Drishti: Finding Focus Through Your Gaze
Have you ever noticed how easily your mind wanders during yoga practice? You might find yourself watching someone across the room, thinking about what’s next in your day, or wondering whether you’re doing a posture correctly.
One way to bring your attention back to your practice is through drishti, or a point of focus.
Whether you’re practicing Ashtanga, Vinyasa, Hatha, or another style of yoga, giving your eyes a place to rest can help steady your mind. It can improve concentration, support balance and alignment, and encourage a more meditative quality throughout your practice.
In Ashtanga yoga, every posture has a prescribed drishti. There are nine traditional gazing points:
- Nasagrai: Tip of the nose
- Angustha Madhyai: Thumbs
- Nabhi Chakra: Navel
- Hastagrai: Fingertips
- Padhayoragrai: Toes or big toes
- Bhrumadhya: Third eye, between the eyebrows
- Parsva Drishti: Far to the right
- Parsva Drishti: Far to the left
- Urdhva or Antara Drishti: Upward, toward the sky or ceiling
Combined with steady breathing, drishti helps transform the physical movements of yoga into a moving meditation.
But you don’t have to memorize all nine gazing points to benefit from the practice.
If you’re unsure where to look, simply choose a point and allow your gaze to rest softly there. Ideally, choose something other than another person. Even in a led class, you can listen to the teacher’s cues without constantly looking toward them.
And while your eyes are focused, let your ears turn toward your breath.
Listen for evenness in your inhalations and exhalations. Notice whether there are moments when you tend to hold your breath or begin breathing more rapidly.
Your breath is telling you something. Perhaps you’re working harder than you realize, holding unnecessary tension, or simply need to slow down.
Listen, and respond.
The next time you step onto your mat, try giving your eyes somewhere to rest and your mind something to listen to.
Your body will thank you.
Progress Isn’t Always Visible
We’ve all heard the saying, “You can’t judge a book by its cover.” Yet how often do we do just that, especially when it comes to ourselves?
For me, it might be a class I’ve just taught, something I’m writing, a run I’ve finished, or my yoga practice.
When someone else is teaching, I’m often the first to compliment their ability to hold space for others or the quality of their teaching voice. In my creative writing class, I do my best to offer feedback that is both constructive and encouraging. And as my regular yoga students return week after week, I can easily see the progress they’re making. Whether it’s simply showing up when they’re struggling or noticing how the quality of their breath has softened, I see it.
But my vision isn’t always as clear when it comes to myself.
The other day, I managed to carve out some time between meetings to work on my drop backs.
I set up my stack of foam pads and began with a simple backbend, placing my hands on the edge of the pads and pushing up from the floor.
Then I stood and slowly bent backward until I spotted my marker at the far edge of the pads. I stayed there for a few breaths, feeling my spine bend backward, before finally allowing my hands to find the edge of the stack. I didn’t try to come back up. I simply released to the floor and stood again.
On the next attempt, I tried to hover a little longer before landing on the pads. This time, I rocked my hips forward, shifting more weight into my hands and allowing my shoulders and upper back to release. Once again, I lowered myself to the floor and stood up.
Then I tried another.
This time, I could feel my weight shifting forward enough that my hands became light on the edge of the pads. I stayed with it, and I came up to stand.
When I watched the video afterward, there was no visible improvement from the last time I’d worked on drop backs. My heels still lifted, and the movement wasn’t particularly graceful.
But something had changed.
There was a discernible difference in my mind. I approached the movement with less apprehension and more confidence. I knew I could do it…and I did it.
Even better, I could recognize that progress instead of picking apart what I saw on the video.
THAT is progress.
Perhaps the next time we’re quick to notice what someone else is doing well, we can extend a little of that same generosity to ourselves. Sometimes our 1% improvement isn’t something anyone else can see. But that doesn’t make it any less real.
Stepping Out of My Comfort Zone
In 2012, I enrolled in a 200-hour yoga teacher training program. I completed the coursework and passed all the tests except one: the final test-out class, where I would demonstrate my ability to teach by leading a yoga class.
I talked myself out of it.
I told myself I didn’t have anything particularly special to offer. There were already so many newly certified yoga teachers. Did the world really need another one?
Besides, my son needed me. Between raising him and everything else in my life, I wasn’t sure where teaching would fit.
And so I stopped just short of finishing.
Some of those reasons were practical. Others, looking back, had more to do with my confidence. But my interest in teaching never really went away. In the meantime, I kept taking more and more trainings, primarily focused on the Ashtanga Yoga method.
Years later, immediately after completing my certification, I found myself unexpectedly called upon to teach a Vinyasa class when the scheduled teacher was stuck in traffic. I was nervous, but I agreed to step in. No time to prepare. No time to be nervous.
I made it through the class, although I spent plenty of time afterward thinking about everything I could have done differently. I wrote about that experience in 2019, calling the post When Called to Serve.
Now, seven years later, I find myself thinking about that experience again.
