#contemplative practice

There was an evening in Rishikesh when Guru Devendra asked me a question that completely changed my practice.

We were sitting by the Ganges after class. Most students had gone for chai, but I stayed, watching the river catch the last light.

He settled beside me on the stone steps.

"Tell me about yoga in Spain," he said.

I described the studios in Barcelona. The flow classes. The handstands. The beautiful spaces with their Buddha statues and Sanskrit quotes on the walls.

He listened carefully. Then, so gently: "That is one limb. What of the other seven?"

I stared at him.

Other seven?

I'd been practicing yoga for five years, I'd been practicing one-eighth of yoga for five years.

The Eight Limbs Most Studios Never Teach

Guru Devendra introduced me to Patanjali's Yoga Sutras - an ancient text that maps the complete path of yoga.

Not yoga as exercise. Yoga as a system for living.

The text describes eight limbs. Asana (the physical postures) is just the third.

Here's what I'd been missing:

1. Yama - Ethical restraints

(Ahimsa - non-harming, Satya - truthfulness, Asteya - non-stealing, Brahmacharya - wise energy use, Aparigraha - non-possessiveness)

2. Niyama - Personal observances

(Saucha - purity, Santosha - contentment, Tapas - disciplined effort, Svadhyaya - self-study, Ishvara pranidhana - surrender)

3. Asana - Physical postures

This is what most Western classes focus on

4. Pranayama - Breath control

5. Pratyahara - Withdrawal of senses

6. Dharana - Concentration

7. Dhyana - Meditation

8. Samadhi - Absorption/union

Sitting on those stone steps, I realized I'd been building a house starting with the roof.

How the West Changed Yoga

Yoga came to the West in the early 20th century. But something happened in translation.

Western culture was obsessed with fitness. Yoga's physical aspects were concrete, teachable, marketable.

The ethical foundations? Harder to sell.

In Barcelona, my studios offered "Power Yoga" and "Flow." Sixty-minute classes, mostly asana. Brief meditation. Philosophy mentioned in passing, if at all.

Nobody talked about ahimsa - about how practicing non-harm toward your body means actually listening to it.

Nobody discussed satya - being truthful about what your body can do versus what you're forcing it to do.

I'm not saying Western yoga is wrong. It brought yoga to millions. The physical practice opened the door for me too.

But something got lost.

"We kept the Instagram. We lost the inquiry."

Four Weeks in Rishikesh

The ashram schedule began before dawn.

But asana practice didn't start until we'd spent an hour discussing philosophy.

Week 1: The Yamas

Ahimsa - non-harming - came first.

Not just toward others. Toward ourselves.

Every forceful adjustment I'd received in Western classes violated this. Every time I pushed past pain thinking "no pain, no gain," I practiced harm, not yoga.

Guru Devendra said: "Ahimsa means asking - am I honoring my body, or trying to conquer it?"

I thought about every class where I'd competed with the person on the next mat.

Satya - truthfulness - meant being honest about my actual capacity. Not the pose I wished I could do. The one my body could sustain.

Week 2: The Niyamas

Santosha - contentment - was harder than any arm balance.

Could I be content with my practice exactly as it was?

Could I find discipline as something sacred (more on this - read about my morning practice)?

Svadhyaya - self-study - wasn't just reading philosophy. It was honest examination of my patterns.

Why did I practice? What was I trying to prove?

Week 3: Everything Shifted

When we finally emphasized asana, the poses were the same.

But I moved differently.

Each movement became a question: Am I honoring ahimsa? Am I practicing satya? Can I find santosha in this breath?

"The poses were the same. Everything was different."

My friend Ananya explained: "For us, asana prepares the body for meditation. For the West, meditation is the cool-down after workout."

She wasn't being critical. Just observant.

Both paths can lead somewhere. But they start from different places.

Back in Gothenburg

I worried the learning would fade when I got back to Sweden.

Some days, it does.

But most mornings now, before I step on my mat, I pause.

I check in:

Ahimsa - Am I being kind to my body today?

Satya - What is truthfully accessible right now?

Santosha - Can I be content with where I am?

My running along the Göta River became pranayama practice. My journal is svadhyaya.

When I catch myself comparing my practice to others on Instagram, I recognize it - aparigraha, the grasping.

The eight limbs weave through everything.

Sara, my Swedish teacher, asked what I learned in India.

"That I'd been missing seven-eighths."

