something is brewing 🔮
why I've been quiet and what is next
🎧 Prefer to listen? - I recorded a (unedited) voiceover for this post for you. We all get endless emails, Substacks, and way too much screen time — so if you prefer to listen, here it is:
something is brewing 🔮
I took a step back from this Substack and from this Real Life Magic Substack over the past year and a half because I’ve been in school for yoga therapy (and got my prenatal/postnatal yoga certification + did a doula training on top of that). It’s been a quieter (yet busy) season of studying, deep integration, and being with myself — and now I’m slowly reemerging and beginning to share again.
Lately, I’ve been feeling called to create a virtual weekly group yoga therapy class for three months (Feb–April 2026). We’ll meet one night a week for accountability, community, connection, and a place to reconnect through yoga therapy practices.
The group would explore themes like:
Self-Acceptance: cultivating self-acknowledgment and compassion from the start, without bypassing your experience, including steps to release perfectionism and productivity conditioning. Celebrating small wins along the way (not when you reach the next goal).
Self-Trust: strengthening grounded intuition, discernment, and embodiment; learning what “yes” and “no” feel like in your body and making choices aligned with your own inner wisdom.
Cultivating Real Life Magic: noticing awe/wonder, synchronicity, signs, and consciously cultivating meaning through mindfulness and small, daily practices.
Learning to listen to life: exploring when to take intentional action and when to soften, pause, or surrender. Attuning to nature, timing, patterns, and inner knowing.
Each week, we’ll meet virtually for a guided therapeutic yoga session, and you’d also receive practices to work with between sessions — visualizations, journaling/self-inquiry prompts, little teachings/videos, and daily micro-practices — along with gentle group accountability and support.
The class integrates practices and tools from many traditions and teachers I’ve learned from in the last 15 years. You can see more information and sign up here.
You might have a couple of questions now:
Who might this group yoga therapy class be good for?
What is yoga therapy?
What about Real Life Magic?
I’ll touch on each below.
Who might this group yoga therapy class be good for:
Someone who has been “doing the work” for years— therapy, wellness, self-development, spirituality — and has plenty of tools, but wants community and accountability to stay connected to their practices. We don’t have to do this alone.
It’s also for someone burnt out from self-help and craving integration, self-acceptance, and relief from the perfectionism that sneaks into the wellness world. For the person tired of feeling like there’s always another thing to fix — and ready to enjoy their actual life now, as the perfectly imperfect human they are. And then we can use the tools when we need them, rather than in a never-ending way of trying to make ourselves perfect.
We live in a culture that worships productivity and perfectionism, so this pattern is extremely common (it definitely has been for me!). But when we learn to accept ourselves and our lives exactly as they are — without gaslighting ourselves or pretending everything’s perfect — we can finally receive the lives we’re working so hard to build. Otherwise, the “goal mountain” never ends.
This class would be ultimately about learning to enjoy your life as it is right now, while reinforcing that you already have what you need to take care of yourself, no matter what’s happening around you. The outside world won’t give us stability; we create an ever-changing version of that from within.
This group may also support someone ready to increase self-trust and break old patterns they keep repeating. Someone tired of the noise and overstimulation — the experts, the “This is THE way!” voices — who wants to feel confident tuning into their own inner wisdom, while still using logic, research, and external support and tools in healthy ways.
This is about learning what “yes” and “no” feel like in your body, and gently orienting toward “yes” and toward joy whenever possible. Intuition is a muscle we build in tiny (& fun) consistent steps.
It’s also for anyone curious about yoga therapy or the practices above — including building self-trust through tarot or astrology in an empowered, grounded way (not outsourcing agency to a deck, an astrologer, or “the universe”). These tools can be helpful when used with discernment and self-awareness.
Someone who believes in seasonal, cyclical living — someone who wants to honor their inner seasons of surrender, rest, going inward, expansion, manifestation, creativity, and aligned action.
And of course, it’s also for someone who wants to cultivate their own relationship with Real Life Magic — signs, synchronicities, intuition, wonder, spirituality, etc — in a grounded, mindful way that is playful and aligns with their belief system and lived experience.
