E64: The Surprising Power of Yoga to Cultivate Flow and Reduce Modern Stress

Most of us are unknowingly caught in a cycle of nonstop activity, leaving little room to reconnect with ourselves. What if the secret to transforming your work and life lies in a simple, ancient practice—yoga—that's more relevant today than ever? 

In this episode, Tony Tenaglier flips the script, blending modern neuroscience, philosophy, and practical insights to reveal how slowing down and mastering your breath can unlock flow, reduce burnout, and create real meaning amid chaos.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:02

All right. Welcome to the Work Sucks But I Like It podcast. Today we're going to do something a little different. And just because I kind of mentioned in the reflection a couple months ago where guests were not showing up, and that kind of resulted last month, actually. And we also had some post-production issues as well. I'm not going to lie, still learning the Riverside Platform. But, anyways, here we go today. So I'm going to do a different spin, and I'm excited to share that, you know, my third book in a rush to go nowhere, Finding Shivasna. That's sort of the working title for now. I had 12 beta readers this last month of April 2026. And, you know, about half of them responded back, which is more than great. You know, I was even excited that 12 people were interested in reading this particular book. So I want to kind of run through the book and sort of like, you know, interview myself. And you've gotten sort of a flavor, right, for the way that I've been hosting the show. You know, how do you define work? Things like that. So let's apply that today and let's roll right in. So how do you define work in terms of, I guess this book, right? And that sounds like a weird question, but basically, you know, yoga to me is a great vehicle to learn about the mind-body connection. And the fact that we live such sedentary lives, meaning we sit a lot, yoga is a reminder that we're meant to move. Whether you're walking or running or whatever other sport you're doing, I think that's great. And yoga is just that other way to just remind ourselves that we just need to move. We're sitting so much watching Netflix on our phones. And we need to integrate this movement with our mind, because when it's unison, that's when we can find a flow state. And that's what I really love about yoga is you do the work on the mat. The process already has built in clear challenges, right? If I'm doing a challenging pose like an arm balance or a warrior three, or maybe working on some other pose like a split, which I cannot do, or a handstand or whatever, you have immediate feedback, right? From those, you know, clear goals. And then you have, of course, the challenge to skill ratio balance, those three things we talk about a lot on the show, the antecedents of flow. And hopefully you're starting to recognize in your own work, your own activities, these three things as they come up, right? Whether you're doing yoga or not, maybe you're starting to see those clear goals. Maybe you're starting to recognize, hey, this is a challenge, this is a skill that I'm developing. Maybe you're seeing, hey, this is feedback. How do I like feedback? Remember, a guest way back early on the show last year indicated asking how you like feedback. So in yoga, what I love about it is that every time I step onto the mat, it's really something different with the practice. And no matter how crazy the world is or whatever's going on in my life, it's just a nice way to sort of separate my, I guess call it work and everything else that I do and just find this chance for stillness. And I think that's important work to do today. You know, I interviewed someone and her sort of like tagline was, you know, self-care is the new healthcare. And I really believe that, you know, yoga is one step in the direction of self-care. And I love one thing that Trisha Vinateri said, you know, in an episode, I believe it's a 51, episode 51, not area 51, of course. But she mentioned that, you know, yoga is a good way to help with, you know, um preventing sort of, you know, uh burnout, but it's not the solution, right? The workplace culture, the values, things like that, those other sort of structures in place with our work, those need to be looked at. But I don't want to overlook the fact that yoga is a powerful thing. And just a little thing here before I go more into yoga, Trisha Vinateri, um, Garrett Wood, Vanessa the Vivacious. I was just on her show, Humanity 2.0, super excited to share that when it drops. All three of us, four of us, excuse me, including myself, are going to be on a panel talking about burnout the end of May 2026. So stay tuned. I'm going to be posting it on LinkedIn, talking more a little bit about it, you know, on the upcoming, you know, shows episodes, excuse me, this month of May, but I'm excited to talk about burnout because it is an important thing today in the work we do. So back to the book. Why did I write this book on yoga? And why did I say, in a rush to go nowhere, finding shivasana? So, first of all, for you readers that aren't yogis, and that's okay, I'd although I still recommend that you go take a yoga class. Shivasana