Before I became ill, yoga for chronic fatigue wasn’t something I’d ever really had to think about. I taught quite physically strong yoga, and although there was still mindfulness within my classes, there was also a lot of focus on the postures: what areas of the body we were warming up, what we were stretching, what we were strengthening and what we were working towards.
My own practice was very physical too. I practised Ashtanga and relied heavily on the physical aspect of yoga. Although I had other tools and had learnt things like Yoga Nidra, I was still quite stuck in my ways. Asana was the main thing you did, right?
Then I became ill.
As my health deteriorated, I became increasingly exhausted. At my worst, doing something as simple as dusting a coffee table could floor me for three weeks, so getting on a yoga mat and doing an hour-and-a-half Ashtanga practice was an absolute no-go.
At the time, I wasn’t thinking about creating a different approach to yoga for chronic fatigue. I was simply trying to work out how yoga could still fit into a body that no longer had the energy for the way I’d always practised.
For quite a long time, I stopped practising asana altogether. Partly because I needed to. My whole life had to stop and I needed to allow my body to rest deeply, and that process went on for years.
But there was something else happening too: my body had become quite a scary place to be.
I didn’t really understand what was happening to me. I wasn’t getting the medical support I needed, and I was experiencing physical symptoms that frightened me. My heart palpitations could become so severe that they would send me into a panic attack.
Sometimes I would get onto my yoga mat, bring my attention towards my body, notice my heart beating and panic. The very thing I had spent years being told was good for me – bringing awareness into my body- wasn’t helping anymore. It was doing me more harm than good, so I stopped.
But stopping was incredibly destabilising. Yoga had helped me through addiction and into sobriety. It had also given me a way of relating to the traumatic things that had happened to me, so when I could no longer practise in the way I knew, I felt completely at a loss.
At the time, I didn’t have the understanding or support to know what to do instead. Nobody had explained to me that bringing attention into the body isn’t always straightforward or helpful, particularly when you’re living with trauma or experiencing frightening physical symptoms. Sometimes becoming more aware of what’s happening inside the body can feel overwhelming or even unsafe.
The classes available to me didn’t seem to hold much space for that complexity. They were generally focused on asana and taught in a broad, one-size-fits-all way. I couldn’t keep up with them physically, and I hadn’t found a teacher who understood what was happening to me or could help me find another way into the practice.
I didn’t yet know that yoga could adapt to meet me where I was.
When yoga had been the thing holding me together.
I felt incredibly lost during this period because yoga wasn’t just something I did.
After years of mental health struggles, addiction, abuse and trauma, I felt like I’d finally found something I identified with. When you come from a traumatic background, your sense of self can become quite fragmented, and for a long time I don’t think I really knew who I was or where I fitted in the world.
Finding an identity through yoga gave me a sense of stability that I hadn’t really had before, and in many ways that was healing for me. I’d found a path in my life. Yoga gave me some stable ground and helped me learn how to find some acceptance with myself. It gave me something to work with and, eventually, it gave me a job, a community and an identity.
So when my ability to practise started disappearing, I became extremely fearful that I was losing everything again. It wasn’t only the physical practice that was changing; something I’d built part of my sense of self around suddenly felt under threat.
It affected how I felt about myself as a teacher too. I would look around rooms I was teaching and see people twice my age who were physically capable of doing far more than I could, and I felt less than. I felt like I had less to contribute because my body could do less.
There was this sense that the floor underneath me was falling away and I was just falling and falling and falling.
How chronic fatigue changed the way I taught yoga.
Eventually, I simply couldn’t demonstrate the way I had before. I was teaching a lot of beginners at the time, often in gyms, so demonstrating had been a big part of how I taught. But demonstrating across ten classes a week was impossible with the level of fatigue I was experiencing. I was trying to do less and look after myself in the hope that I could stop my condition from getting any worse, so I couldn’t continue teaching really strong classes with loads of postures when I couldn’t physically sustain doing them myself.
So I had to begin to adapt.
There were fewer postures and less physical effort, with more breath awareness, pranayama, meditation and Yoga Nidra. There was more Savasana, smaller movements, longer pauses and more time lying on the floor. I started going into the more subtle aspects of the practice because, physically, I didn’t have much choice.
And honestly, for a long time I felt really insecure about it. I knew many of the people in front of me could physically do more than I could, and part of me felt like what I was offering wasn’t enough.
It’s been a long journey to get from there to feeling confident in what I teach now.
But something really interesting started happening.
I stopped assuming that because somebody could do more, they needed to.
