I Cried Recording This — On Giving MySelf Permission and Why Yoga Needs to Go Deep Again

I almost didn't make this episode. It's the most personal thing I've shared in a while — and at one point I just stopped and cried, right there into the mic. This is me working through a paradigm shift I've been sitting in for months: owning that after seventeen years, I'm not a beginner yoga therapist figuring it out anymore. I'm a senior one. And that comes with a responsibility I've been hesitant to fully claim — to speak honestly about what's happened to yoga over the last twenty years, as it moved from weird and deep to widely available, and in that spread, became diluted. Surface level. Fitness oriented. A stress reliever you do for 15 minutes and forget.

In this episode I talk about why yoga has always been about healing and integration, not just exercise — and why, in a world accelerating into AI and disconnection, we need practices that turn us inward more than ever. I talk about devotion. About what it means to actually identify as a woman who practices — not occasionally, but as a real part of who you are, with a system and a village around you that helps you fill the gaps when life gets hard. This one is raw, it's honest, and I think it might be exactly what some of you have been needing to hear.

Come Home to Your Body - free somatic yoga practice for women

->https://kerimarino.eo.page/comehome

Daily Devotion - 21 day therapeutic home yoga practice 

-> https://www.kerimarino.com/daily-devotion-21-day-program.html

The Nourished Woman Sanctuary - on-demand and live somatic yoga for women ready to feel wildly whole & free

-> https://www.kerimarino.com/the-nourished-woman-sanctuary.html

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Connect with Keri at https://www.kerimarino.com/ and @the_nourished_woman

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:27

Lately, I've been working through some of how I'm seeing who I get to be in my business and whether or not it's who you all want me to be. And I've been uncovering some belief systems that I see now aren't in alignment with how I really feel inside and who I'm becoming into. And so this episode is partly an exploration of that out loud for you to hear, but it's also a conversation about what yoga actually is. And it's speaking right into the heart of the woman who is not just looking for surface-level benefits. You are looking not for symptom relief, but to feel like your entire life feels different, alive, free, whole, comfortable in ways that it's not yet spacious, useful. So part of what I've been realizing is that I've been in this field a long time. I've been practicing for 20 years. I've been working professionally as a yoga therapist and yoga teacher for 17 years. And I've realized only recently, and this may make you laugh, that I'm a senior teacher now, that I can say that. And it almost makes me like, ugh, makes my throat catch a little bit because I don't want my ego to get too big. But also, I've had clients telling me for years that they look at me this way, because many of you are actual yoga teachers or yoga therapists, even, and you look to me as a person who carries the years that I've practiced, all the years of teaching, the thousands of hours working with people. And I've also believed until very recently on some level, that me speaking about yoga as audaciously as I want to, as directly as I want to, that it just wouldn't be good for business. I thought that you didn't want to hear it. I thought that you wanted me to talk about other things. And what I've come around to is that actually the voice that I have to share, the unapologetic focus on yoga as a deeply embodied, lived experience, spiritual practice, way to feel held and supported for women that I see it as, is immensely important. And so part of this conversation is me giving myself permission to just speak out loud more and more and more often about that. Because I think so many of you might need to hear it. And whether or not you resonate with my love of yoga and my passion and desire for your own practice or not, you'll see your own stuff in this. You might see how you have things that you're passionate about that maybe you've felt like people weren't interested in or wouldn't help you with your growth or relationships or business growth or whatever it is that you're aiming for. And so I think that this conversation is for all of us because, gosh, don't we need more women being honest about their inner experience and sharing it out loud, right? So let's talk about yoga and part of what I've seen trend-wise over the years of my practice. So I just want to bring you into the frame of my mind for a second. When I first started teaching yoga, there was hardly anyone teaching yoga. It was very weird. Um, we carried boom boxes to class with like mixed CDs that we had handmade and burned. And yoga, in my experience, was deeply spiritual. It was a practice for the whole self. It was about coming home to your body, it was about awareness, it was about emotions, it was about a relationship to your own voice, it was about so many different things. And then yoga became more popular. And as yoga became much more popular, and we've seen several booms of this in the yoga industry, and as teacher training programs became like literally available all of the time everywhere, and as yoga became available everywhere all the time, which was so different than when I started, then the industry shifted in a lot of ways. And I saw a lot more surface-level yoga being made available at first. I saw quick training programs come into origin, like where you could train online, never even working with a teacher in like 30 days, or like my first teacher training was a 30-day intensive training program where I lived in Asheville, North Carolina and went to the studio and studied for 30 days and like straight 10, 12 hours a day at yoga school. And I but I but mine was a really deep, I will say my training program was really deep and multidimensional. But I just saw yoga become something that was more about fitness, it was more about physical aim, it was more about achieving like really hard yoga poses, it was more about like um showy practices, it was more about health than it was about like the integration of the self. Spirituality was kind of chopped out of it. In fact, many places back then and even today were literally telling yoga teachers that they couldn't weave in chanting or they couldn't talk about spirituality or emotions at all. It just had to be physical. I was talking to some yoga teachers just this weekend about how they teach at a really well-known gym and how they're taught those things and how they creatively get around it so they can still weave in the depth. The industry changed. And then the industry has changed more again because now yoga is available online and wide scale. Yoga is available at apartment complexes, yoga is available mixed with alcohol. There's goat yoga, puppy yoga, kitten yoga. There's yoga available in any number of places all of the time. And it is no longer, and there's a lot of yoga that is actually not even yoga, like it is just exercise being called yoga because yoga sells, right? Like it's a billion-dollar industry every single year. And I think that what has been hard for me as a woman who has always cared.

