The Liberation of Yoga Comes from Making It Your Own
7 am, November 6, 2026, The Yoga Shala at Sundari on Hawai’i. The body is a body of light, our whole lives long.
Today is the onset of our second week of immersion. I walk over to our yoga studio with the shape of a two-hour class in my mind. Students arrive, at first they’re chitty-chatty. Then we settle in. We breathe together. We move through the postures with teachings woven in, following the arc from gentle opening into vigor and heat, into our balances, and finally down into deep rest.
As I glance around the room, I see students who a year ago could barely hold a pose. Their bodies have utterly transformed. And the way they talk to themselves has transformed too. There is more self-trust and more spaciousness now, more adventure and risk-taking, more play and more joy.
Later in the day we turn to philosophy and to interpersonal process. Yet the asana is vital. It belongs at the foundation, alongside everything else we do. We practice in service of the whole energy circuitry of the body coming online, so the body becomes available to respond to life. Literally, to have a greater response capacity for life.
Bringing the entire body online, open and available, is foundational to awakening in a body. It lives in a different place entirely from exercise, toning or trying to look better.
So today’s essay is on this, along with a comprehensize download for subscribers on crafting a home practice.
Some of you still carry a split between the material and the spiritual, where going to God means going up and out, away from the body. Others of you feel the density of this plane so strongly that it seems to be all there is, and you’re missing the sparkly, effulgent light that you are.
If you’re not a yogi at all, this is for you too. Whether you’re a dancer, an athlete or a devoted couch potato, I invite you into the potency of living in a body that is fully receptive to the world around it. Imagine a body able to take in every sensation, to feel and deeply process the scents of the morning, to dance with the wind, to jump high and stretch long. The body shapes our consciousness and our awareness. What our body is available for is a big part of our ability to meet life.
If you live in a differently abled body, or a body that has known wounding, war or disease, this is for you as well.
Within any constraint, at any age or stage, in any state of health, there is more sensation and awareness available. Breath and posture can potentize what is here and bring more of you online, exactly as you are.
All love,
Christine
The body is the doorway, and the light wants to come all the way in.
The Body in Yoga
In Bhakti Tantra Yoga, the body is sacred ground, the living meeting place of matter and spirit, earth and light.
There are two strong currents shaping contemporary yoga relative to postures. One is the over “asanification” of the practice. Yoga becomes a pursuit of flexibility, strength, fitness and increasingly elaborate shapes. We go to class, work hard, have an experience, feel good, and come back for more. There is a hedonic treadmill here, a constant appetite for the next class, the next opening, the next hit of sensation. Physical achievement can become its own closed circuit, with plenty of activity and surprisingly little awakening.
The other current moves in reaction. I often hear people say that yoga has nothing to do with asana. I understand the impulse. In many studios the chanting has gone, the devotional dimension has disappeared, and the practice has become athletics. Yet the claim that yoga has nothing to do with asana carries its own distortion: it perpetuates the split between matter and spirit, between the physical body and the energetic current, between our lived embodiment and our awakening.
We include it all. The material body and the light body belong together in awareness. Our physical embodiment is how consciousness knows itself, how we feel ourselves and one another, how energy moves, and how the body’s innate capacities for self-healing, integration and renewal become available.
A profound shift arises here, from objectifying the body to subjectifying it.
The body moves from being something we look at, evaluate, shape and work on, to the living subject of our experience. We turn toward the inside: interoception, the felt sense of being here, the subtle movements of breath, sensation, energy and emotion. We become intimate with the experience of being embodied. The body becomes where we experience ourselves, where awareness takes form, and where life meets us from within. We move from looking at the body to knowing life through the body.
We learn to trust it and know it with no outside reflection.
This is the embodied philosophy of Wake Down: bringing the light all the way into matter, into the tissues, the breath, the senses, our relationships and our ordinary lives. Awakening has a direction into life. It becomes increasingly intimate with the actual experience of being here.
Asana, or postural yoga, done well and now simply cheer-led, serves this awakening. It develops our capacity for sensation, perception and receptivity. It helps us feel ourselves and one another, circulate life force and participate in the body’s intelligence and capacity for self-healing. Deeply attentive dance, martial arts and other forms of directional movement can serve the same integration.
When movement, breath and exquisite attention meet, the body becomes a vehicle for awareness.
