What a Birthday Taught Me About Yoga (and It’s Not What I Expected)

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This year’s birthday got me thinking.

Which isn’t unusual – birthdays tend to do that. But this one sent me somewhere specific: back to the mat. Back to the practice. Back to the question of what yoga has actually given me over the years, which turns out to be quite different from what I thought I was signing up for.

On the day itself, I did what I do most days. I unrolled my mat – not for content, not to plan a class or film something or tick a box, but because it’s the one thing that’s always brought me back to myself.

There’s something about another year passing that makes you want to stand somewhere familiar, somewhere honest; and for me, that place has a slightly worn corner and smells faintly of my current favourite wax melt or candle.

But here’s what I kept coming back to, sitting with it all: the mat isn’t actually the point. It never really was.

Some Time Ago

A few years ago (okay, more like twenty, let’s be honest about it) I would have told you yoga was something I did. A physical practice. A workout, almost. Something I squeezed in when I had the energy, which wasn’t often enough, because life kept happening in the way that life does.

I was fitting yoga around everything else: work, tiredness, the low hum of never quite feeling caught up. And when I made it to the mat, it was good – genuinely, good – but it was also finite. I’d finish, roll it up, and carry on as I was.

I didn’t know there was more to it than that.

I didn’t know that what I was dipping a toe into was actually an eight-limbed practice, thousands of years in the making, that had something to say about every single part of how I was living. Not just how I moved my body, but how I breathed, how I thought, how I related to other people, how I treated myself.

I didn’t know that yoga was going to teach me how to rest.

The Shift That Didn’t Happen on the Mat

Here’s what nobody tells you when you start doing yoga: the āsana (postures) – the bit most people think is yoga – is actually just one limb of eight.

The full framework comes from Patañjali’s Yoga Sūtras, compiled somewhere around 400 CE, and it describes yoga as a path rather than a practice. Aṣṭāṅga yoga – eight-limbed yoga – covers:

• Yāma – how we relate to the world around us: values like non-harm, honesty, not taking more than we need
• Niyama – how we relate to ourselves: cleanliness, contentment, self-study, surrender to something larger
• Āsana – the physical postures. Yes, this one. But notice where it sits: third
• Prāṇāyāma – the regulation of breath and life force. The bridge between the outer and inner
• Pratyāhāra – withdrawal of the senses. The turning inward, the moment you stop reacting to every external thing and find there’s a whole inner world waiting
• Dhāraṇā – concentration, or single-pointed focus
• Dhyāna – meditation, sustained, deepening awareness
• Samādhi – integration. A state of wholeness that’s difficult to describe and easy to feel glimpses of, usually when you least expect it

I’m not listing these to make you memorise them. I’m listing them because when I finally encountered this framework properly and really sat with it, rather than just knowing it existed, something genuinely shifted for me.

The shift wasn’t on the mat. It happened because of what the mat kept pointing me toward: the breath; the quiet; the turning inward.

Learning How to Rest

I spent a long time treating rest and stillness as something I had to earn.

I think a lot of us do. We live in a culture that is relentlessly oriented toward doing – producing, achieving, optimising, being useful. Rest gets sold back to us as a reward for effort: you can stop when you’ve finished; you can relax when you deserve it; you can sleep when you’re dead, presumably.

Yoga – the full practice, all eight limbs – quietly dismantles that logic.

Prāṇāyāma teaches you that the exhale is not lesser than the inhale, that slowing down the breath isn’t weakness; it’s regulation. That your nervous system is not your enemy, and it responds to gentleness.

Pratyāhāra teaches you to come home, to notice that the world will continue making noise, and you don’t have to be swept away by all of it. That going inward isn’t avoidance; it’s discernment.

And yoga nidrā – which translates roughly as yogic sleep, and sits in the territory of pratyāhāra and dhyāna – takes all of that and holds it in one practice. You lie down. You are guided through layers of awareness. You stay conscious while your body does something very close to sleeping. And somewhere in that liminal space, the nervous system gets to exhale in a way it rarely gets to in ordinary waking life.

I didn’t learn to rest because someone told me I should – I learned because I kept coming back to these practices and they gradually, gently, made the case for it. Not through force or instruction; just through the experience of what it felt like on the other side.

What Birthdays Actually Ask of You

Birthdays are interesting. They arrive whether you’re ready or not, and they tend to ask questions you’ve been too busy to sit with.

What’s changed? What’s the same? What do you actually want?

I’ve started to think of them as a kind of annual pratyāhāra – a moment of turning inward that the calendar forces on you whether you’ve been practising it or not. A chance to withdraw from the noise for a moment and take stock.

This year, when I turn that gaze inward, a lot of what I find points back here: to this practice, and to the people who’ve been part of building something around it with me.

The people who come to classes and bring their whole tired, complicated, full lives with them and unroll their mats anyway.

The people who’ve lain down in community halls and trusted me to guide them somewhere softer.

The people who message me, who reply to emails, who turn up online and engage with ideas that most of the world still thinks of as fringe or strange.

You are part of why this feels worth doing. Genuinely.

I’m Still Learning. I Think That’s the Point.

One of the niyamas – the second of those eight limbs – is svādhyāya: self-study. Ongoing, honest, curious self-inquiry. Not self-criticism or a performance review. Just the willingness to keep looking, keep asking, keep being changed by what you find.

I’ve been practising yoga for twenty-something years and I am still a student of it. Not in a self-deprecating way: in a genuinely delighted way. The practice is that deep – there is always somewhere further in to go.

That’s what I love about teaching it: not handing people a set of shapes to master, but handing them a framework for understanding themselves. Watching someone find their breath for the first time. Watching someone discover they can lie still for forty-five minutes and not combust. Watching someone realise that the turning inward isn’t something to be afraid of.

That is yoga. All of it. Not just the shapes.

If You’re Curious About the Lying-Down Part

I teach yoga nidrā through an event called Strong Enough to Rest – and the name is not accidental. I t’s there because most people who come don’t feel strong enough. They come tired, overstretched, quietly depleted; they come because something in them recognises it needs what this offers, even if they can’t quite name it yet.

We gather, we settle, we go inward together.

You don’t need to have any experience of yoga. You don’t need to be able to touch your toes, hold a posture, or know a single Sáṃskṛta word (though if you want to learn some, I’m here for it). You need to be able to lie down. That’s the whole requirement.

If that speaks to something in you – whether you’re twenty-something and starting out, or twenty-something (or more) years in and just now finding the space to slow down – I’d love to have you there.

On birthdays, I notice what I’m grateful for. This year: this practice; our community; this ongoing, ever-deepening conversation with a tradition that has been asking the same questions of humans for thousands of years.

I’m still learning.

I think that’s the point.