is probably the easiest yoga pose you can do. It's basically laying down on the mat and closing your eyes. But the trick is, most people think that's falling asleep. Well, it's not. We're not trying to fall asleep. We're trying to go inward. We're trying to calm the fluctuations of the mind. And that's the goal of yoga. And there's this book called the Sutras of Patanjali. Um, most yoga teachers, yoga schools will more or less agree that this is the called quote-unquote textbook of yoga. Now, what's interesting about this textbook, it's not really a textbook in the sense of like physics, where I learned Newton's laws and, you know, maybe other different things of electromechanical things, but it's really about a way of life. And so what's interesting over the years when this text was written and sort of evolved, especially in the West, right, as this sort of like, let's buy a rubber mat and go practice yoga in a heated room with all these sort of random postures that we're doing. And, you know, there's nothing wrong with that, but I think we're slipping towards this hustle culture in the yoga class of loud music, of fast-paced movement. And to me, yoga has always been a reminder to slow down. So the book is in a rush to go nowhere, which we feel sometimes, right? We feel like we're going nowhere. All this hard work, maybe we're in the middle of our careers, whatever that means, working towards retirement. And sometimes it feels like we're going nowhere just because we're comparing ourselves, right, to other people. Oh, you know, they made it to retirement, or this person's an entrepreneur and making so much money and living on a yacht and eating caviar and whatever we think, you know, wealthy people do with their money and time. And, you know, it's interesting that, like, you know, on the podcast, I've interviewed millionaires and, you know, people that just have what call just day jobs, looking at it from just the, you know, the financial perspective. It's that, you know, money is just a thing. It's not, yeah, it's what you make of it, right? And obviously what you make, I guess, but it's what you make of it with the money that you have, right? So I've interviewed, again, wealthy people, and they're not like selling the life of like being on a yacht and all these things. So, anyways, I kind of go on a tangent there about the whole, but I want to just say that like to me, the world is sort of like spinning chaotically, right? So, yoga is an important thing. So, this book that I wrote is basically a modern take on yoga in the West, and it's really about getting away from this fast pace. I need to check things off. I need to get my workout in. And believe me, I went through this phase of I wanted to track my calories and I had on my, you know, watch that how many times I was doing yoga and it was telling me if I was fit or not. And now I just like going in with nothing. No phone, no watch, just practicing on my mat with a community. And that's what I love the most. And so, you know, I talk about on the show, you know, success is not a matter of good luck, it's good skill. And I think the skill on the yoga mat is so critical today, no matter what you do, that mind-body connection, right? That matching of breath with movement to establish this mind-body connection. Now, you know, if you're a runner out there, you know, I've run 12 marathons myself. If you like kind of playing sports, you feel that, right? It's built into the game. It's built into, you know, whether you're running in a race or running in the woods or whatever, it's you have that runner's high, right? There's this connection that everything is one, right? And that we, that's that flow state that we've always kind of talked about in the show. And in yoga, that skill, when you stick to the process, when you follow the breath through challenging postures, there comes a time when, as you can realize, you know, when you build up that skill to the challenge in front of you with the respective feedback towards the goal, right? All the antecedents have flow here, you're going to get into flow. And yoga just has taught me so well. Um, every time I step with a mat, even to this day, that reminder of looking for the challenge, right? Looking for the opportunity. So here's an example, right? So say we're in a difficult pose, a warrior three. And if you don't know what that is, you'll probably have to Google it. It's basically one leg is on the ground, your arms are going out in front of you, the back leg is lifting up. So you look like kind of a T, right? And it's very hard, right? It's a very challenging pose. Gravity is the immediate feedback, right? It wants to pull your leg down, it wants to pull your torso down, you're doing the work to lift it up. That's the skill, right? So the goal is to get in this particular shape. The feedback is gravity. Of course, your mind wandering too, you know, trying to stay balanced as well. Um, and then, of course, you know, the skill is to get it the leg up. And then the challenge, of course, again, is fighting that gravity. So the skill that we're talking about then, once you've sort of realized kind of the map of the antecedents of flow in the yoga posture, is now the ability to use the breath within