My life seems to be mirroring what’s happening in nature right now.
The trees have lost their fullness. Their leaves are no longer deep green. They’ve dulled a little, and some are beginning to change color. I know that one day very soon, the leaves will fall, and bare branches will dominate the landscape as the stillness of winter sets in.
My summer was full. I taught a lot of yoga at a lot of different places. I spent time with family. One thing flowed into the next.
In September, I made a conscious decision to pare back my teaching and concentrate more on being a student of yoga.
And now I find myself in a liminal space where I’m not sure what’s next.
It would be easy to fill my schedule again. But I find myself longing for less—less filling of the empty spaces and more lingering in stillness.
It’s an unfamiliar feeling, and, if I’m being honest, it’s a bit unsettling.
It reminds me of Savasana—“corpse pose”—the final resting pose in a yoga practice.
In Savasana, we’re asked to be still in a liminal space—the space between this practice and the next, the space between this practice and . . . life.
That’s it. Just be still.
No pose to accomplish.
No movement to coordinate.
No breath pattern to follow.
No instruction about what comes next.
Just . . . space.
And for some students, that’s the hardest part of class.
There’s nothing to do—except be still in the unknown.
Our culture is as averse to stillness as it is to the unknown. We want action, plans, answers, certainty.
We are surrounded by messages telling us to know:
Know who you are.
Know what you want.
Know where your career is going.
And, for goodness sake, have a five-year plan to get there.
But sometimes . . . we just don’t know yet.
Savasana teaches us how to inhabit the unknown. How to be okay with not knowing what comes next.
That’s a radical attitude—one that requires practice.
Yoga is meant to teach us how to live better.
The practice isn’t learning how to fill the empty space. It’s learning how to stay present inside it—to prioritize presence over performance, experience over expectation, awareness over achievement.
Off the mat, the practice of yoga becomes accepting change when it comes, pausing to consider the possibilities, crossing the threshold before we know for sure where we’re going, and surrendering to the flow of life.
We can’t control the river. But we can learn to navigate it.
And maybe sometimes, before we navigate, we need to learn how to simply float.
To stop trying to figure out where the current is taking us.
To let the empty space be empty.
To trust that not every season is asking us to grow, produce, decide, or become something new.
Some seasons may simply be asking us to be still.
We don’t always need to know what’s next.
Sometimes, the practice is simply staying still long enough to discover what emerges when we stop trying to fill the space.