As my own capacity became less predictable, I started checking in with my students more. Instead of walking into a room and assuming everybody had the energy for whatever I’d decided we were going to do, I started asking them.
How’s your energy today? Are you tired? What do you feel like you need?
And people increasingly asked for the slower practice. More importantly, over time they seemed to become more comfortable saying that they were tired in the first place. Having less energy wasn’t something they necessarily had to overcome anymore, and it wasn’t a failing. It was information, something we could acknowledge and work with.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve checked in with a class and then said, “Right, we’ll start lying down,” and watched people’s faces light up. Sometimes someone will bump the person next to them, and I’ll literally hear them say, “YES.” Other times there’s just this collective sigh of relief that seems to say, thank God I don’t have to work hard today.
Afterwards, people would tell me, “That’s exactly what I needed,” or, “I didn’t know I needed that until we did it.”
I started to realise there was a real need for this type of yoga, not only for people living with chronic fatigue or illness, but for anyone who needed permission to slow down.
You don’t have to be chronically ill to need permission to stop, though. Life is busy, and it’s pressured. We’re constantly being encouraged to achieve more, do more, produce more, improve ourselves, become better. Improvement, improvement, improvement. We seldom seem to feel okay with just being.
And then this begs the question… what’s wrong with just being?
The check-in became part of the yoga.
This is where the way I teach really started to change. The check-in wasn’t simply something I did so I could decide what poses to teach that day. The check-in was part of the yoga.
Can you notice what’s actually here? How much energy do you have? What is your body doing? Can you notice when something changes? And then, can you allow what you’ve noticed to influence what you do next?
Because if we don’t develop that awareness, we can spend an enormous amount of our lives on autopilot, doing the same thing over and over again because that’s what we’ve always done, sometimes even when it’s no longer serving us.
I’ve seen this very clearly in my own life through addiction and burnout. For years, I was caught in patterns of behaviour that I knew were causing me harm, but knowing something intellectually and actually being able to notice what’s happening in the moment and make a different choice are two very different things. A lot of my behaviour had become automatic. Something would happen, I would feel a certain way, and I would respond in the way I had learnt to respond.
For me, part of changing those patterns was learning to create a little bit of space between what I was experiencing and what I did next. And I think that’s one of the things I’ve come to understand much more deeply through yoga too. Awareness doesn’t necessarily change anything on its own, but without awareness, we don’t have much opportunity to make a different choice.
Yoga had to leave the mat.
When chronic illness was at the centre of my universe, that same awareness had to be applied in a different way. This time it wasn’t addictive behaviours I was trying to notice and respond differently to; it was what was happening in my body, how much energy I had, what was making my symptoms worse, and all the little choices I was making throughout the day.
When I stopped practising strong asana, yoga didn’t just disappear. If anything, the awareness I’d developed through my physical practice had to move even further into the rest of my life.
This was also when yoga philosophy became a much bigger part of my practice. I began to explore what it might mean to find some contentment, or Santosha, within the life I actually had, rather than constantly fighting against it. Aparigraha – the practice of non-grasping or non-attachment- also became increasingly relevant as I was forced to loosen my grip on how I thought my body, my practice and my life should be.
I had to notice when I was doing too much. I had to notice what foods I was putting into my body and how they affected me, and I had to pay attention to what I was surrounding myself with, how much stimulation I was getting and how much energy things were taking from me.
Yoga couldn’t be something I showed up for on a mat, did for an hour and then wandered off into the rest of my day completely oblivious. It had to seep into the rest of my life.
And this is where adaptability became incredibly important.
Sometimes you have to abandon the plan.
Adaptability for me now begins with a check-in: noticing what’s there, noticing how I feel and then doing my best to choose something in accordance with that information.
But it doesn’t stop there, because you also have to be willing to change your course.
I might get onto my mat intending to practise, and then something doesn’t work. I experience pain, fatigue appears, or my body responds differently from how I expected. At that point, I have a choice: I can power through for the sake of it because I decided I was going to practise, or I can pay attention to the new information I’m receiving and change course.
Sometimes that means modifying something. Sometimes it means doing something completely different, and sometimes it means abandoning the whole thing and lying down just to breathe.
The same thing happens outside yoga. I might decide I’m going to cook myself a particular meal because I have some time and I want to nourish my body. I’ll buy the ingredients and have the whole thing planned, then the evening arrives, and I’m too fatigued to cook it.
So what now?
I can become attached to what I said I was going to do and see changing the plan as some kind of personal failure, or I can look at what’s actually happening and ask: what can I manage right now? What’s another option?
My life with chronic illness has been so unpredictable that I’ve had to get pretty good at this.