that sort of framework, right? So you've got all these things going in the posture. Now you're using the breath to say, on an inhale, I like to say, okay, inhale, look for the, you know, opportunity, the energy, the tension, whatever in the body. And on the exhale, send the breath that way. So what you're doing is you're building an awareness, right, of what's going on in this relative posture through the inhale. And on the exhale, you're letting out sort of this controlled energy to find this sort of stable, metastable equilibrium here in this posture. And when you do that over and over again, right, and on your yoga mat, imagine how that compounds for you. Imagine that, you know, your mind's eye being able to see the challenge in your body. And then now take that off the mat, right? Imagine now you've practiced the skill of seeing what's inside of you, you start to recognize it in other people. And I think that's such a great skill that I've developed on the yoga mat. And in the book, I'm trying to really build that up through the context of, you know, again, the yoga sutras that we talked about and really the neuroscience. So, what's interesting about yoga today is that it's built on philosophy, you know, way of life, if you will, um, in India. Um, yoga is this one particular philosophical system. And neuroscience today. And what do I mean by that? Because philosophy, I mean yoga, philosophy is really kind of how the mind is working, right? The goal of yoga is to calm the mind. And in neuroscience, right, we're trying to understand brain waves. And what's interesting, when you start looking at the different types of brain waves going from, you know, uh gamma, you know, beta, alpha theta into delta, it's you're lowering the frequency of the brain waves when you move towards delta, which is that sort of sleep, if you will. And then one author had correlated that to uh the state of samadhi, which, you know, I was kind of suggesting that Shivasana can help us sort of get there, see that realization. And the way I think about with brain waves, so remember that alpha theta brain waves are a flow state. And if you touch your forehead right now, just picture in your mind's eye that the activity in the brain has sort of diminished, and all we're seeing is this alpha theta flow brain state in your mind, when you are in a flow state, of course. With that angle now, you can clearly, well, that's what I'm trying to sort of argue in the book, is that if yoga from a philosophical standpoint is saying that we want to calm the mind, neuroscience is showing us that flow states are actually calming the mind. And then if we get into delta, which is sort of, you know, this meditative state when you've really controlled your mind, that's when you can start to see things. Now, the thing that is interesting, right, is that people are afraid to slow down. They're afraid to stop because this world is nonstop. But think of it like this, right? If you're on a lake and the water is very choppy, it's depending on the sport that you're doing, right? Maybe if you're, you know, um wakeboarding, that's fun, you know, things like that. But if you want the lake to be calm so you can see the bottom, you can't have any waves. And so, same too, and similar to with your mind, is if there's too choppy, there's too many waves, if you will, in your mind, you're not going to be able to see. And that's what yoga is really doing for students today. So, what is one thing that has sucked about this work? And what did you do to make it not suck in this editing process? So, first of all, writing is very challenging. And, you know, I don't know how many times, you know, say for example, you've written an email, maybe you've drafted it, you have edited a few times before you hit send. Imagine doing that for a 60,000, 70,000-word email, right? You have to reread it a lot. And the part that sucks is the editing. I'm not gonna lie. But the thing about the editing is that, you know, my editor says, you know, good writing is in the editing. And so to make it not suck this time, I allowed myself to say, hey, you know what? If I want people to read this, I need to take sort of a leap of faith, send it out to my network, see who's gonna pick it up. And I have to say, you know, for those listening to the podcast who read my book on the initial beta read, thank you so much. It was very eye-opening to see the different perspectives. Some of you came back, you know, and said things that were were good for me, right? It's I wasn't looking for, oh, yay, good job, Tony. You wrote a book. It's so great, it's gonna do well. That's fine, right? We all want that sort of like, you know, congratulations on some level, but at the same time, I want to improve, right? That's some feedback, but we also need the feedback that makes us grow. And so one of the things that a friend had commented on was that the use of music. So in a yoga class, to me, music is very obnoxious, I'm gonna say, just point bluntly. And that sounds crazy because as you know, the music that you listen to on the show, the beginning and the end, is from you know, my band, the Nowhere Kids, and I'm the drummer, right? So you would think that I would love music. But the thing about music is