The body is how we perceive. It is our receptive instrument for the world and for other people. When my body is shut down or constricted, it is very hard for me to feel you and the world around me, to receive and to create. My birthright is my body completely online, my whole life long. Available to feel, receive, create and respond.
Asana is how I keep the instrument tuned. It is how the light comes all the way down, and it is a prayer. As my teacher Mark Whitwell says, “The guru is the breath.” The practice is becoming deliciously intimate with your own embodiment.
The Ascended and Descended Masters
One of my teachers speaks of the ascended masters, the ones who mastered the earthly and rose beyond it. But what of the descended ones? The descended ones bring the light all the way down. Into the body and the kitchen, into grief and kinship. They stay. (In Sanskrit, avatāra literally means descent, the divine crossing down into form. The bodhisattva could leave the wheel of suffering and chooses to remain. I am interested in this movement of awakening that stays in relationship with the world.)
Ascent carries the possibility of transcendence. Descent brings the light into form. Tantra holds both currents. The light pours down through the crown, the life force rises from the pelvis, and they meet in the heart.
There is something extraordinary about bringing spiritual realization all the way into our human experience. Into the complexities of being a woman, a mother, a lover, a friend, a creative being. Into the pleasures and difficulties of having a body and living among other bodies. The kitchen, the bed, the studio, the marketplace, the places where life actually happens.
The descended ones remind us that awakening has somewhere to go.
Why asana matters
The body is an expression of the one. In Bhakti Tantra Yoga, we want it fully online, available to create beauty and receptive to the world and to other people.
Every shape I take opens a channel through which feeling and perception flow.
The body is remarkably articulate. It tells us through sensation where there is holding, where movement has become restricted, where we have lost access to a particular range of feeling or motion. Sometimes the information is obvious. Sometimes it takes years of practice to recognize the patterns.
Asana helps restore movement where there has been holding, circulation where there has been stagnation, and sensation where there has been numbness. As breath and attention move through the body, we support its innate intelligence and capacity for self-healing. We become more available to feel, to respond and to participate in our own healing.
Each pose carries its own question. Full wheel asks: do I trust life? Can I open my heart and receive? Plank asks: can I hold myself up?
These are physical questions with energetic and psychological dimensions. The shape gives us an experience through which we can investigate them. We discover where we grip, where we withdraw, where we are willing to risk opening. Sometimes the answer surprises us.
There is also a simple practical truth. Many of us are midlife, with another twenty or thirty years in these bodies, and whatever we leave unaddressed can become more restricted. Scar tissue binds, and we grow afraid of moving the places that were hurt. I want the range of motion to swing my luggage overhead with ease, and to leap out of the way of an oncoming car. I want to meet whatever the world presents with balance and response-ability.
Your body, given its genetics and circumstance, is perfectly adapted to what you’ve asked of it. Ask differently and it will change.
How we practice in Bhakti Tantra Yoga
A full practice is an hour-and-a-half-long prayer, from the opening mantra all the way to śavāsana. We offer sun salutations with the Gayatri or the Aramaic Lord’s Prayer, giving and receiving with every bow. The breath leads and encases each movement. We move gradually and pass through neutral after every opening. Strength and opening go together. A well-attended tadasana might even make you sweat.
The devotional dimension matters. Bhakti brings the heart into the practice. The mantra, the breath, the bow, the physical shape and the quality of attention become part of one continuous offering. There is giving and receiving in every movement.
Over the years, I’ve noticed how differently we can approach ourselves in practice. Some of us lean toward the self-bully, pushing and demanding, never quite satisfied. Others tend toward the collapser, backing away from challenge before discovering what might be possible.
With the self-bully, I find myself exploring the possibility of softness and curiosity. With the collapser, I become interested in choice, in discovering that I can do hard things when I want to. He learns ask moment to moment: How am I right now? Would I like to go further?
The breath gives us a way to stay in conversation with the body. Every transition, every pause, every return to neutral offers another opportunity to feel what is happening. Strength and opening need one another. The body learns through the relationship between them.
A practice can be vigorous and deeply receptive. It can be devotional and physically demanding. It can bring us to the edge of our capacity while keeping us intimate with the experience of being there.
When the energy rises too high
By the second week of retreat, my students were buzzy. So much had been taken in. Their minds were busy, the chatter had increased, and the energy had risen up and out, into the head. They needed the descent.
So we slowed down. Long exhales and humming breath. Weight into the heels and sit bones. Long-held grounding poses. Hands on the heart. Every time someone noticed themselves rising into the buzz, they put a hand on their heart and came back down.
