How I Meet the Heavy Days: Kriya Yoga in Everyday Life

This morning I woke up feeling like the world was a little heavier than usual.

There wasn't one thing wrong. Nothing had happened overnight that I could point toward and say, There. That's why. It was more subtle than that. I simply woke up aware of the weight of being a human in this exact life. The kind of heaviness that seems to settle somewhere beneath the ribs before the mind has figured out what to call it.

I write often about wonder. About noticing moss and wispy clouds and the way light moves through trees. I write about contentment and presence and learning to trust ourselves. Those are true parts of my life. In fact, I think I notice them more now than I ever have before. But there are heavy days, too, and those can be harder to share. It is so much easier to share the walk in the woods, the meaningful yoga class, the sunset, or the insight that arrived after we have already made our way through whatever difficult thing preceded it.

But I don't believe contentment asks us to curate our lives into something perpetually beautiful. I think it asks us to become more honest about what is actually here. Sometimes what is here is joy and wonder and a deep appreciation for this strange, beautiful life. And sometimes what is here is sadness, exhaustion, worry, grief, or an emotion we cannot quite name. Hard days are part of the truth of being human. If our practice only works when we are peaceful, rested, inspired, and standing in beautiful light, I'm not sure it is much of a practice at all.

Maybe this is why I have come to appreciate the practice of Kriya Yoga so much.

In the second chapter of the Yoga Sutras, Patañjali brings together three practices: Tapas, Svādhyāya, and Īśvara-praṇidhāna. Tapas is often translated as discipline, effort, or the heat of practice. Svādhyāya is self-study. Īśvara-praṇidhāna is surrender—an acknowledgment that there are forces larger than our individual will and things in this life we simply cannot control. Together, these three form Kriya Yoga.

I've started thinking about Kriya Yoga as yoga in action or living my yoga practice. It is one thing to sit with a book in my lap and study yoga philosophy. It is another thing entirely to wake up on an ordinary Friday morning with tears somewhere close to the surface and discover what those teachings might look like in the middle of an actual human life.

My first instinct these days when something feels off is curiosity. That wasn't always true. There was a time when discomfort usually became something to fix. I could become productive. Start something new. Find someone who needed help. Say yes to something. Keep moving. There are so many socially acceptable ways to avoid sitting with ourselves, and I have been quite skilled at several of them.

This morning, though, I didn't immediately try to change how I felt. I started wondering what might be underneath it. Life has been unusually full lately. Because of the Labor Day holiday and the way our Yoga Teacher Training calendar fell, we have three training weekends close together. This is my first time leading this particular Yoga Teacher Training, so I'm not simply pulling polished lesson plans off a shelf. I'm building them. I am usually working a week or two ahead, reading and studying, writing lessons, creating activities, and thinking about what I want these new teachers to understand—not only intellectually, but in their bodies and eventually in the way they hold space for other people.

I love this work deeply. And it is still work. More hours spent preparing have meant fewer hours doing absolutely nothing. Fewer wandering walks. Less time outside. Less time doing the things that don't need to accomplish anything but somehow return me to myself.

There have been other things, too. I've had some deeper conversations with my teenage child lately, and I can feel some of the weight he carries as a teenager trying to find his way through a complicated world. My partner has experienced some difficult days with Parkinson's over the past couple of weeks. Yesterday, I had a conversation with someone from my past that left a little sadness behind. None of these things, individually, explained the heaviness I felt this morning. Together, though, I could see the landscape a little more clearly.

This is what Svādhyāya, or self-study, looks like for me much of the time. It isn't necessarily sitting in deep contemplation until I uncover the hidden explanation for everything I feel. More often, it is simply turning toward myself with enough curiosity to ask, What is happening here? And then, perhaps more importantly, What do I need?

Almost immediately after asking that second question this morning, I started to cry.

Not delicate little movie tears, either. The kind that arrive with enough force that you realize your body apparently knew the answer before you did. So I turned up the music and let myself cry.

Years ago, I would have resisted this. Tears felt too much like giving in to something I was afraid might swallow me. I wanted to understand them, reason with them, trace them back to their source and solve whatever problem had caused them. I think part of me believed that if I allowed myself to feel sadness fully, I might somehow become sadness.

I don't believe that anymore. I've lived with myself long enough now to know that sometimes feelings simply want somewhere to go. They don't always need a story or an explanation. They don't always need to be transformed into wisdom before they are allowed to leave the body. Sometimes I just need to cry. So this morning, I did.