This year has brought several opportunities to step outside my comfort zone. Publishing Keeping Pace, a memoir about my personal grief journey, was a big one. Sharing something so personal with the world felt enormous. And apparently, that wasn’t enough. I went on to record the audiobook myself, too.
Both experiences required me to do things I hadn’t done before and to become comfortable with a certain amount of uncertainty.
And then came some unexpected teaching opportunities.
Most of my teaching has centered around Mysore-style Ashtanga yoga. It’s a practice I know well, and one where I feel comfortable working individually with students as they move through their own practice. I don’t have to stand at the front of the room and lead everyone through a sequence. Instead, I observe, offer guidance one on one, and respond to what each student needs.
Recently, though, Erica Valentine, one of my fellow teachers at Breathe Together Yoga, has asked me to cover some of her classes while she’s away pursuing her own opportunities.
First came Candlelight Sound Bath, Meditation & Gentle Movement. More recently, she asked me to teach her all-levels Vinyasa classes with optional strength work.
Neither is exactly in my wheelhouse.
Before teaching my first candlelight class, Erica generously spent part of a Saturday with me, showing me how she works with the different instruments and giving me a chance to try them myself. She also loaned me a collection of instruments, including crystal bowls, metal singing bowls, bells, ocean drums, a rain stick, and chimes.
The candlelight class has me guiding students through gentle movement and meditation before settling into a sound bath. I’m learning how to work with the instruments, how to pace the different portions of class, and how to create an experience that feels cohesive.
I’ve even been practicing my sound baths at home with my two Labrador retrievers, ages two and six. They’re usually wild and crazy, but apparently the sound bath works on them. They fall asleep! I’m not sure there’s a better endorsement.
I’ve also purchased my first sound bath instrument, a shaker made from kenari seed nutshells. I have only one more candlelight class scheduled, but apparently that hasn’t stopped me from starting my own collection. I’m looking forward to trying it out.
The Vinyasa classes challenge me in a different way. I’m creating sequences that flow, offering variations for different abilities, and incorporating optional strength work with light weights. Vinyasa is more familiar territory for me than sound baths, but every teacher brings something different to a class, and I’ve enjoyed exploring how to make these classes my own.
For the strength portion, I draw a little from my own experience training at the gym, both independently and with personal trainers. I try to focus on form and controlled movement so that even with lighter weights, students can experience the exercises and the muscles they’re working.
A few of the guys have commented on the light weight selection. I suppose when you’re accustomed to lifting heavier weights, two-, three-, and five-pound dumbbells might not seem like much. But there’s plenty to explore with lighter weights when you slow things down and pay attention to how you’re moving. And let’s not forget, you don’t need weights at all to work on strength. Sometimes, simply engaging your muscles more intentionally is enough to make a familiar movement feel entirely different.
It’s a very different experience from walking around the Mysore room, observing and assisting students. Both classes require more preparation than my usual teaching, and both push me outside my comfort zone.
But here’s the thing. I love teaching them. Read More
When the Body Remembers
Kapotasana has a way of finding me.
I don’t rush into it. I reach up before I reach back. I press my legs firmly into the mat and take my time creating space, especially in my low back where I’ve learned not to collapse. The first round I practice on my own. The second goes deeper, with steady support behind me. I feel grounded. Safe. Strong enough to explore the edge.
When I come upright again—back on my knees—something shifts.
Without my hands on the floor, as my back body lifts the weight of my torso, a surge rises through the front of me. Not joy this time. Something heavier. I can feel it building before I understand it.
I reach for a wheel and fold forward over it, letting my spine return toward neutral. The edge presses just below my sternum. My knees hold it in place. I breathe. And then the tears come.
I know why. Read More
How Much Do We Affect One Another — Even When We Don’t Mean To?
In a recent class, a teacher offered a simple reminder that stayed with me:
our energy on the mat doesn’t exist in isolation. It affects the people practicing beside us.
They invited us to consider practicing not just for ourselves, but for our neighbors.
To let that awareness shape the way we move and breathe — almost like an intention we carry through the practice.
It immediately brought to mind an experience I had earlier this year.
Two students were practicing near one another. One arrived clearly carrying a lot — moving quickly, breathing loudly, pushing hard through the sequence. The other seemed increasingly affected by that pace and intensity. Eventually, they rolled up their mat and left early.
When I later encouraged the first student to slow down and find a bit more ease, the suggestion didn’t land well. There was frustration. Tension. Only later did I learn what they had been carrying into the room that day — a high-stakes test or interview later that morning, the kind that tightens the body long before we’re aware it’s happening.
That conversation stayed with me.
Not because anyone did anything wrong, but because it revealed something subtle and true:
we often show up to practice carrying far more than we realize — and what we carry doesn’t stay contained.
I was in the middle of my own stressful season at the time, navigating uncertainty and change. It made me wonder how often my energy had spilled into shared spaces without my noticing. How often I, too, had practiced while holding tension, urgency, or distraction — and how that may have affected others.
None of this is about blame.
It’s about awareness. Read More