Becoming the Breath: A Journey through Yoga's Inner Weather

We’ve all walked into a yoga room feeling less than whole: sluggish, stiff, and unprepared for anything resembling transformation. I did recently; my body ached, my mind was scattered, and my motivation was a thin flame. And yet, somehow, yoga did its efficacious work.

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Risking the Threshold

The moment we choose to show up, something changes as the rituals work their way into us through soul seams ever so carefully guarded.

When we feel slow and keep slogging through anyway, class unfolds as always, and most often, our efforts wake up. In my case, my breath steadied and the dull machinery of my internal weather reorganised into something like presence. The session loosened whatever had been mired in mud, and by the time I left the parking lot and turned south in my car, the world was rearranged. I had become the lotus that had risen from the mud.

And there it was, when I looked to my right through the car window to the sinking Sun , the cosmos spoke through a breaking sky that opened from the centre of a dark storm cloud. The white edges glowed as though brushed by a master’s golden paintbrush made of light, a bright blue sky-blade between the shimmering clouds.

In the presence of that sky, everything inside me was suddenly A-OK. And this is the real alchemy of yoga, the subtle turning of inner weather that we know so well. It happens again and again after crossing that threshold, and it reshapes us without fail and without ceremony. And in that moment, I was like all of us are after a class . . . ready for whatever came my way.

The Second Surrender, Taking the Risk to Trust

But yoga asks us not to take just the risk of walking in and crossing an unknown threshold, but yoga asks a second risk, and that is our relinquishment of control. Not a hard ask, but yoga asks for a gentle, almost invisible release of whatever armour we’ve brought with us. If we can soften the heart just a little, trust arrives, not as an emotion, but as a posture of willingness. This opening is the yogi’s first real step into presence.

To trust in yoga is to allow the moment to be what it is, without disguise or filter. It’s an act of embodiment when we trust that our body will follow the ancient patterns of change, and when doing so, we will change.

We trust because we know we are participating in life while pointing toward something more. In giving ourselves to the moment, we enter the reality of our own experience with unshielded honesty.

Breath: Returning to the Centre

In our practice, we eventually come home, and that is back to the breath, back to the soul’s steady drum. Breath is not simply air; it is the architecture of consciousness. With every inhalation, a new narrative becomes possible. With every exhalation, an old script crumbles. Listen to it closely, in it, you will hear yoga’s song.

This is where the yogi “kisses the soul,” receiving the full inheritance that lay dormant behind habit and noise. In the breath, we remember how we are and who we are when the inner weather clears of fog and reserve caution.

Embodiment: Movement as Memory

Asana and pranayama usher in a sacramental remembering, a full-bodied anamnesis. It’s hard to believe but very true that movement and breath combine into a kind of alchemy, a healing solution that links memory to motion, spirit to sinew.

In the act of remembering a pose in our bodies, the yogi becomes both the text and the act of reading the text. We inhabit a pose – as a habit – and in that habit, we remember the deep truth of our being. That at the core, our centre is soul-coal, we are inner fire that is immanent and transcendent.

We don’t step onto the mat to escape the world, but to meet the self waiting beneath the noise.

The yogi lives in that sacred space simply by moving and breathing. I have no need to find or promote a spiritual orthodoxy, but I find truth in the ancient chant. Ra ma da sa; sa say so hum. “Sun, moon, Earth, infinity; all that is infinity, I am Thee.”

Community: Joining the Circle

In the yoga room, hierarchies dissolve. What remains is shared breath, shared effort, shared humanity. Here, the yogi releases the armour that protected them outside and becomes a witness to the whole. We see ourselves and find that the mirror in a yoga room amplifies the words from the popular song, “I Found,” by Amber Run. “For and I found love where it wasn’t supposed to be, right in front of me. Talk some sense to me.”

In that air of talking sense and making sense, love for self becomes love for others. The energy that emerges during yoga practice, through prana rising from individual bodies working together as one, feeds the larger body. No rank. No worthiness scales. Only one common identity that reverberates within and echoes outward to all beings.

Practice: The Target Is the Self

Yoga’s mission isn’t performance; it’s self. Not self as ego, but Self as vessel. In the intersection of yogi, teacher, and practice, something ancient and biological awakens: the steady reshaping of mind, body, and spirit. The heat of tapas refines the inner landscape. A drop of sweat hits the mat and becomes a small baptism, and the practice of yoga becomes the regeneration turned to devotion, devotion into healing. And what does this healing do? I think it makes me a better father and partner, and it makes me a better Grandfather.

Healing: The Final Release

And then release into savasana. The great letting-go, where space widens and time loosens its grip. It’s yoga’s medicine, the physical, the non-physical, and the metaphysical working quietly as one integrated healing effort. Compassion for self-dawns and the yogi is anointed not with achievement, but with truth: the goodness of their own being and the love that is found right in front, in the mirror.

The savasana is not an ending, but the quiet stitching together of everything that came before. It is the return to life, the sun peeking through the agitated clouds and at the same time changing them, softening them, clarifying the boundaries.

The Sky Again

When I think back to that Sunday sky, a bright sun beam streaking through the dark cloud, a guilded vision of gold and blue shining through, I realised it was simply a mirror. Yoga had settled me enough to see clearly. To feel fully. To receive the world without flinching, to accept the good sense of what was staring back at me from the mirror . . . love, like a blue sky.

This is the transformation we seek and in fact is the returning to who we are. It is offered freely when we step into the yoga journey again and again and let it work it’s unfailing power to be and to be better.

We show up don’t we? We show up because we have learned yoga is not escapism, yoga is a return and a becoming; it is talking sense to ourselves, it is a reminder that we are part of all, the unified one. And occasionally, even the landscape reminds us. If we notice it, we might salute that stunning landscape with our transformed inscape and know that once again, unmistakably, we are One.