What Leaving Yoga Taught Me About Actually Living

I spent years teaching and practicing Prana Vashya Yoga, and for a long time it felt like the central axis of my life. My days were built around practice, teaching, thinking, talking about practice, and scrolling through what everyone else in the yoga and wellness world was doing. With motherhood though I started noticing how tense and serious everything felt. The content online felt repetitive and preachy, the conversations increasingly moralistic, and the studios like places where people were silently trying to prove something about themselves through their practice.

After a few years into starting to feel this way, I reached a point where being in that environment just didn’t make sense anymore. So about a year and half ago I stopped practicing, I stopped teaching, and I deleted Instagram from my phone. I didn’t mean it as a dramatic statement, I was simply tired of feeling like I had to show up as a particular version of myself all the time, when so much in my life kept changing, and I wanted to see what life looked like without that constant pressure.

The Part of Wellness Nobody Talks About

Looking back, I can see that what pushed me away wasn’t yoga itself. Yoga is neutral. But it was the way the wellness world attaches ideas of discipline, purity, and “alignment” to behaviours that really should only be personal and flexible. When you’re deeply immersed in that space, you don’t always notice how often people talk about food, movement, rest, or routine as if these choices indicate how “good,” “aware,” or “committed” someone is. I was guilty of that too, because the space I was living in encourages you to think in those terms without you even realizing it.

And because I was inside that mindset, it felt normal at the time. But once I stepped back, it became very clear how much unnecessary guilt, pressure, and self-judgment I had absorbed simply by treating health as if it were a moral category rather than something practical and personal.

Why the Righteousness Happens

With distance, I’ve understood that the reason so much righteousness appears in wellness spaces isn’t necessarily because people are trying to be superior, but because the brain naturally prefers clear rules and reliable structures. Wellness routines deliver that: eat these foods, avoid those, move this many times a week, meditate daily, stay consistent, don’t break the pattern. These rules make you feel in control, especially if the rest of your life feels uncertain.

The problem is that life doesn’t cooperate with that level of consistency! Bodies change, moods change, schedules change, and sometimes you simply don’t want to do what your routine tells you you “should” do. When your identity is tied to being disciplined or “pure,” any small shift feels like a personal failure instead of a normal adaptation.

What Changed When I Let Go

Once I stopped practicing yoga and took social media out of the equation, my perspective shifted much faster than I expected. It was almost like I could finally hear myself think without the background noise of everyone else’s routines and philosophies. I realised that being healthy doesn’t require treating yourself like a project. Some days I move a lot, some days I don’t. Some weeks I eat very intentionally, and others I don’t think about it much at all. None of it needs interpretation, and none of it means anything about who I am as a person.

Instead of worrying about what a break in routine “means,” I started just moving with whatever phase I was in. And honestly, it made life feel much more relaxed and enjoyable. There is something grounding about not making every choice a reflection of your identity. When you stop doing that, you realise most things really are just…things. A day off practice is just a day off. Eating differently for a while is just eating differently. It doesn’t mean you’ve lost your path or your discipline or your sense of self. It just means you’re living like a normal human being whose needs and preferences shift.

A Different Kind of Philosophy

If there’s anything I believe now, it’s simply that life is meant to be lived, and living requires more adaptability than most wellness routines make space for. You don’t lose anything by changing. If anything, you gain a sense of ease that strict routines tend to take away. And when you stop judging your own habits so harshly, you naturally stop judging other people’s, which removes a lot of invisible tension from your daily life.

In a way, stepping away from yoga brought me closer to what I think yoga was trying to teach in the first place: the ability to pay attention to where you actually are and respond to it honestly.

Where I Am Now, and What’s Coming Next

Even though I stepped away from yoga for quite a long time, I’ve started noticing a quiet urge to move again. Nothing dramatic or structured, just a steady feeling that my body wants to come back to some form of practice on its own terms. It’s not a return to the strict version of Prana Vashya I used to do, but more of a blend of the things I’ve enjoyed and benefited from over the years: a bit of Prana Vashya, some functional movement, flexibility work, strength training, plenty of walking, and, honestly, just continuing to dance in my living room whenever I feel like it because that has become one of the most uncomplicated and joyful body movements in my ordinary life.

The big difference now is that I’m approaching movement with a flexibility I didn’t have before. The priority isn’t to get better or to be consistent or to prove anything about who I am. The priority is that I actually enjoy it. If a movement practice doesn’t feel good, I don’t want it. If it becomes rigid again, I’ll step away again. I’m 36 weeks pregnant as I’m writing this, so I know this return will be slow and gradual, and I’m not trying to accelerate it. I can feel that it’s coming, so I’m letting it come naturally without turning it into a project.

Studying the brain these past two years has contributed a lot to this shift. Diving into neuroscience, especially through thinking and learning inspired by neuroscientists like Anil Seth, helped me understand that our experience of life is intimately connected to the state and structure of our brains. It sounds obvious, but when you really internalise it, something changes. You start to realise that the goal isn’t to live according to a perfect routine, it’s to shape a life that actually feels good to live. If the experience inside your own mind is tense, pressured, or constantly self-critical, then it doesn’t matter how “healthy” your routines look from the outside. It won’t translate into a good life.

And I think that’s ultimately where I’ve landed. The point of all of this (yoga, movement, eating well, resting, studying, growing) is to enjoy being here. Not in a superficial or “positive vibes only” way, but in a grounded, honest way that recognises that the quality of our internal experience matters more than the appearance of our external habits. If movement helps me enjoy being here, I’ll move. If rest helps me enjoy being here, I’ll rest. If my routines shift, I’ll shift with them. The goal is not to become a perfect practitioner of anything. It’s to live a life that feels good from the inside out.