Disillusioned, I Almost Quit Yoga
Some time ago, I almost quit yoga after 15 years of consistent practice.
Fifteen years is long enough to build an entire identity around something. Long enough for people to describe you through it. Long enough that when you tell people you might be done with it, they look at you the way people look at someone announcing they are divorcing a very stable partner.
"You? But yoga is your thing."
Apparently.
I was tired. Not physically tired — I know physical tiredness. This was a tiredness of yoga itself. My body reacted before my mind fully caught up. I couldn't look at yoga content anymore. I felt genuinely unwell scrolling past another slow-motion reel of someone flowing gracefully through life in matching earth-toned activewear.
I gave away an entire library of yoga books when I moved apartments. Put them outside on the street. People carried them away like they'd discovered hidden treasure. Honestly, good for them.
My yoga mats were pushed into a corner where they collected dust. Yoga suddenly felt like someone I used to be deeply intimate with — someone I had once loved and known closely — but now I got irritated simply hearing them chew. The reaction felt almost allergic. And I knew it wasn't random.
Sometimes the body reaches conclusions before the mind writes the report.
I think it was years of small discomforts accumulating quietly inside me. Years of noticing things in yoga spaces that didn't sit right. Years of trying to reconcile certain teachings, certain dynamics, certain contradictions. Years of stretching myself into shapes that looked flexible on the outside while something inside hardened.
Eventually, the body submitted its resignation letter.
I also felt angry because suddenly fifteen years looked like wasted time.
And it wasn't just time. It was money, energy, and a life I had genuinely built inside this world. I taught yoga, studied it, structured my days around it. I gave a lot. More than I had capacity to give. I just didn't see it at the time.
I spent my nights recording meditations, refining sounds, sequencing voice cues and breath work. I poured hours into creating practices meant to help other people slow down, regulate, heal.
And I often did it without really being held in return.
And it wasn’t just personal exhaustion — there is a structure underneath it. In the wellness space, there is often this unspoken assumption that if something is meaningful enough, it will somehow also become sustainable. If you just follow your dream with enough heart and motivation, it will turn out well. That devotion will translate into stability. It doesn't always work like that. Especially not when healing becomes content, and content becomes currency.
And somewhere in that space, I didn't yet have strong enough boundaries around capitalism. I thought if I was doing something "good," it would somehow protect itself. But meaning doesn't protect you from exhaustion. And care doesn't automatically create structure.
People love saying that a practice held them. Yoga communities say it with the certainty of people announcing gravity exists. But what if it doesn't? What if your practice isn't keeping up with your life? What if your life changes shape and your practice remains standing there, repeating the same answers to entirely different questions?
These questions feel almost inappropriate to ask.
Yoga has been elevated to such a sacred place that questioning it can feel like betrayal. Teachings become wisdom because they sound ancient. Beliefs become truth because enough people repeat them often enough. Questioning starts looking suspiciously like disrespect. As if curiosity itself had somehow become a spiritual failure.
But questioning is not betrayal. Questioning is often what keeps something alive. Otherwise, practices become museums.
So I went to the gym instead.
A sentence that would have shocked my younger self. Fifteen years ago I would have probably whispered the gym the way people whisper about eating chicken at a healing circle.
But I actually liked it.
No one was trying to awaken my inner goddess. No one suggested I release ancestral trauma through my hip flexors. There was no ambient sound bath, no Sanskrit, no reminder that I was exactly where I needed to be.
I lifted weights. I left. I felt good.
Revolutionary.
Nobody around me was performing wellness. They were just doing something physical because it felt good or strong or useful. No bigger framework or life wisdom involved. Something I had spent most of my life finding shallow and uninteresting suddenly became the place I felt most at ease. There was something in that plainness I hadn't realised I was starving for.
Then, slowly, I found my way back to the mat.
I didn’t force myself. I started slowly because I felt like I needed to reconnect. I noticed I was beginning to miss what I once had. I returned because something had shifted. Or maybe because I had.
I always knew my practice would be lifelong. I think I just misunderstood what that meant. I thought lifelong meant consistency. I thought it meant always returning to the same place. But maybe lifelong practice actually means allowing the practice itself to change, even dissolve.
The intention changed. The intensity changed — ironically, it feels more intense now than ever before. When I first started in my early 20s, I had a lot to unpack. I had to get to know my body, learn my thoughts, observe myself. I had to meet myself. That takes time. And I don't think I'll ever be finished.
But now it feels less like unpacking and more like fine-tuning. Less like searching. More like removing. Removing noise. Removing performance. Removing things that were never mine. Letting go of what I once took in as truth and no longer recognize as mine. Until eventually there is less noise between me and myself.
Maybe that burnt-out, disillusioned, quietly-dreading-your-mat phase is what it looks like when the body refuses to continue a conversation that stopped feeling honest.
Mine did.
And I suspect yoga is not the only place where this happens.
If this resonated with you, moved you, or made you pause and reflect – consider this your cue. I’ve set up a virtual tip jar via Buy Me a Coffee. No monthly commitments, no strings, no memberships required.
Your sweet kindness helps keep the thoughts flowing, the energy exchange intact, and the glow of my inner goddess alive. It won’t fix capitalism, but it might buy me five minutes of joy (or at least a cortado).
Gracias. Thank you. Jërëjëf. Merci. Obrigada. Danke. Arigatō. Medaase. Grazie. Hvala. Tack. Asante. Shukran. Teşekkürler. Dziękuję.
