There were times in my life when I knew exactly what I needed to do.
I just…couldn't.
I thought that simply completing the last big thing I'd been working on would finally make me feel better — relieved. But it didn't. Not really. Sure, I celebrated. I had more time and mental space. I felt a bit lighter. I travelled. I entered the 2025 holidays proud and accomplished, no longer having to answer "so when will you be done?" — only to face the new line of inquiry: "now what are you going to do?"
UGH. Annoyed by the question, I wanted to scream can you just give me a minute?? But I was annoyed because I was asking myself the exact same thing — and had no answers. I was stuck. Again. Knowing I wanted to put my research and newly earned credential to good use, yet…how?
Right after the new year, I went to visit dear soul-mate friends I hadn't seen in quite some time. In their presence, I felt grounded almost immediately — another experience of coming home, but this time for a sustained stretch. I started to feel like my old self again. The old self meeting the new is quite something. I felt like I was coming back to life.
Over that week, I realized just how intensely dysregulated I'd become. How disassociated I was from my deeper feelings. I recently saw a meme that said: "Depression for a lot of Gen Xers doesn't look like falling apart…it looks like holding everything together while quietly feeling nothing." That one landed.
When I returned from that trip, I knew I needed to come back to my yoga practice — not to maintain, as I had been, but to unravel. It was time to take my own advice. To take what I knew from my research and my history with yoga and bring it into meaningful, intentional practice.
I remembered the particular quality of stillness at the end of a practice — lying in savasana, feeling my breath slow and my body soften into the floor — and thinking: this is what it feels like to actually be okay. Not performing okay. Not managing. Just — okay.
What I know from my research and my practice is that yoga does something very specific to the nervous system. It creates the conditions the brain needs to access what we already know. It opens a door that years of stress had quietly shut.
Here's something the research makes remarkably clear, even if we rarely talk about it this plainly: you cannot think your way into growth when your nervous system is in survival mode.
When we're stressed — and for most of us, that's more often than we realize — the body activates the sympathetic nervous system, the fight-flight-freeze branch. This system exists to protect us, and it does that job well. But it comes at a cost. Under stress, the prefrontal cortex — the part of the brain responsible for decision-making, emotional regulation, learning, and cognitive flexibility — effectively goes offline. Even mild stress causes rapid loss of these higher-order functions. Chronic stress takes it further, actually reducing the density of neural connections in the prefrontal cortex over time.
When you are stressed, you lose access to your most sophisticated self.
And here's the piece that matters most for anyone doing personal growth work: the brain's ability to form new neural pathways — new ways of thinking, responding, and relating to your life — requires neuroplasticity. And neuroplasticity is significantly inhibited by chronic stress. This means all the insight, therapy, journaling, and intention-setting in the world has a ceiling — if your nervous system never gets the signal that it's safe to rest.
The coping skills are there. The new ways of thinking are possible. But the door is locked, and stress is holding the key.
The parasympathetic nervous system — the rest-and-digest branch — is what unlocks it. When it's activated, the brain releases acetylcholine, essential for learning and memory consolidation. The prefrontal cortex comes back online. Executive function returns. The nervous system shifts from scanning for threat to something open, curious, and receptive — precisely the state we need to do real growth work.
This is not a metaphor. This is physiology. The body has to feel safe before the brain can change.
Which brings me to yoga — and to what I found in my own research.
My doctoral dissertation explored the lived experiences of licensed mental health counselors who use yoga as a self-care practice. What I found was that yoga wasn't just helping them feel better. It was doing something precise and consistent in their nervous systems — and they could feel it happening in real time.
Participants described breathwork as the most immediate tool — the first signal that a regulated state was being accessed. One described breath as muscle memory: something her body had learned to find automatically, in hard moments, between clients, in the middle of a difficult day. Not a technique she had to remember. A capacity that had become part of her.
Movement through postures created what participants called an immediate somatic shift — a felt transition from tension to groundedness. Several described beginning to regulate simply by unrolling their mat. The ritual itself was enough to start signaling safety to the nervous system.
And savasana — the final resting pose — was described not as an optional cool-down but as the moment the shift completes itself. "Savasana is glorious," said one participant. "It's the moment where I feel like nothing is wrong." Another: "I notice a slow shift within myself. I feel a difference between when I walk into class and when I walk out." My research frames savasana explicitly as a gateway to nervous system downregulation — the place where the body finally exhales.
One participant said it as plainly as I've ever heard it said: "Just returning to my mat resets my whole nervous system."
This is what regulation feels like in a body. Not an idea. Not an aspiration. A felt, embodied, repeatable experience — one that opens the door to everything you already know but can't access when you're running on stress.
Personal growth is not just a mental event. It never has been.
We can want to change. We can understand our patterns, set intentions, make plans, read all the books — and still find ourselves returning to the same places. Not because we haven't tried hard enough, but because the trying happens in a nervous system that never received the signal that it's safe to let something new in.
Yoga — practiced with intention, consistency, and awareness — is one of the most accessible and well-researched tools we have for creating that signal. It teaches the body to find regulation. It builds the neurological conditions for real learning and lasting change. Over time, it doesn't just help you feel better on your mat. It rewires what's possible everywhere else.
This is the intersection I have spent my career living at and studying — where the wisdom of yoga meets the science of the mind, and where both meet the very human desire to grow into who we are meant to be.
It's also the foundation of the work I'm building through The Grounded Growth Method — a workshop series designed to bring these tools together in a meaningful, accessible, and experientially grounded way. If this resonates with you — if you've felt that gap between knowing and being able to do — I'd love for you to explore it with me.
More details coming soon. In the meantime, I hope you'll find your mat.