It’s also why I don’t really plan my yoga classes. I don’t know what’s going to meet me in the room. I don’t know who’s going to turn up, what energy people will bring with them or what their bodies and minds are going to need that day.
I might have an intention, but if I see halfway through that something isn’t working, I’ll change it. The plan isn’t more important than the people in front of me.
We become attached to who we think we should be.
I still struggle with all of this sometimes, and I don’t want to pretend I’ve reached some beautiful place of total acceptance where I can lovingly listen to my body at all times. I haven’t.
But as some of the harder stuff has calmed down and I’ve started to see a little bit of light at the end of the tunnel, I’ve found enough space to at least entertain the possibility that I could change the way I think about some of this.
Because we can become incredibly attached to an idea of who we think we should be, and often that idea is based on a previous version of ourselves because our previous experience is all we’ve got to compare ourselves to.
That can limit us in both directions. We can believe we’re never going to improve because of what has happened before, or we can believe we should be as capable as we were yesterday, last year or ten years ago. Either way, we’re not really meeting what is here. We’re living according to a constructed version of ourselves.
I was Sayeeda, the yoga teacher. Someone else might be Bob, the bodybuilder. Or the runner, the successful business owner, the person who always copes, the person who gets shit done.
We become attached not only to what we do, but to the identity of the person who does it.
So what happens when we can’t anymore?
I’ve written more about my relationship with identity and what happens when our sense of self begins to change. [Read It here →]
What illness taught me about non-attachment.
Living with chronic illness has forced me to let go of a lot: parts of my identity, things I thought I would do and assumptions about what my body would always be capable of.
My body doesn’t cooperate with what I want from it much of the time, and through that I’ve come to understand non-attachment in a way I don’t think I could have learned simply by reading about it. It’s made me realise how little control we have over so many aspects of our lives. Maybe all of them. Who knows? Free will is a conversation for another day.
It has also changed my understanding of acceptance. My capacity means I can’t necessarily pursue the huge goals and aspirations I might once have had. Instead, I’ve had to learn how to be with the life and the possibilities that remain.
Not perfectly or permanently, but sometimes.
Finding something in the smaller things.
My life has become much smaller because of illness, and because of that I’ve had to become much more interested in the subtleties of it.
A sunset. Watching trees blowing in the wind. Being really present with a favourite meal and noticing the pleasure of tasting it. Small moments that might previously have passed without much attention.
It’s taught me a lot about Santosha – the practice of contentment, but that doesn’t mean I’m content with being ill. I don’t want to sugarcoat that.
Living with chronic illness can be devastating. It can ruin so many parts of your life, and there isn’t necessarily an endpoint where you overcome it, learn the lesson and ride off into the sunset as a wiser person. You’re just living in this crazy world now where everything has become harder, and some days none of this philosophy is going to make that feel any better.
But I’ve found that, with time, small shifts in perception can sometimes make my circumstances a little easier to live alongside. Sometimes I can find a little bit of joy, and sometimes I can’t.
Things fluctuate, and there is no endpoint.
But somewhere along the way, there might be a small glimmer that allows us to relate to what’s happening a little differently. Sometimes, that moment alone is enough to shift things in another direction.
Adaptability wasn’t something I set out to teach.
It was something I had to learn, and now I see it showing up in the people I teach.
I see students becoming more confident in making their own choices during practice rather than feeling like they have to follow everything I’m teaching. I see someone decide a posture isn’t working for them and choose something else. I see people rest. I see people becoming more open about struggling and beginning to understand that having a hard time doesn’t make them a failure.
That’s exactly what I want.
I’m not interested in teaching people to become really good at following my instructions. I want people to develop enough of a relationship with themselves that they can notice what’s happening and make their own choices.
Sometimes that choice might be to work harder. Sometimes it might be to do less, and sometimes it might be to stop altogether.
The point isn’t that less is always better. The point is that we have to notice first.
Everything happening within the body gives us information, but we don’t necessarily have to understand it. There may be times when we have absolutely no idea what we’re feeling or what we need, and that’s information too.
But perhaps we can create enough space to become curious about what’s there and, from there, begin to build a different relationship with ourselves.
Start with a check-in.
I’ve created a short guided check-in practice to help you explore exactly this. It’s not about fixing anything, getting yourself into the “right” state or working out exactly what every sensation in your body means.
It’s simply an opportunity to pause, notice what is — or isn’t — there, and perhaps notice something you haven’t noticed before.
Because that small moment of awareness can be the beginning of a conversation between your body and your mind. And the more we practise having that conversation, the more choice we may have about what we do next.
[Get the free guided check-in practice →]
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