Child’s Pose in Aisle 7: How Do We Heal In 2025

Healing Mantra in 2025: Stop. Drop. And Surrender

Yesterday, I almost didn’t make it through yoga class.

I hadn’t slept. My wrists were already bitching before I even rolled out my mat. And by the time I hit my first chaturanga, I knew this would be more of a gauntlet than a meditation. I felt like my joints had formed a union and were staging a walkout. My knees were overlocking, my body was compensating in all the wrong places, and every ounce of energy I had left was funneled into the one thought keeping me upright:

Stop thinking. Keep breathing.

It’s the first time I’ve ever genuinely wondered if I’d have to bail.

And yet—I didn’t.

Yoga has always been the thread through my chaos. I’ve practiced on and off for years, and every time I return, it feels like my body is telling me a story I haven’t fully heard yet. The mat becomes a mirror. The breath becomes a bookmark in each new chapter of whatever I’m battling.

And lately? The toll is real. Physically, emotionally, cosmically—pick your dimension.

I’ve been in nearly constant pain—wrists, shoulders, neck. I recently had to go back to PT because the pain had escalated to the point that my hand goes numb and wakes me every night. (Nothing like waking up feeling like your own limbs are ghosting you.) Financially, I’ve been in a spiral. I often joke that life feels like two steps forward and ten back—like I’m doing a cha-cha with the universe, but the music is really slow and really petty.

And yet, in the middle of all this regression, something weird is happening:

My yoga practice is progressing.

In the past four months, I’ve seen more growth than I have in 20 years.

Arm balances that used to mock me?

Watch me fly.

Inversions?

Sleek and obelisk—stacked, still, and finally mine.

But it’s not because I’m stronger. It’s because I’ve stopped muscling through and started breathing into the discomfort. My body is learning to hold me, but differently. Not through effort. Through humility. Each surrender, embraced by grace.

I’ve started wondering if this ironic inversion of progress is cosmic—maybe my Saturn and Venus in the second house are forcing me to give up external control so I can grow internally. Or maybe trauma is just cruel and twisted like that.

Last year, I got certified in Reiki, mostly because I was tired of knowing that my pain was trauma-related without knowing what the hell to do about it. My body has been speaking a language I’ve only recently started to understand. It turns out that the dialect is mostly about pain and passive aggression.

This week, my PT handed me a Theracane, which sounds like a medieval weapon but is actually a tool for people who want to give themselves acupressure therapy at home. She guided me to a pressure point in my shoulder, and as I pressed into it, I felt something release. Not metaphorically. Viscerally.

I almost reflectively burst into tears—not from sadness, but from my nervous system finally unclenching like a fist and receiving the metaphorical pat on the back it desperately needed.

Later that day, I collapsed into bed and got a nudge to continue watching Severance on Apple TV—a show I had no plans to watch until it randomly started playing the other night, which now feels suspiciously like my Higher Self staging a spiritual intervention.

For those unfamiliar, the show’s premise is both dystopian and disturbingly relatable: employees at a shady biotech company undergo a procedure to surgically sever their work selves (“innies”) from their outside selves (“outies”). The result? One part of you works forever, trapped in corporate purgatory. The other part thinks you just magically get paid while blacking out eight hours a day.

It’s a brutal little metaphor for dissociation. And burnout. And grief. And how you can go entire stretches of your life sleepwalking through your own pain—until someone, or something, hits you with a line like this:

“You carry the hurt with you. You feel it down there, too. You just don’t know what it is.”

—Petey, Severance, Episode 3

The moment I heard it, I cocked my head in that way you do when something resonates just enough to make a small dent in your consciousness, but not enough to disrupt your avoidant little equilibrium—a casual nod to a painful truth. And then, like Mark, I sat there, superficially processing, letting it graze the surface instead of letting it all the way in.

Because that’s precisely what the body does with trauma.

It carries the hurt. Quietly. Invisibly. Like an unopened letter shoved somewhere in the fascia, the spine, the shoulder blade you can never quite reach. And when it finally gets read, it’s not poetic—it’s deeply inconvenient and usually happens in physical therapy while someone’s showing you how to unlock years of stored pain with a fuzzy tennis ball.

And just when I thought the show had finished airing me out, there was another hit. This time at Petey’s funeral—the guy who literally dies for trying to do the right thing. For reintegrating. For choosing wholeness in a world designed to keep us compartmentalized.

Mark is sitting there, slumped in grief and confusion, and behind him, Petey’s daughter June—composed, brutal, wise beyond her trauma—leans forward and drops this emotional grenade in his lap:

“Did it ever occur to you that there are better ways to deal with bad situations than by cutting yourself off from half your life?”

Great. Just what I needed while trying to numb the pain from the inside out on a pile of ice packs—an intervention from my higher self.

Despite it all—despite the numbness, the financial spirals, the grief lodged somewhere behind my right shoulder blade—I am progressing. Not just physically, but in a weird, spiritual, “I hate that this is working” kind of way.

My yoga practice is evolving because I’m finally letting myself feel things all the way through. Not just in my mind. Not just in a journal. But in the tissue. In the breath. In the pose I thought I couldn’t hold.

I’m still exhausted, aching, and emotionally held together by arnica and snark. But I’m soaring through arm balances. My breath is deeper and steadier under pressure. My nervous system is trying to give me some space, loosening its protective mama bear grip—but old behaviors die hard.

If you’ve been to a yoga class, you’ve heard the instructor gently remind you:

“If it gets too much, take Child’s Pose.”

But what’s the Child’s Pose for life?

Because let’s be real:

We’re all carrying more than we’re equipped to handle. The grief is heavier. The systems are weaker. Support is scarce. And yet, somehow, we’re still here. Still breathing and still showing up in bodies that are doing their best to heal in a world that rarely makes room for it.

Maybe healing doesn’t look like a straight line.

Maybe it looks like accidentally watching the right show on the wrong day.

Like fighting back tears in physical therapy.

Like being on a yoga mat while your wrists file an HR complaint mid-plank.

Maybe our mantra is Stop. Drop. And Surrender.

Maybe healing in 2025 looks like Child’s Pose in Aisle 7.