SPEAKER_01 7:34

Gosh, I feel I feel emotional about it. Sorry. As a woman who has always viewed yoga as healing. As a woman who has always viewed yoga as healing, as a place of death, as a place of community, as a place of meaningful support for my entire being, body and mind and spirit and life. It has been kind of tricky to navigate this world because I've seen people sell surface level stuff and have more outward success than I have.

SPEAKER_00 8:38

And I've seen people like I've seen, for example, one of the busiest studios here in my community of Greenville, South Carolina is literally just teaching exercise, calling it yoga. They're doing three-minute shavasanas, and it's just fitness, but it's like it's booming. And then there are yoga studios that I have worked at that are beautiful and rich and inclusive and meaningful and doing deep work, and the classes are not as full. And it's been kind of hard. It's been kind of hard to figure out like how do you offer something so valuable and meaningful and healing and deep in a world that thinks that yoga is surface level shit. And so I think on some levels, I've tried to figure out how to fit in and how to find a voice and how to build a brand despite many moves to different states and cities, despite having babies and needing to scale my business up and down, despite all of it, despite working in this industry for 17 years nonstop and practicing in it for 20, I've tried to figure out how to fit in. And the reality is that now, maybe more than ever, we need the depth of yoga. We need the voices saying out loud that yoga is more and that yoga offers immense power to transform your life and to nourish the places within you that need love and care, and to really bridge the gaps between the areas of yourself that are fragmented and disconnected or aren't flowing or are even blocked so that they come together and are whole. And now we have the boom of AI. And the boom of AI again is changing this world that we live in. We have answers at our fingertips from a broader perspective than we've ever had before. It is so much easier to look outside of ourselves than ever before than it is to look inward for answers. And I think that makes yoga practice all the more important because this is a place of returning to self. This is a place of listening to your intuition. This is a place of wholeness. This is a place of accessing quiet and contemplative and stillness. And it is also a place of moving and opening and stretching and breathing and chanting and raising your voice and chanting softly. And it is so many things. It is this spiritual practice at its very core. And I think we need it. And I think part of reflecting on all the time that I've spent and this like paradigm shift in my own mind of seeing myself as a senior yoga therapist, as a senior teacher in this realm, is about naming these things for you. Because I know that so many of you are hungering for something so much more. And maybe you've been caught in a tangle, or you've been, you've been influenced by the marketing that yoga teachers, maybe even me, have put out into the world that have made you think that yoga is surface level or about symptom relief or simply about fitness or about these more shallow level things when it's about depth and it's about liberation and it's about waking up and it's about freedom and it's about integration and it's about healing. If you've hungered for more, if you've wanted something deeper, if you've wanted to feel a level of connection with yourself that makes you literally feel more alive and wild and whole and free, so you can look in the mirror and actually like the person you see, so you can fling your heart open in those beautiful small moments and appreciate the ordinary good that's available right in front of you. If you want to stop comparison comparison thinking, if you want to break free from shame, if you want to be a 70-year-old who shakes her ass in her living room and has a good time doing it, right? If you want to have great sex with someone you trust, if you want to be the mom who listens closely and also knows how to set down the role of being mom and just be you again. Like all these things, I just want you to know that you are right on time, girl, and you're not looking for something that's not possible. It's absolutely possible. And this is what you've been looking for, maybe. You've been looking for someone to say out loud the depth, the freedom, the joy, the pleasure, the play is possible. And I don't think, I just don't think this surface-level yoga can get you there. Like, there's no part of me that believes that it can get you there. But I do absolutely believe, and I know from my own experience, I know from 17 years of being in this practice and unapologetically like staying in touch with this real healing approach to yoga, that it's possible because I've seen it happen for so many women, but it won't happen from casual yoga practice, it won't happen from surface-level yoga practice, it won't happen from on and off again yoga practice. This is about devotion, this is about consistency, this is about desire, this is about creating an identity around being a woman who practices regularly because it is a framework, a tool, a system of support that you have in your life. And I think yoga also is a way to build back the village that so many of us are missing, that community, that support where real things can be talked about and expressed and moved through and cried through, whether it's an online community or an in-person community. I think so many of you are hungry for that. And so, if after listening to this episode, you feel like you want the kind of depth that I'm offering here, there's a free practice for you down in the show notes. It's called Come Home to Your Body. And it's really just a lovely little taste of the kind of yoga experiences that I share. But another thing that that gives you is access to my weekly soul notes. I send one out every Thursday morning, like clockwork, Thursday morning if you're in the eastern United States. It would be a different time for you if you're someplace else. Where I share really meaningful weekly reflections like this in written form. And it also helps you stay in touch with all the different ways that you can practice with me, whether you're locally here in Greenville or anywhere in the world. Thanks for listening today, love.