A Closing Reflection

Before we begin to move, let’s pause and take a few deep breaths.

Completely fill
and completely empty
your lungs.

Let your nervous system know that something is shifting.

Take as many breaths as you need.

From here, begin to think about movement — nothing happening quite yet.

Then, when the mood strikes you, start to shift your body.
No need to be ambitious. Fingers and toes first.

Eventually, you let movement roll through you.
Arms and legs shift.
The head turns.
The neck softens.

Maybe there’s a stretch.
A yawn.
A sigh.

And when it feels right, you roll onto your right side
and rest.

As you rest, take a few moments to recalibrate —
to let your mind catch up with your body.
To get your bearings.

Slowly, when it feels right, you sit up.

This is where we pause before we part ways.

You, returning to your life — teaching, connecting with clients, loving your friends and family, moving, breathing, finding the particular way you inhabit your days.

My hope with this issue is that you felt seen.
Heard.
Understood — perhaps in a way that hasn’t always been offered to you in the yoga space.

One of the most difficult truths about this industry — this work, this profession — is that we exist in two places at once.

We keep one foot in lineage and tradition, doing our best to live in relationship with teachings that began long before us, often in lands far from where we now stand.

And at the same time, we live firmly in the present.

That tension matters.
It deserves to be named.

I first noticed this tension years ago, while visiting Rome in my twenties.

Modern buildings and glowing billboards rise beside some of the most ancient architecture in the world. The city does not resolve the contradiction — it lives inside it. And somehow, it survives. Thrives, even.

We can, too.

But only if we are willing to see ourselves clearly.
To name what is beautiful and what is broken.
To acknowledge what we inherit — and what we are responsible for shaping.

May this inaugural issue of Inside Yoga help orient you — not toward easy answers, but toward honest presence in the work we are doing now, and the futures we are quietly building together.

— Rebecca Sebastian
Editor, Inside Yoga