Eventually the tears slowed. My breathing softened. I felt that subtle shift that sometimes comes after a really good cry, when nothing about the circumstances of your life has actually changed, but somehow there is a little more room inside you.

I had planned a productive workday. There were things on my list and plenty I could have accomplished. I even considered going to the wonderful Friday morning yoga class at our studio because yoga class certainly qualifies as self-care. But when I listened a little more closely, that wasn't what I wanted.

I wanted to be outside.

So I leashed up two of the dogs and headed out the door.

I didn't have a destination in mind. I wasn't tracking mileage or trying to turn the walk into exercise. I just started walking and let curiosity choose the route. I noticed the flowers still blooming along the way, holding onto these last warm days. I felt the sun on my face and looked up at thin, wispy clouds stretched across the blue sky. The dogs wandered and sniffed and investigated all the things dogs find endlessly fascinating, and I was happy to have their quiet moral support beside me.

Nothing extraordinary happened on that walk. There was no grand revelation waiting around the corner. I walked. I noticed. I breathed. I let myself be outside on a warm September morning instead of sitting at my computer trying to force myself into the version of the day I had planned.

And somewhere in that choice, I began to understand Tapas a little differently.

Tapas is often translated as discipline, and I think it can be easy—especially in our productivity-obsessed culture—to hear the word discipline and assume it means pushing harder. Finish the work. Stick to the plan. Do the thing you said you were going to do. But increasingly, I understand Tapas as the intentional use of my energy. Sometimes discipline asks me to show up and do the difficult thing. Sometimes it asks me to recognize that pushing harder is simply another way of abandoning myself.

When I came home, I kept following that instinct. I spent some time doing the small self-care rituals I've neglected during these busy weeks. I colored my hair. Yes, I am still fighting the light gray color my hair apparently believes we should be embracing at this stage of life. I've had dark hair my entire adult life, and I'm not convinced lighter hair and my skin tone are meant to be friends. Apparently surrender has limits. That particular spiritual lesson will have to wait for another day.

I shaved simply because it made me feel cared for, and then I lowered myself into a warm bath and let my body soften into the water. None of these things were profound. They weren't particularly spiritual. There was nothing I could put on a résumé or point toward at the end of the day as evidence of my productivity. They were simply small ways of saying to myself, I am paying attention to you.

Maybe that was the practice.

Tapas didn't ask me to override myself today. It asked me to participate intentionally in my own care.

Eventually, clean and freshly dark-haired, I sat down to write. Writing has always been one of the ways I find my way back to myself. Whether it happens in the private pages of my journal or in personal reflections like this one, writing lets me place my experience in front of me and see it with a little more spaciousness. And just like that, I was back in Svādhyāya again.

Perhaps these practices aren't neat steps at all. Perhaps they circle through one another.

Somewhere in the middle of this morning, a close friend sent me a message. There was no crisis she knew about. I hadn't told her I was having a heavy day. She simply reached out to say she hoped I was having a happy day—or, if I wasn't, that perhaps the worst part of it had already passed.

It was such a small thing, and it landed exactly when I needed it.

I don't know what you call moments like that. Coincidence. Connection. Grace. The Universe. Love. I don't feel particularly compelled to decide. I only know that sometimes life offers us a reminder that we aren't carrying everything alone. Someone thinks of us at the right moment. A dog leans against our leg. Sunlight finds us on a walk. A song comes on when we need to cry. Something larger than our carefully constructed plans seems to whisper, You are held here, too.

This is where Īśvara-praṇidhāna becomes more than a Sanskrit word for me. It becomes the practice of surrender.

There are things I care deeply about that I cannot control. I cannot make the world easy for my child. I can love him, listen to him, support him, advocate for him, and remind him again and again that he has somewhere safe to land, but I cannot remove every difficult thing from his path. I cannot control what Parkinson's does in my partner's body. I cannot go backward and rewrite old relationships or conversations. I cannot decide which memories leave an ache behind. Apparently, I cannot even schedule my emotions around the workday I had planned.

There is an enormous amount of suffering available to me if I insist that I should be able to control these things.

So I practice surrender. Not because I don't care, but perhaps because I care so deeply. There comes a point where loving something and trying to control it are no longer the same thing. I can do what is mine to do. I can show up. I can love. I can act where action is possible. And then, again and again, I have to loosen my grip around the rest.

