief. They may be temporary, or they may last longer. They don’t always mean mental illness, but they do call for care.

For me, the turning point came when I understood this through my own nervous system and through caring for my children, one of them being neurodivergent. I started to see how easily our inner systems; what I now call our *body budget, can get depleted.

A healthy body budget isn’t just about how much you move or how clean you eat.

It’s about balance between "doing" and "being". It shows us how important sleep, food, interactions, emotions, rest, and recovery is.

It’s about knowing when your system is calm, when it’s on edge, or when it’s totally overdrawn.

This idea changed how I live and how I teach.

At BreathePower Yoga Studio, this is the work I bring into the room.

We don’t just stretch and strengthen.

We build awareness.

We talk about energy; not in abstract terms, but in real, practical ways:

    •    How does your body feel after a hard conversation?

    •    What kind of movement brings you back to balance?

    •    What helps you recharge, instead of pushing through?

   •  What is loud in your body? How does it show up- tightness, soreness, fatigue, achy, stiff, uncomfortable? Notice it. Stay with it. Now can you find the opposite? Is it difficult? Then can you imagine how it would feel like? "Space, calm, balanced, strong."

I want my students (kids, teens, adults, parents, caregivers) to understand that managing your body budget is a skill. One that we’re rarely taught, but absolutely need.

So we slow down.

We notice.

We breathe.

And slowly, we rebuild capacity; not just physically, but mentally and emotionally, too.

Mental health is not a fixed trait.

It’s a relationship you tend to every day.

Yoga, at its heart, teaches us that kind of attention.

Not perfection.

Not bypassing.

But presence, especially when things feel messy or hard. It gives us the tools. How quickly you draw will depend upon your practice and also how much is your body budget in that moment.

Yoga offers us the gift of a "pause," a moment where we observe, recognize, and decide.

Mindfulness is a decision, but it follows the increase of awareness. In my experience, I've observed that when we're exhausted and our body's resources are low, our decisions can be affected. However, if we realize we're operating on a low budget, we can step back from acting or responding and return to it later with improved energy levels.

So no, I don’t have it all figured out. But I do the work. And I offer this space to anyone else willing to do it too.

*Body Budget is a term mentioned in Lisa Feldman Barrett's book "How Emotions are Made"