He said to me:

“You’re on the path to full awakening in this lifetime.”

I immediately felt my ego activate. My shoulders lifted a little bit. I think he could see the thoughts running across my face.

“I’m going to achieve full awakening in this lifetime.”

Before I got too carried away, he quickly put me in my place.

He smiled and said:

“Awakening is available to us all.”

I find this statement incredibly comforting.

It reminds me that awakening is our birthright. It’s not something special available only to special people. It’s not reserved for monks, gurus, saints, or spiritual teachers. It’s not that there are awakened people over there and unawakened people over here.

Awakening is available to us all.

This morning, I taught a yoga class around this theme.

The teaching was simple: any practice that guides us into the present moment is guiding us toward awakening.

The story of the Buddha is that he sat beneath a Bodhi tree until he understood the nature of suffering and awakened to the truth. Then he spent the rest of his life sharing that understanding with others.

The Buddha was a normal person. He wasn’t a god. He wasn’t fundamentally different from any of us.

I was sitting in a lecture recently when a teacher said:

“If you see the Buddha on the street, smile at him.”

Everyone laughed.

I realized they were thinking of the Buddha as a historical figure who lived thousands of years ago. But that’s not what he meant. The Buddha simply means The Awakened One. So that means that all of us can be the Buddha. And there is a Buddha within all of us.

Modern neuroscience is actually pointing toward something very similar.

Psychiatrist Daniel Siegel describes two broad modes of awareness: the Narrative Network and the Experiential Network.

The Narrative Network is the part of us that is constantly telling stories.

Why did she say that?

I’ve always been like this.

What if this happens tomorrow?

What happened five years ago?

It’s the network that creates our identity and our sense of self. It’s deeply connected to autobiographical memory, future planning, and what neuroscientists call the Default Mode Network.

The Experiential Network is something very different.

It’s direct experience.

Feeling your feet on the floor.

Listening to birds without analyzing them.

Feeling your breath moving in and out.

Simply being here.

Norman Farb’s research showed that these are actually different modes of awareness that activate different regions of the brain.

What fascinates me is how beautifully this maps onto the contemplative traditions.

In yoga, we might say the Narrative Network corresponds to vrittis—the fluctuations, stories, and movements of the mind.

The Experiential Network corresponds more closely to direct awareness. Witness consciousness. Presence.

Patanjali described it thousands of years ago:

Yogaś citta-vṛtti-nirodhaḥ.

Yoga is the stilling of the fluctuations of the mind.

The Buddha described it as awakening.

Modern neuroscience describes it as moving from narrative awareness into experiential awareness.

Different language. Same direction.

And then there is Step Twelve of the Twelve Steps:

Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to alcoholics and to practice these principles in all our affairs.

A spiritual awakening.

The more I study yoga, Buddhism, neuroscience, and recovery, the more I feel they are all pointing toward the same thing.

The movement from living entirely inside the stories of our mind toward direct experience of reality.

From thinking about life to actually being here for it.

From identification to witnessing.

From separation to connection.

From suffering to freedom.

This is exactly what we’re moving into in the next section of Resting with the Sutras, which is why I am so excited about it.

When I first started offering Resting with the Sutras in January, I imagined it as a way to make these teachings accessible—not just as philosophy to study, but as something we can actually experience in our bodies and our lives.

And this next twelve-week journey feels especially potent.

Weeks 1–2: Vairāgya — The Practice of Letting Go

Yoga Sutras 1.15–1.16

Together we’ll explore:

• Attachment and identity

• Addiction and compulsion

• Longing and control

• Witnessing rather than reacting

Weeks 3–4: Samadhi

Yoga Sutras 1.17–1.18

What happens when the mind becomes quiet?

We’ll explore:

• Meditation and concentration

• Subtle awareness

• Bliss and spaciousness

• The inner journey of yoga

Weeks 5–8: Faith, Practice & Spiritual Momentum

Yoga Sutras 1.19–1.22

Together we’ll reflect on:

• Consistency and discipline

• Building momentum in practice

• The role of devotion and sincerity

• How intensity shapes our path

Weeks 9–12: Īśvara, Devotion & Om

Yoga Sutras 1.23–1.27

We’ll explore:

• Īśvara Praṇidhāna

• The guru principle

• Divine consciousness

• Bhakti and devotion

• Mantra as meditation

• Om as sacred sound

• Finding refuge

Each class includes:

🕊 A dharma talk on the sutra of the day
🌿 A nourishing yin yoga practice
✨ Yoga nidra for deep rest
💬 Time for reflection and community

Whether you’ve studied the Yoga Sutras before or are meeting these teachings for the first time, this series is an invitation to rest, reflect, and deepen your relationship with yoga beyond the physical practice.