that it's distracting, right? There's noise. And if we think again in terms of those waves on the lake, if I have music blasting and I'm trying to calm the waves in my mind, you're kind of fighting against the music. And so that's why I stopped using music in my class. But the other argument is that some people's waves are so choppy that music helps them streamline their thoughts to get them on sort of planet Earth, I'll say, you know, from the Netflix, you know, binge watching and the five screens behind their phones with social media. And again, it's not to bash people that have that now, because you know what? We're set up to be addicted. And it's not our fault. It's the people designing these things, and it makes it very hard for us users to navigate the phone. And that's the thing that I also talk about throughout the book is how do you navigate the phone? Because I'm not preaching that we all go throw away our phones and go live in a temple, you know, in the mountains or something, you know, and live our life. Because that to me is not taking the full responsibility of the life that you have. Now, maybe for some, that's their path they they take. But for let's face it, for most of us, we want to have a family, maybe. We want to have our things, right? We're not so detached, you know, from every sort of object, inanimate thing in our life that we can live with basically nothing in the woods. And I think like that is what the book is really speaking to is how do you navigate, you know, the world of the phone today through the lens of yoga? Now I know sort of complex, but as you can hear, when you've got an engineer Lego building, you know, working on his PhD, like talking on this podcast. I love integrating all these different things, right? Because one of the things that I love talking about of late is this concept of doing and being. And that's what I see a lot in the yoga practice today. Everybody can do yoga. Even though you think you can't because you can't touch your toes, it doesn't matter. That's all bull crap. And touching your toes doesn't mean shit, right? You go to class, really, to me, a true yogi is getting into a flow state. So if we were measuring, you know, calming the mind by alpha, theta brain waves, then anyone can do yoga, right? In that regard. It's not about putting your foot behind your head or doing a split or touching your toes on that level. Now, the postures certainly help, right? The postures definitely allow us to explore the mind because let's face it, it agitates it, right? That's the part that sucks, right? Trying to work on these postures that are challenging, but through the discipline of the practice, through even the community, right? That's what I love too, right? People are yearning for, you know, friendship and connection today. And yoga is is all of that, right? You can improve yourself on a personal level. You can make friends in a yoga community. And so, you know, as I wrap up the edits and the suggestions, I'm really excited, you know, to I guess start to ruffle some feathers here in the yoga kind of like world because it's becoming too also sort of commercialized, right? And I definitely have a section on cultural appropriation. Yoga was really, you know, originated from India. So the argument is, okay, well, how much are we sort of taking from India, right? And sort of using it in the American sense. And, you know, where's that fine line, right? Of appreciation of what, you know, these people did, you know, in terms of yoga and how do we use it in the United States? And that's another sort of path that I explore in a chapter in the book. But the takeaway, again, is this. I think, you know, we talk about skills, you know, on the podcast. And yes, I've talked about the skill of mind-body connection, but the most important one that I just am going to keep coming back to, just like a broken record, you know, just like Ed Howard said with, you know, leadership with one breath, you know, his book on that, it's that it is the breath, right? So no matter what work you do, I believe that when we can tap into the breath, when you can tap into the breath and be so mindful of your breathing throughout the shitty times of work, throughout the crazy thoughts that you're having, even the thought before you're ready to pick up your phone and be like, oh man, before I go in this deep, you know, rabbit hole of, you know, going down this Instagram scroll, which by the way I've done too with Legos. I love looking up Lego profiles and seeing how I could improve my city. But, you know, just catch yourself in that moment with the breath. And it's just training your brain. And it's very hard, believe me, because the phones have been made to be addictive. So imagine you're addicted to this phone, which most of us are, and breaking that addiction is going to be tough. But like I said, kind of a weird filler here, you know, sort of out of the blue, if you will, throwing this yoga sort of mix into the podcast. Next week, though, we're going to jump right back into interviews. I'm really excited to really share some exciting ones. I think this month of May 2026 is going to be really cool in terms of like the themes that arise. And we'll see you next time. Thank you.