this full moon a Circle Comes to Completion for me

A personal reflection on more than a decade of yoga, relationship, care – and the decision to pause.

On this full moon, I share a chapter of my work that has lasted for more than a decade: I gave up my space at Spree Hebammen praxis in Berlin.

Over all these years, I had the privilege of accompanying people through very different phases of their lives. I met people during pregnancy, later met their babies, watched children grow, and sometimes encountered the same people again years later at a completely different moment in their lives.

Classes became communities/villages, and sometimes many years of practising together.

For all of this, I feel deeply grateful.

“Yoga is relationship.” — T.K.V. Desikachar

I come from the tradition of Sri T. Krishnamacharya and T.K.V. Desikachar, and these words increasingly describe the essence of what yoga means to me.

Yoga, for me, is not simply something that happens on a mat.

It is relationship.

Relationship with our body and our breath. Relationship with ourselves. Relationship with other people and with the world of which we are a part.

This is the kind of relationship I have been fortunate to experience through my work over so many years.

When yoga becomes a product

At the same time, I have increasingly struggled with the conditions under which yoga is often practised, marketed and consumed in the West.

When yoga becomes a product, another class to book, consume and leave behind- relationship, continuity and care can easily be lost.

This does not mean that I believe yoga should be offered for free. Quite the opposite.

I want to continue being in service to this ancient wisdom tradition and to make it accessible. But I also need to find a way of doing that without depleting myself or struggling to make a living and provide for my own family.

The person holding the space also needs to be held.

Care cannot be sustainable when the people providing it are depleted in the process.

A pause

So this ending does not mean that I am leaving yoga.

It is a pause. A moment of stillness.

An opportunity to ask again:

How can I continue to be in service to this practice while creating a way of working that is also sustainable for me and my family?

I don't yet know the full answer.

And perhaps I don't need to know it yet.

Some parts of my work continue: my online practice, individual yoga therapy, selected group offerings, and my work around trauma, power, inclusion and adult education.

But I also want to allow myself not to immediately fill every empty space with something new.

A cycle is allowed to end.

And perhaps it is precisely in allowing an ending that space for another form can emerge.

What remains is relationship

When I look back over more than a decade, I don't first think about how many yoga classes/hours I taught.

I think about people.

About encounters and conversations. About bodies changing, healing. Pregnancies and babies. Children growing older. People leaving and returning years later.

I think about the privilege of having been part of a small piece of people's lives.

And perhaps this is the part of my work I want to carry with me, whatever form it takes next.

Yoga is relationship.

A space can close.
A way of working can come to an end.

The relationship remains.

With love and gratitude,
Sangeeta

Annapurna House