Living with chronic illness has been humbling. For the last ten years, I’ve stepped onto my yoga mat not knowing who would be there to meet me. Perhaps that’s always been true, but illness simply made it impossible to ignore.
There was a time when I practised Ashtanga every day. I loved arm balances, headstand variations, and with my hypermobile body I could move into shapes that felt impossible to many people.
Then I got sick.
Pain, fatigue, unpredictability and grief changed everything.
The things I once did with ease became difficult, and sometimes impossible. Not just yoga, but life itself. Things I had once taken for granted now required planning, pacing, recovery, or were simply beyond me altogether. Even the simplest practices became a struggle. There were days when just being in my body felt too much. The pain, fatigue and discomfort were so overwhelming that turning towards them with awareness felt impossible.
I felt like I had lost so much of myself. Yoga had brought me joy, stability and a sense of wellbeing, but the losses reached far beyond the mat. The relationship I had with my body, and with the person I thought myself to be, no longer existed in the same way.
For the last ten years, every time I’ve stepped onto the mat, I’ve had to begin again. That’s if I made it to the mat at all. Not because I forgot what I was doing. Because I never quite knew who was turning up. Some days my system might cooperate. Other days it wouldn’t. Some days there was energy. Other days there was only exhaustion.
Again and again, I found myself meeting the reality of what was here rather than what I wished was here.
It’s been frustrating. At times heartbreaking, and for a long time, I thought the goal was to get back to who I used to be.
I kept waiting for the version of me that existed before illness to return. I thought if I rested enough, worked hard enough, found the right treatment, or simply waited long enough, I’d eventually find my way back.
But she never did.
Somewhere along the way, something shifted. Slowly, my relationship with myself began to change.
Part of that came through the consistency of having yoga in my life, not necessarily through poses, breathwork or meditation. There were long periods where those things felt out of reach. But simply knowing yoga was there, waiting for me whenever I was able to return, became an anchor.
These aren’t lessons I’ve learned once and for all; being human is messy and ever-changing.
Yet, I no longer measure my worth by what my body can do.
I no longer believe productivity determines my value.
I’ve learned to meet myself with fresh eyes each day, and I’ve learned to extend that same curiosity to other people too, especially when I’m teaching. I make fewer assumptions now, and I know now that what someone can do tells us very little about what they might be carrying.
I’ve also learned to find joy in smaller things. A sunset. The moon. A warm breeze. A good conversation. The feeling of being comfortable for a few hours.
Not because I’ve transcended suffering, but because life became so simplified that I had no choice except to notice what was already here.
This perspective took a decade to arrive.
For much of that decade, gratitude wasn’t accessible to me. Contentment wasn’t within reach, because I was too deep in the reality of pain, loss and survival.
There were years where I wasn’t learning beautiful lessons.
I was just surviving.
There were years where I didn’t feel grateful. I felt angry, frightened and trapped. And I want to be careful not to suggest that every hardship contains a hidden lesson waiting to be discovered. Sometimes painful things are just painful things. Not every illness, trauma, loss or struggle leads to profound insight. Sometimes the only thing you learn is that something hurt.
There is nothing wrong with that.
But somewhere along the way, I stopped trying to get back to who I used to be. And started learning how to be here instead. Maybe that’s the real practice. Not chasing a future version of ourselves, but learning how to be in relationship with who we are today.
I’ve come to realise that most people are starting again, all the time. Maybe not because of living with chronic illness. But because of grief, divorce, burnout, ageing, loss, parenthood, injury, or simply the fact that life doesn’t stay still.
Life keeps changing the person who arrives.
The practice, perhaps, is learning how to begin again, exactly as we are.
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