The body knows something about how to settle when we give it our attention. The breath lengthens, the weight becomes more available, the mind has somewhere to land. The whole system begins to find its way back into relationship with the ground.
This is the practice of the descended ones. The integral feeling is being fully here and fully everywhere, rooted and spacious at once. The light comes all the way down, the earth rises all the way up, and they meet in the heart.
The heart is the place where heaven and earth make love.
Kula, and the practice of relating
All of this happens in relationship. We discover so much about our embodiment through other people. They reveal where we open, where we contract, where we defend and where we can receive.
On retreat, participants have been juicing or eating beautifully, receiving bodywork, swimming, resting and practicing together. Each of these is a relational process. The teaching is the practicing, and the practicing is the relating.
A kula is a family of the heart, gathered by intention, where we practice awakening in relationship so it can take root in ordinary life. There is something particular about gathering with this shared intention. We become witnesses to one another’s unfolding. We learn to receive without immediately defending, and to be present without rushing to fix.
Whether or not someone can receive what is in my heart, I still see them as a creation, holy and worth every single little atom.
Relationship is where so much of our practice becomes visible. We discover the places where we want to be seen, the places where we hide, the places where we make assumptions about another person’s experience. The field between us becomes another place of inquiry.
The practice is learning to remain available in that field, with all the complexity of being human.
Your practice is your practice at home
Practice becomes inner directed when you bring it home. Class gives refinements, and retreat takes you deep. Your real practice is the thirty or sixty minutes at home, guided by your own body.
Over my twenty-five years on this path, I’ve become increasingly interested in beginning with the joy body. Rather than immediately looking for what’s wrong or what needs fixing, I’ve learned to notice where I am already strong, open, available and alive. Where there is ease, pleasure, fluidity and possibility. Where the body is already online.
From there, I become curious about the rest of the field. Are there places of density or holding? Where am I contracted? Where am I collapsed? Does my energy want lifting or resting? What would I enjoy exploring today?
I’ve found that beginning with what’s alive changes the whole quality of practice. There is less fixing and more listening, less imposing and more discovering. Some mornings I find myself in an hour of flowing heat. Some mornings it’s five minutes of breathing with a hand on my heart. Both are the practice.
The joy body is a wonderful place to begin because it reminds us that vitality is already here. We have existing strengths, openings, pleasures and capacities. There are places in the body that want to move, places that want to expand, places that are ready for more. There is a natural intelligence in discovering what is available today.
And then there are the denser places, the places asking for patience, attention or a different kind of movement. The inquiry keeps changing. Some days the energy wants lifting. Other days it wants grounding and rest. Sometimes the most interesting discovery is that a place we thought was weak has considerable strength, or that an area we thought was open has another layer of feeling waiting underneath.
Making the practice your own has its own kind of liberation. The principles of sequencing, breath, spine and limbs become familiar enough that you can begin to respond to your body in real time. You develop sensitivity and discernment. You begin to recognize what serves your body and your awakening today.
The practice keeps changing because we keep changing.
I’ve made a free guide for subscribers, The Art of Sequencing a Home Practice and Making It Your Own. It walks you through the general arc of practice sequencing, the principles of breath, spine and limbs, how to design for your own body on any given day, simple self-release, and a twenty-minute practice to begin tomorrow morning.
Take hold of your practice, and let it take hold of you.
What would it be like to live with the whole body available, online and responsive? When all of me is here, I can finally see all of you. When the light comes all the way down, the divine comes all the way home.
With love from Kalapana,
Christine Marie
Sequencing a Living Practice is an 18-page teaching unit behind this piece:
The general arc of practice sequencing, stage by stage, with the purpose of each stage and cues for it
Breath, spine and limbs: ujjayi, and how the breath encases and serves each movement
Timing templates for 30, 60 and 90-minute practices, plus a 20-minute starter practice
How to build a whole practice toward a peak pose, with full wheel as a worked example
The energetic questions each pose asks, from trusting life to holding yourself up
Designing for the body in front of you: digestion, lower back, knees, neck and shoulders, and old injuries
Coaching your self-talk, from the self-bully and the collapser to curiosity and choice
Self-release for the psoas, the QL and the calves, using blocks, balls and your own body
Sound and mantra as practice: Om, seed syllables and a call-and-response closing
Safety notes, plus practice assignments and reflection questions to deepen your own practice
Take hold of your practice, and let it take hold of you.
