Your Healing Is Your Responsibility

There’s an idea that is simple to say and hard to live. What happened to us is not always our fault. What we do with it is still ours.

I heard another studio owner say a version of this in a video this week and I have not stopped thinking about it. Your healing is your responsibility. My first reaction was a little bit of ouch, which is usually how I know something is true lol.

Here is what I think it means. If teaching yoga has shown me anything, it’s that everyone in the room is carrying something. Some of it is small and some of it changed them. All of it counts.

But pain is not permission. Being hurt doesn’t make it okay to hurt someone else, or to be short with the people who show up for us, or to expect them to carry something they had no part in. They didn’t do it. They are just the ones standing closest.

I think a lot of us (me included) get stuck at the understanding part. We figure out why we are the way we are and it feels like progress. It is progress. It’s also not the finish line. Knowing where a habit came from does not change the habit. You still have to do the boring part, where you catch yourself on a random Wednesday and decide to do differently. And none of that means acting like it never happened. Keep your boundaries. Remember all of it. Just don’t hand it to the next person.

There is a difference between something happening to you and letting it become who you are. One of those you didn’t choose. The other one you get to decide every day.

Yoga has a word for this. Svadhyaya, which means self-study. It is one of the niyamas so it comes later in our series and I am getting ahead of myself, but Patanjali lists it in Yoga Sutra 2.32 and the short version is that you study yourself the way you would study anything you wanted to get good at. With honesty, and without beating yourself up about what you find.

I see it in class. I can cue the pose. I can’t breathe for anyone. The practice only works when the person on the mat is the one doing it, and that is as true in a hard conversation as it is in chair pose.

Nobody else can do this part for us. Not a partner, not a best friend, coworker, not the best teacher in the world. I used to think that sounded lonely. Now I think it’s the good news, because it means it’s in our own hands.

So here is the question I’m sitting with this week. Where can I take full accountability in my life right now?

xo

Emily

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