#168 And Now, I Begin to Guide Myself
Join my next Meditation Training Tomorrow - October 29 - at 8am EST!
Join my next Meditation Training starting tomorrow for three days at 8pm AWST Bali (8am EST Toronto) - last offering until January!
Two months ago, I signed up for an online meditation teacher training.
I’d been meditating daily for a full year - forty minutes a day of silence.
Even writing that still surprises me.
For someone who’s spent fifteen years studying yoga and eleven years teaching it, I used to struggle with consistency in my personal practice. I was always “on” for my students - teaching classes, holding space, creating 0 but when it came to my own stillness, it was sporadic. A few days here, a few days there. I often needed to go to other’s teachers classes to get grounding, to get regulated, to get support. I didn’t have it within.
But something shifted when I learned this technique.
It was simple. Pure. Just me and a mantra.
No app. No teacher’s voice. No studio.
Just me learning to sit with myself.
My teacher, Rolf, translates Yoga Sutra 1.1 as:
“And now, I begin to guide myself.”
I’ve been thinking about this line a lot lately.
Because that’s what this season has been about - finally learning to be guided from within, not from without.
At first, meditation wasn’t easy.
It stirred things up - old stories, unhealed memories, karmic loops I thought I’d already broken.
That’s what meditation does. I describe it as having a dirty washcloth - every time you dip the washcloth in water, you’re cleaning it. Every time you dip the washcloth in, it becomes a little more clear. It’s a gradual practice that takes time.
It’s like meditation. You don’t just do it once and then it’s done. It’s a gradual practice, done daily.
And when you sit for your daily meditation, it shows you where the noise lives inside you - so that, slowly, practice by practice, the noise can settle.
“Yoga is the stilling of the fluctuations of the mind.” — Patañjali, Yoga Sutra 1.2
And when those fluctuations start to settle, you can finally see, with clarity, with truth, with intuition.
Not the world as you’ve been conditioned to see it - but the world as it really is.
I’ve realized that before this practice, I was always seeking peace outside myself - in places, people, achievements, even in the next spiritual training. I was seeking teachers to regulate me, partners to make me feel more happy. I was seeking jobs, places, alcohol - all these things in the outside world that I thought would make it better.
Meditation is when you stop searching the outside world and start searching on the inside.
The Buddha said,
“Peace comes from within. Do not seek it without.”
It’s one of those quotes you hear so often, you stop hearing it.
Until suddenly, you do.
Meditation turned that sentence into a lived experience for me.
Now, when I skip my morning sit, I feel it - my mind gets louder, my edges sharper. By mid morning I need that first twenty minute meditation or I literally don’t feel well.
Meditation isn’t something I do anymore; it’s something that does me.
It’s like brushing my teeth.
Or, as I sometimes call it with one of my teachers, Anvita, a “brain spa.”
When I look back at the woman I was even two years ago, I barely recognize her.
She was driven, yes. Passionate. Purposeful.
But she was also scattered - constantly reaching for something, constantly in motion.
This version of me - the one who sits in the same chair every morning, eyes closed, repeating her mantra in her mind - I’m softer. Clearer. More anchored in my own being.
“When the mind becomes steady, the light of the Self shines forth.” — Yoga Sutra 1.3
That’s why I decided to become a meditation teacher.
Because for years, I’d practiced a little of this and a little of that - a guided meditation here, a mindfulness app there. But I was never given the tools to sustain something on my own.
Mantra-based meditation changed that for me.
It gave me a practice I could carry anywhere - through airports, heartbreaks, illness, celebrations, jet lag, retreats, everything.
It taught me that no matter where I am - Bali, Canada, India, the UAE - stillness travels with me.
The students of my teachers were living proof of its power. They had this glow - grounded yet radiant. A steadiness that I now recognize as the fruit of deep practice.
And now, I feel that same peace taking root in me.
Tomorrow night - October 29th at 8:00pm Bali time (8:00am EST) - I begin teaching my next How to Meditate course.
It’s a three-day journey to help you discover the same stillness that changed my life. I teach mantra meditation as it connects to Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras, which is intentionally designed for students and teachers of yoga to anchor everything they’ve learned in yoga philosophy into an experiential practice.
When you complete the training, you’ll receive a free one-month membership in my community, The Mindful Life Practice, where we meditate together several times a week - helping you bring the practice into your everyday life.
If you’ve been craving clarity, calm, or a deeper connection to yourself —
this might be your moment to begin guiding yourself too.