I’m still putting the pieces together, but I’m curious whether this resonates — would anyone be into something like this? Or know someone who might be?
Feel free to send them my way or let me know if you want to stay in the loop.
What the heck is Yoga Therapy?
As I said above, I’ve been studying yoga therapy for the past year and just finished the main coursework. I’m now in my integration year, where I get to apply everything I’ve learned and work with people one-on-one and in groups while I work with mentors. I’m hoping to be officially IAYT certified by the summer.
When most people hear “yoga,” they picture stretching or flowing through poses or maybe finding a moment of calm, but as most of you already know, yoga is a 5,000+ year-old holistic system from India, rooted and developed alongside broader South Asian traditions, designed to bring harmony to the body, mind, and spirit.
In simple terms, yoga therapy uses the full spectrum of yoga’s tools — movement, breath, mindfulness, philosophy, intuition, self-inquiry, and more — in a therapeutic, customized way, to support the whole person: body, mind, and spirit.
IAYT - The International Association of Yoga Therapists defines it as: “Yoga therapy is the process of empowering individuals to progress toward improved health and well-being through the application of the teachings and practices of Yoga. They also note that it is difficult to define because it can be approached in so many different ways, as many yoga therapy teachers have modeled for me, and you can read more about that here.
My version of yoga therapy is less about poses and more about helping you reconnect to yourself, understand your patterns, and discover what balance and whole-person well-being look like for you in this season of life. (Which is different for everyone and constantly shifting.)
It can support everything from stress and anxiety to major life transitions, chronic pain or illness, self-acceptance, intuition/self—trust, cultivating joy & acceptance, overall health, energy work, emotional processing, and more.
Yoga therapy recognizes that we are dynamic beings — constantly shifting, evolving, responding to stress, emotions, environment, relationships, and life transitions. Because of that, your yoga “medicine” might look different every day. Yoga therapy is a type of somatic therapy, so sometimes it’s movement. Sometimes it’s breathwork. Sometimes it’s deep rest, energetic clearing, or honest self-reflection.
It recognizes that everything is connected and it can be grounded, scientific, woo, or a mix — whatever meets you where you are. Ayurveda — yoga’s sister science — is also part of the lens of yoga therapy. In Ayurveda, which is also thousands of years old and rooted in India, the opposite is often the medicine, and the goal isn’t perfection or extremes, but gently finding your middle path.
To give you an example of yoga therapy: If five people walk in with the same issue — say, chronic low back pain — each one may be caused and supported by something entirely different.
stress-related tension —> nervous system down-regulation
an L4/L5 herniation —> targeted asana + functional movement
emotional buildup —> somatic work, restorative yoga, journaling
craving joy + self-acceptance —> practices that cultivate those
or… they might just need a new bed
Same symptom. Different root cause. Different yoga therapy and support.
If you know anyone who might benefit from a yoga therapy session or who’s curious about how it works, feel free to share my info. They can learn more about my group yoga therapy class here, and if they want something more personalized, I also offer private sessions.
Yoga therapy can be a complementary form of care for various health challenges, physical or mental, and does not intend to replace the services of mental or physical healthcare providers. It can be part of the continuum of care, as an additional layer of support.
I plan to share my story about why I got into yoga therapy soon.
So now, what about Real Life Magic?
Will I keep sharing Real Life Magic stories?
Will I go back to my old journal-style Substack posts?
Good questions. I’ve been reimagining my Real Life Magic project (which was first born in 2018 and shared in 2023), and I plan to bring it back in a new way. I always wanted it to be more of a storytelling project than a wellness podcast — so I stepped back to make sure I didn’t accidentally turn it into something it wasn’t.
I am practicing tuning out the external noise of what I “should” do next, and doing what feels like joy instead. I’m redesigning this space for the next version, and I will share more about what that will look like soon.
“I am practicing tuning out the external noise of what I “should” do next, and doing what feels like joy instead.” Love this so much. Love yoga therapy with you!!!