As I sat writing, I began thinking about how differently I meet days like this now than I did several years ago. Back then, I probably would have looked outside myself for relief. I might have said yes to another project because there is a certain rush that comes from having something new to solve. I might have found someone who needed me and poured my energy into making their day better. I might have mistaken being useful for being okay.

There is nothing inherently wrong with helping other people or accomplishing things. Both can be beautiful. But I've learned that I cannot build my own contentment there.

This is where Santosha, another of the Niyamas, keeps finding its way into my life. Contentment, at least as I understand it now, does not mean being happy all the time. It does not mean transcending the messy parts of being human until nothing bothers us anymore. It does not require me to wake up every morning delighted by my life.

Contentment asks something both simpler and harder of me: to become willing to tell the truth about this moment.

And the truth of this moment is complicated. I am deeply grateful for my life. I love the work I am doing. I am surrounded by people I love. There are flowers still blooming outside, dogs walking beside me, warm water to sink into, and friends who somehow send messages at precisely the right moment.

And there is sadness.

There is heaviness.

There are things I wish were easier for the people I love. There are things I cannot fix. There are moments from the past that still leave an ache behind.

All of that can be true at the same time.

Perhaps contentment isn't found by arranging our lives so perfectly that nothing difficult ever visits us. Perhaps it grows when we stop requiring reality to be different before we are willing to inhabit it.

When I taught Kriya Yoga to our Yoga Teacher Training students this week, we talked about transformation as a spiral rather than a straight line. We notice. We investigate. We practice. We release. And eventually we find ourselves noticing again. We encounter many of the same patterns at different stages of our lives, but perhaps each time there is a little more awareness, a little less automatic reaction, a little more choice, a little less grasping, a little more space.

I can see that spiral when I look at this ordinary Friday.

I noticed the heaviness and became curious about it. I listened when my body answered my questions with tears. I let myself cry instead of trying to explain the tears away. I considered how I wanted to use my energy and chose a walk instead of the workday I had planned. I noticed flowers and sunshine and wispy clouds. I cared for my body in small, ordinary ways. I received the unexpected kindness of a friend. I sat down to write. And through all of it, I practiced loosening my imagined control over things that were never mine to control in the first place.

None of this means the heaviness magically disappeared. That isn't the point.

Maybe this is one of the things I understand differently about transformation now. Transformation doesn't necessarily mean the pattern disappears. It doesn't mean we practice yoga long enough that sadness stops visiting, that grief no longer hurts, that worry never wakes up beside us, or that life finally becomes predictable.

Sometimes transformation simply means we meet what arrives differently.

That may be one of the greatest gifts my yoga practice has given me.

I don't always get to choose what arises within me. Feelings seem to operate according to their own mysterious timetable, with remarkably little respect for what I have written in my planner. But I do have some choice in the relationship I build with what arises. I can fight what is here and add another layer of suffering to it, or I can become curious. I can listen. I can decide what is mine to do. I can care for myself. And eventually, I can practice opening my hands around everything that was never mine to control.

I can also remember the ever-changing nature of this human life.

Everything changes. The feelings I desperately want to hold onto eventually change. Seasons change. Bodies change. Relationships change. Children grow. The people we love change. We change.

And mercifully, this also means that the feelings we are certain will last forever eventually change, too.

There is something strangely comforting to me in that truth today. I don't need this heavy day to become a light one before I can appreciate being alive inside it. There is still warmth on my skin. There are still flowers blooming. There are dogs beside me and people who love me. There is meaningful work waiting for me when I return to it. There are also tears, uncertainty, tenderness, and things I wish I could change.

This is the whole thing.

This is the life I get to practice with.

Today, living my yoga means allowing some heavy, sad feelings to visit without treating them as evidence that something has gone wrong. It means trusting that I can feel them without becoming them. It means studying what is here, choosing where I place my energy, and surrendering what was never mine to control.

And perhaps there is even a gift in being human enough to feel all of it—the wonder and the grief, the sunlight and the heaviness, the love and the uncertainty—and knowing that none of it stays exactly as it is.

I don't always get to choose what arises within me.

But my Kriya Yoga practice has changed how I meet what arises.

And today, that is enough.

Here are some additional photos of my walk - just to share for fun: