The Body That Remembers

In life, adulthood does not announce itself through wisdom so much as through friction. Over time, it becomes a condition. Iron in the joints, age in the jaw, and the heavy, yet bearable weight of shared limbs.

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Fourteen years ago, I came to yoga to mend a troubling back. Instead, I entered a covenant with yoga’s quiet yoke, a chamber of reckoning. Gravity became my hidden teacher. Through yoga’s steady revelation of self, and then again through fatherhood, I learned a difficult truth: I cannot rescue anyone from the weather of history or force any necessary unbinding.

In late summer, I met my son, and when I arrived, he was cutting wood with his big Husqvarna chainsaw. He’s strong, fit, in his 30s, and covered in wood chips. He gave me a twisted smile before pulling the cord and bringing the saw back to life. “Just another five cuts.” He lives alone in a small wilderness cabin in the Great Lakes region and is fuelled by testosterone and the deep woods. I arrive with an elder’s gravity, and the uneasy knowledge that time has shifted beneath my feet.

He mocks my clothing. “Dad, you gotta get out in the woods and work that pain out of your shoulders.” He believes the cure for pain is hard work and that redemption is hammered out by exertion. I understand him. The body wants proof. The body demands attention and extracts honesty.

And when the body has called for attention long enough and can wait no more, it might create the great collapse. It’s what I call a reckoning. It’s what the mystics call the dark night of the soul. It arrives when the scaffolding that holds up the image of who you thought you were finally gives way and can no longer hold the structure. In fatherhood, the dark night is realizing you cannot protect your child from the weather of history.

In the labour of adulthood, and through my sustained yoga practice, I’ve come to understand that life and resilience are formed by tapas first and then surrender, not the other way around. Yoga names tapas not as punishment, but as a heat that refines, a pressure that reveals, a burn that carries what is false up and out of the flesh. To surrender is to know this fact.

I am convinced that the deeper lessons live in the body. Yin yogis say it’s held in the fascia. It’s everywhere. I feel it in hips and shoulders, and in places where breath hesitates and memory waits. Our story is in the body. That’s the truth, and yoga proves it.

It is not a metaphor to say yoga is the door that opens truth. And truth further opens space, breath, and courage. Truth emboldens me to say that my son carries gravity and grief in his chest like a pirate hiding his gold. I carry it in my hips like an unfinished apology or love letter. Our bodies share 50 percent of the same DNA and the same pressures, but we translate it differently. He tries to outwork it. I try to get through tapas, to surrender, and then listen to it.

There is much I have redeemed through yoga, but some tensions remain between my son and me. That tension carried me. It powered me forward into practice. On the mat, I stopped arguing with others and began arguing with myself. Somewhere in the middle of that, redemption began taking hold through breath, sweat, and gravity.

I didn’t start yoga for enlightenment, but because my back failed and pain cornered me into humility. The entry point was need. It was mechanical, and its goal was straightforward: fix the broken place. That is how it begins for many, but the body is never only mechanical.

Within weeks, I was submerged in heat, kneeling in sweat that felt less like exertion and more like confession. The hot room became a chamber of reckonings. A sign on the wall read like prophecy: “First it will become harder. Then it will become easier. Then it will get different. Then way different.” Was it about yoga or about life?

Yoga, Fatherhood, and the Long Work of Surrender

My emotions surfaced from hiding in muscle to consciousness and memory. It was not just injury, but inheritance. It wasn’t all sorrowful, but some of it was, like alcohol abuse, distance from my children, and the long arc of avoidance disguised as productivity. The midnight hour arrived without asking permission. It came when tapas burned up the oxygen powering illusion.

Redemption, I learned, does not rise in a straight line. It moves in circles that boomerang back through wounds to teach the wound how to breathe again. Yoga’s gravity is a steady descent to deeper levels of awareness, or as B.K.S. Iyengar wrote, “Self-cultivation through asana is the broad gateway leading to the inner enclosures we need to explore.” Yoga serves our adult growth as we learn self-cultivation by conscience and consequence.

Adulthood means one has the capacity to remain relational when under pressure. It is the yogi’s refusal to outsource conscience that becomes their strength. It is the discipline of staying critical without becoming cruel. Yoga taught me this slowly, one posture at a time. Every posture became a way in and out of both falsehoods and truths.

Breath is my governing teacher, linking physical effort to spiritual attention. In this way, yoga widens beyond the studio and into the rest of my life. Illness, grief, recovery, longing, and vulnerability stopped being interruptions. They became instructors. Earthly truths became thresholds.

In time, yoga became communal. Not just something I did alone, but something I do with others on the mat, in conversations held at the edge of fatigue and injury, and in my motorcycling communities, where I taught yoga skills to bikers. Yoga breath for bikers became a way to safety and ease in the saddle. The balance of yoga became longevity for bikers, and presence in yoga became survival at speed. Yoga was no longer a retreat from danger. It was training to meet danger with survival skills.

Yoga continues in me as attention practiced in tapas, surrender, and presence. Each asana bends me into a necessary discomfort. Each rise returns me to breath. Each collapse teaches me the difference between surrender and disappearance. I learn over and over how to fall, how to rise, how to be firm but not rigid. There is no conquest in yoga, no trophy lifted up in great arenas, no enemy pinned beneath the knee. Only the slow work of returning without armour.

Redemption does not belong to the victorious. It belongs to those willing to come back again and again. To sit in the heat. To tell the truth. To feel what we would rather outrun. Redemption is not escapist and does not lift us out of the world, but lowers us closer to collapse, to honesty, to breath, to relationship, and into the unfinished labour of love.

The body always remembers. Life always presses. Breath always returns. Sweat always returns. Conversation always returns. Relationships always return. And in these many returns, the fixes are carried forward by repetition and rhythm, not by a man who has finished anything, but by one who has learned how to keep beginning.

My practice is unfinished, but the breath keeps counting one return at a time, and the steady learning from these movements takes me back to fatherhood, into silence. I cannot force any posture in others or myself, but by following breath by breath, I endure and offer my son and my community a twisted smile of deep knowing, of deeper love.