"And now?"

"Now I'm practicing all eight. Badly, but wholly."

I'm not suddenly enlightened. I still get competitive. I still judge my worth by my flexibility some days.

But now I notice. I recognize when ego enters, and I can choose differently.

The Invitation

Your asana practice is valid.

The physical gateway is real. For many of us, it's the only way we would have found yoga.

But there's more available.

The ethical foundations don't make practice harder. They make it deeper.

Ahimsa transforms how you approach every pose.

Satya changes what "progress" means.

Santosha lets you stop chasing and start inhabiting.

The eight limbs aren't ancient rules to follow rigidly.

They're an invitation to fuller practice.

Yoga can be exercise. That's powerful.

Or yoga can be transformation.

"The body is the doorway, not the destination."

I still practice the same sequences from Barcelona. Downward dog. Warrior. Triangle.

But now each pose asks questions:

Am I practicing harm or healing?

Achievement or awareness?

Grasping or contentment?

Same poses. Different yoga.

What's your experience with yoga beyond the physical practice? Have you explored the yamas and niyamas?

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The tiles were cool under my feet.

Dawn light was just beginning to touch the Sierra Nevada, turning the peaks soft gold, and my grandmother moved along her terrace with the metal watering can, tipping it gently over geraniums and jasmine.

I was ten years old, half awake, sitting cross-legged near the low wall. The air smelled of lemon blossoms and something I couldn't name then but recognize now as patience.

Abuela Isabela didn't say much those mornings.

She'd water each plant slowly, pausing between pots, her breath steady and unhurried. Sometimes she'd glance at the mountains and stand still for a moment, the watering can resting at her side.

Once, she looked over at me and smiled.

"Respira, mi niña," she said. "Despacio."

Breathe, my girl. Slowly.

She showed me how to match my breath to the rhythm of the can, the slow pour of water, the quiet between one plant and the next.

"Like the mountains," she said, gesturing toward the Sierra Nevada. "They breathe too, you know. Poco a poco."

I didn't understand what she meant. I just sat there, watching her, breathing the way she breathed, letting the morning settle around us like stillness had weight.

My grandmother never called it meditation.

She never mentioned chakras or mindfulness or any of the words I'd learn years later in yoga studios. She just lived it, moved through her mornings with a quality of attention I wouldn't have a name for until I was much older.

But on terrace in Granada, with the mountains breathing and my grandmother's hands gentle on the watering can, I learned something I didn't know I was learning.

What She Taught Without Teaching

Abuela Isabela's house was small and whitewashed, perched on the edge of the Albaicín district where narrow streets wound upward and the scent of jasmine mixed with incense from the shops below.

Every summer, my siblings and I would visit for a few weeks, trading the noise of Barcelona for Granada's slower rhythms.

My sister Lucía and my brother Mateo would get restless by midday, wanting to explore or play, but I'd stay close to the house.

I liked the quiet.

I liked the way my grandmother moved through her routines without hurry or performance.

She'd rise early, always before the heat settled in.

First the plants. Then coffee, black and strong, in a small ceramic cup she'd had for decades. She'd sit at the kitchen table with the newspaper, reading slowly, sometimes pausing to look out the window at nothing in particular.

I'd watch her from the doorway, not sure what I was noticing but feeling it mattered somehow.

In the afternoons, when the world outside slowed to a hush, she'd sit on the tiled floor of the living room with her sewing.

The old radio played flamenco softly, crackling through guitar and voice.

She never rushed her stitches, she just worked, steady and present, her breath matching the rhythm of her hands.

I'd lie nearby on the cool tiles, half reading, half listening, feeling the weight of summer stillness press down like a gift.

Looking back now, I see what she was teaching me.

Presence isn't something you do, it's something you are.

It lives in the space between tasks, in the pause before you begin, in breath you take when no one's watching.

She taught me that ordinary moments, watering plants or mending clothes or sitting with coffee, can be sacred if you meet them with attention.

She taught me this without saying any of it out loud.

When Stillness Found Its Name

Years later, I was twenty-two and living in Barcelona, working at a marketing agency and feeling the constant hum of a city that never quite stopped moving.

A coworker mentioned a yoga class near the office, something about breath and slowing down, and I went mostly because I was curious.

The studio was small, wood floors and large windows, the kind of space that felt intentional.

The teacher was calm and spoke in that particular tone yoga instructors have, the one that sounds like they're always on the edge of whispering.

