What happened when you posted about being less flexible at yoga

Throughout my early years as a yoga student and teacher, Stand forward fold It was the measuring stick by which I measured my progress. How far I can go in a pose represents a level of flexibility I never thought I would reach as a person with chronic back pain. The idea of ​​expanding into the Forward Fold seemed like my chance to gain a new identity.

Once I was flexible enough to rest my chest on my thighs, I moved to standing Blocks To make the situation more challenging. There was no end to how far I would push myself. Then a spinal injury changed everything. The pose I used to measure my progress became the pose that revealed my limits.

After my injury, getting back on the mat felt like starting over. Given my history with spinal stenosis, this was not the first time I had to rebuild my physical yoga practice. But this time something changed inside me. I no longer wanted to push the limits of my body. I felt that yoga was no longer about achieving the most demanding expression in a pose, but rather rebalancing my body. For the first time, I was beginning to truly understand the lesson of surrender that I knew was integral to yoga but had never applied to my own practice.

So I let go of who I was in the past and accepted who I was in the present. Instead of looking for depth in the pose, I began to prepare myself for ease, just as I had asked many students to do in the past. “Move your feet hip-width apart, bend your knees widely, and place blocks under your hands.” These are no longer general signals, but necessary adjustments are needed to allow my body to participate in the situation with compassion rather than force.

Even with my internal progress, there was still a part of me that hoped that I could return to the version of the pose that I was able to do before. But months passed and nothing changed, except for how I chose to see my progress.

Sharing my regression with the world

If you spend any time on social media, you know that it’s almost impossible to avoid other people’s highlight videos — maybe it’s someone’s personal glow-up or a photo of their workout progress. This doesn’t mean this type of content is bad, it’s usually meant to be inspirational. But it’s also possible to feel as if reverse Making progress is not represented enough on social media, especially in the yoga space.

Ultimately, I chose to Make a video about Forward Fold. I no longer wanted to hide the truth about what happened to my body. The decision to finally post the video on social media felt like an acceptance, a release from the need for perfection, and an embrace of what could be construed as regression.

Yoga taught me that practice is not about holding on to what I used to be able to do, but about being present with who I am now. However, I was nervous that the yoga community would see this. Will people judge me for being a yoga teacher and no longer being able to do poses the way she used to? Will I lose followers? Will this affect my business?

Something unexpected happened. I woke up the next morning and went straight to the comments section. No one was judging my practice. Instead, they were sharing their experiences with regression. Reading their stories confirmed for me that people don’t want to see perfection, they want to see their humanity reflected in others. In the year since I shared it, the number of people I thought would relate to this post has grown – across Instagram and YouTube, and it now has over 60 million views, over a million likes, and over 7,000 comments.

Through this experience, I’ve learned to empathize with my body’s needs in ways I always knew but never acted on myself—largely due to pushing myself beyond my limits to post on social media. I no longer care about how far I can stretch, but rather how I feel while I’m in it. I pause and allow my breath to deepen while holding space for the sensations in my body. Because in reality it doesn’t matter what the pose looks like. What makes it yoga is how you deal with the situation and surrender to what is.