We begin tomorrow, and registration closes once the cohort starts.

I’d love to practice with you.

Join us for Resting with the Sutras

With love,

Alexandra

Awakening is available to us all.

Not because we become someone special.

But because beneath all the stories, all the striving, all the identities we cling to, there is already something awake within us—waiting patiently for us to notice.

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Or maybe more accurately: for the first time on my own terms.

I had come back twice in March 2025 to teach yoga, but I couldn’t …

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The foundation of our 200 Hour Yoga Teacher Training has stayed mostly the same. This is the beginners, 21 day course, that anyone who wants to be a yoga teacher needs to take! The structure works. It is immersive, transformational…

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I was sitting in a pub called Gabbys (which doesn’t exist anymore) with my sister Em and our friends Anna and Leah. It was a Friday night in 2014, in November, in mid-town Toronto. Leah asked me if I had Instagram, and I said no.

“Oh, you would love Instagram,” she said. “You can add filters to photos and post t…

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In 2010, I picked his book up off the shelf at my yoga studio, read it cover to cover, and became completely fascinated by Patanjali. That was really the beginning of a long chapter of my life where I studied the Sutras in depth.

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I think this is the beginning of the end of my relationship with Instagram. Not in a dramatic way. Not like when I quit drinking.

More like… slowly breaking up.

I’ve been doing this for about 16 mont…

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For the first five years of my sobriety, I had been part of a community of women who were anti-AA: the newer, modern recovery spaces. And I still resonate with a lot of that world. But the truth is, I judged AA before I knew anything about it.

At the t…

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This book took me five years, three editors, and was so incredibly difficult, but rewarding, to write. In writing my story, I made sense of my life. In publishing, I had to make amends with a few characters in the story (most importantly the person I married whe…

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I actually wasn’t planning to run this again online. But one person asked… then a few more… and somehow a group came together!

So I’m teaching it again, and it will probably be the only time I offer it in 2026.

I want to share a bit more clearly what we actually do…

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Last Call - Join us Tomorrow for Resting with the Sutras

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I said to the stude…

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There are a lot of reasons for that (read: excuses). First of all, life has been wildly full. When I really reflect on the last few months, it’s been profound. Through January and February, there was drop-in yoga every single day at the new home yoga shala I opened here in Bali - Mindful Bali

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I want to invite you to join a special Free Resting with the Sutras class on Zoom this Wednesday night 7:30pm New York Time (Thursday morning 7:30am Bali Time) to experience it!

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The first, is the new Resting with the Sutras series on Thursday mornings Bali (Wednesday nights New York), and the second is the new Yoga Sutra Study on Friday mornings Bali (Thursday nights New York).

Why are th…

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Yesterday was Ogoh-Ogoh.

And it’s Day 4 of my March 2026 Yoga Teacher Training.

This is the first time I’ve ever hosted a YTT over Nyepi and Ogoh-Ogoh here in Bali—and I planned it this way intentionally. After how incredible last night was, and how today has felt, I’ve already decided: I will r…

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We meditated for eleven hours a day. We had no access to reading materials, writing materials, or communication devices.

I didn’t know what to expect going into this experience, and I’ve barely written anything about it since. Vipassana is one of those things that feels almost impossible to explain to someone who hasn’t experienced it.

But one thing happened that I absolutely wasn’t expecting.

Memories.

A huge amount of them.

I moved to Kuwait when I was twenty-three and spent the rest of my twenties in the Gulf region before eventually moving to Bali. When I think about my life story, it tends to begin there: my twenties in the Middle East. What has now become more than a decade spent in Asia.

But during Vipassana, something strange happened.

It was as if my life had been moving through a tunnel. When I moved to Kuwait, it was as if I closed the tunnel door behind me and locked it shut.

Inside the meditation course there was nothing to keep me busy. No work. No conversations. Nothing to read. Nothing to write.

And suddenly it felt like I stepped back into that tunnel.

Memories started arising.

Memories of strange things teachers said and did when I was a child.

Memories of choices I made as a teenager that are no longer aligned with my values. (I’ll write about that another time. It’s too big for this piece.)

Memories of things people said to me when I was young that I hadn’t thought about in years.

All of it had been locked away somewhere in a vault.

I always knew that vault existed, but I don’t think I was ever truly conscious of it. I thought those early years simply didn’t matter. I thought the things that shaped me happened later, in Kuwait.

So it wasn’t that I was avoiding earlier memories. I simply believed they weren’t relevant points on the timeline of my life.

Yoga philosophy actually has language for this.

In the Yoga Sutras, the deep storehouse of our past impressions is called karmashaya, literally the repository of karma. It’s like a storage field inside the psyche where the traces of every action, experience, and emotional imprint are held.

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