She led us through poses I didn't know the names for yet, and then at the end, she had us lie still.

"Find your breath," she said.

"Notice where it moves in your body. Be present with it. Don't judge. Just observe."

And in that moment, lying on my mat with my eyes closed and my breath moving slow and steady, I felt something familiar.

Something I knew but had forgotten I knew.

I saw my grandmother's terrace. I saw the watering can. I heard her voice: Respira, despacio.

I opened my eyes and realized, with a jolt that was equal parts recognition and sadness, that I'd been taught this already.

Not in a studio with wood floors and soft music, not with Sanskrit words and careful instruction, but on a stone terrace in Granada by a woman who never called it anything more than breathing.

Why did I need a yoga class to value what my grandmother had given me freely?

It's a question I've sat with for a long time.

Part of the answer, I think, is that Western culture teaches us to formalize things before we trust them.

We need credentials, systems, languages we don't speak.

We travel to India to learn what our grandmothers knew all along, because somehow the distance makes it real.

I don't say that with bitterness. I understand it now.

Sometimes we need the journey away to recognize what was always there.

The yoga training didn't replace my grandmother's teaching, it helped me see it. It gave me language for something I'd felt but couldn't name.

Both paths are valid.

The grandmother who waters plants in silence and the guru who teaches pranayama in an ashram, they're offering the same thing.

Presence. Breath. The practice of paying attention.

I traveled to Rishikesh years later to study with a teacher named Guru Devendra... and what I found there was the same stillness my grandmother had shown me on a terrace overlooking the Sierra Nevada.

The circle closed quietly, two decades after it began.

What the Mountains Remember

Abuela Isabela died three years ago.

Pancreatic cancer, quick and quiet, the way she lived.

I flew back to Granada for the funeral, and afterward, I went to her house.

My mother and aunt were sorting through her things, deciding what to keep and what to let go, but I walked out to the terrace alone.

The mountains were still there.

The geraniums had grown wild without her care, but the jasmine was blooming.

I stood where she used to stand in the mornings, and I realized I was holding my breath.

So I let it out.

Slow. Steady. The way she taught me.

I sat cross-legged on the stone where I used to sit as a child, and I practiced yoga there, on the same terrace where she watered plants and showed me how mountains breathe.

The poses felt different in that space, less like performance and more like prayer.

Her stillness had become my stillness.

I didn't know when it happened, didn't notice the inheritance passing from her hands to mine, but it had.

The way I pause before beginning something. The way I breathe when I'm anxious. The way I move through my mornings in Gothenburg now, slow and deliberate, coffee first, then breath, then the day.

It's all her.

She taught me that contemplative practice doesn't begin in studios or ashrams.

It begins wherever someone shows you how to be present.

It begins with a grandmother watering plants. It begins with breath matching rhythm. It begins in ordinary moments that aren't ordinary at all if you're paying attention.

The sacred is hidden in the everyday, waiting for us to notice it.

The Inheritance

These days, I live in Gothenburg, far from Granada's heat and jasmine.

My apartment is small and light-filled, and I have a balcony that faces the Göta River.

I don't have a terrace with mountains, but I have a view of water and sky, and in the early mornings before the city wakes, it's quiet enough to hear my own breath.

I start each day the way my grandmother started hers.

Coffee first, black and strong. Then I sit, sometimes on my mat, sometimes just on the floor, and I breathe.

Slow. Steady. Paying attention to the rise and fall of my ribs, the way air moves through my body, the space between inhale and exhale where everything is still.

I'm not trying to achieve anything.

I'm not working toward enlightenment or flexibility or any particular state.

I'm just practicing what she taught me: that meditation isn't what you do, it's how you do everything.

Watering plants. Making coffee. Breathing.

The practice is passed down not through books or certifications but through example.

Through mornings spent in silence with someone who knows how to be present. Through the inheritance of stillness that moves from one body to another without announcement or ceremony.

I think about her often when I sit in breath, on mat in Gothenburg, thousands of kilometers from the terrace where I learned this.

I think about how she never needed yoga studios or Sanskrit or any formal practice to know what took me years to recognize.

And sometimes, when the morning is very quiet and I'm breathing slowly, I hear her voice again.

Respira, mi niña. Despacio.

The mountains are still breathing.

And so am I.

Did you have someone who taught you stillness? Someone who showed you how to be present before you knew what to call it?

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