The day my wife rewired my brain 🧠🤯 on Love, Life & Yoga

A good quote does more than we think. A good quote does more than decorate a page or pander to what we already believe. Applied in the right context, a good quote can make you close the book and just sit there in wonder 🤔. As I did the day Laura schooled me on life, changed the trajectory of my education, my foresight, and maybe even rewired my entire brain 🧠. I asked her a question whilst reading in bed, and she said; “There are no facts, only interpretations.” (Nietzsche)

I still think about that day. And I look forward to the day I can tell Zaccy about the time mummy laid the smackdown on daddy and and permanently altered the way he saw and understood everything.

Even before that moment, I remember my mum telling me Laura was a keeper. I said, no mum, she plays in midfield. This little old Asian woman in a headscarf just looked at me, blank. That’s my problem in life (one of many). I don’t know my audience. And I’m just not as funny as I think I am.

Anyway. Nietzsche schooling aside, here are three quotes I’ve read in books that made me close the cover, disrupting my certainty and fundamentally changing how I see yoga, teaching, and become more comfortable being my own person.

1. “It is we who have put our hands before our eyes and cry that it is dark 🫣" - Swami Vivekananda

What I took from this was that I couldn’t keep waiting for someone else to open my eyes for me. Whatever I was battling with at the time, I needed to be brave enough to face it, including the possibility that I was getting in my own way.

2. “The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. To be your own man is a hard business. If you try it, you’ll be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.” - Rudyard Kipling

This was one of the many realities of trying to find my own path rather than just adopting the dogmas handed that had been forced on me. It took work (and heart) to not belong to the crowd.

3. “Everyone knows the drop merges into the ocean, but few know the ocean merges into the drop.” 💧 Kabir

An almost radical idea, I thought, when I first read it. We’re always told that yoga is the individual soul merging into the cosmos ✨. But until I read this, I’d never once considered it the other way around. It changed how I see the philosophy of yoga, and breathing especially. In fact this quote is what inspired my own line on breathing. “You do not breathe. Breathing runs through you. You exist only for the few seconds it passes through.”

So why am I sharing these with you? Because, in their own way, these three quotes have helped me make sense of the person I’m trying to become. Just my own person, really, which sounds simple enough until you realise how much of who you think you should be has come from everyone else.

Someone once called me an unusual yoga teacher, and I took it as a victory. It had taken me years of reading, questioning and disagreeing to feel comfortable being that guy 🫣.

The funny thing is, I’ve learnt so much from books I don’t entirely agree with. Somewhere in all that reading, Eastern and Western, I started feeling more confident about what I believed, without needing everyone around me to believe it too. These quotes helped me get there, although I’m still working plenty of it out.

And I wonder how many of you have felt that too, loving yoga but not quite feeling like a “yoga person”. I’m sharing this because I’d hate for you to spend years thinking that was something about yourself you needed to correct.

And if there’s a quote that’s made you close the book and question something you thought you knew, reply and share it with me.

Namaskar

Zahir

My Book 📕 - Yoga, Madness or Meditation?

IN-PERSON TRAINING 👇🏽

→ 200h YOGA TEACHER TRAINING

→ ADVANCED 300H TT

🧠 ONLINE LEARNING 👇🏽

Free Courses

💡 Advanced TT,

🧠 Anatomy Blueprint,

😤 Science of Breathing

🧘🏽‍♀️ Teaching & Structuring

☯️ YIN Yoga