Ahimsa: My First Step into Yoga Philosophy

There is no yoga without nonviolence.

I stumbled into yoga almost by accident… or more accurately, by injury.
I tore my pectoral in a jiu-jitsu sparring match, and since I couldn’t lift weights anymore, I looked elsewhere. My earliest yoga “practice” came through infomercials and biceps—P90X with Tony Horton. That was my gateway into western yoga, and honestly, I loved it.

From there I dove deeper into YouTube flows, DVDs from the library, and random classes—still mostly focused on the physical: stretching, sweating, pushing myself. I had no idea yoga held anything deeper. I was barely scratching the surface.

Stumbling Toward Something More

Eventually I reached a point where I knew I needed something different. My health was falling apart. My nervous system was burned out. The restaurant job was crushing me. I felt stuck in a loop of illness, stress, and the terrifying sense that there was nowhere to go for real resolution.

Inside me, something was aching to come out. I knew it had to do with holistic health. I suspected yoga was involved somehow, but I didn’t yet understand the depth of yoga or how much wisdom it carries about the human mechanism. I remember wondering, Do I really want to teach yoga classes? What could possibly be so special about yoga?

Back then, I had no idea.

Stuck in Survival Mode

My life at that time felt like one long, stressed-out shutdown response.

I was working long hours in a chaotic restaurant environment. My body was in too much discomfort to keep going, yet I didn’t see a way out. Simply surviving each day was a battle. Running a business on top of that was another battle I had no capacity to fight.

I felt skill-less, empty, like I had nothing of value to offer the world. My health was declining and my sense of self collapsed with it. Shame, exhaustion, self-judgment—they were my constant companions.

I believed deeply that the body could heal itself, and I believed nutrition was the key. I followed what I thought was a “healthy” eating lifestyle to fix my gut pain. But nutrition is confusing, and everyone claims their way is the right way. I ate whole foods and followed paleo because people I trusted told me it was the answer.

Still, my body kept failing.

Later, Ayurveda would completely transform my understanding of food, digestion, and what “healthy” actually means—but that wisdom came much later. At the time, all I knew was this:

I was not okay. And I couldn’t fix it with willpower alone.

My First Real Step Into Yoga

When I eventually enrolled in a yoga therapy program—right at the start of COVID, entirely over Zoom—I was completely ungroomed as a yogi. I knew nothing except poses. Yet there I was: signed up for a 1,000-hour training, committed to seeing it through.

That program cracked something open in me.

I began to actually study yoga—not just the shapes, but the philosophy. The depth of yoga was overwhelming at first. The sages who shaped this science were some of the most intelligent minds to ever live. Their teachings were dense, intricate, and profound. Hard to grasp at first… but captivating.

Slowly, the philosophy began to seep into me.
And what hit me the hardest was Ahimsa.

Ahimsa: The Foundation of Yoga

The first concept I truly met was Ahimsa—nonviolence.
It is the very first yama, the first branch of the first limb.
It is literally the beginning of yoga.

At first it seemed simple: Don’t be violent.
I wasn’t hitting anyone. I didn’t think of myself as harmful. I had no awareness of the subtle ways I punished myself, the frustration simmering inside me, the harshness I directed inward. So I thought:

“Okay, cool—what’s next?”

But as I sat with Ahimsa, something shifted.

I began to hear the violence that lived inside me.

Seeing My Own Violence

As I reflected on Ahimsa, I saw how deeply I was harming myself:

• the way I talked to myself

• the shame and self-blame

• the comparisons and judgments

• the constant inner criticism

• the pushing past my limits

• the overworking, the drinking, the refusal to rest

I realized that the deepest violence in my life wasn’t external.
It was internal.

Yoga teaches pratipaksha bhavana—cultivating the opposite.
When negative or harmful thoughts arise, we consciously shift toward their opposite: thoughts that are true, kind, supportive, aligned.

The mind is incredibly powerful.
It shapes our experience of reality.
It colors everything we perceive.
It can create us or destroy us.

If we repeat violent stories inside our mind, the body will live inside that violence.

Learning Ahimsa meant finally seeing this clearly—
and then slowly choosing a different direction.

Creating a Nonviolent Inner Environment

If healing is the goal, we must build an inner world that supports healing.

The body is unbelievably intelligent and wants to move toward balance.
But it cannot heal if the mind is constantly attacking it.

Ahimsa is not just “be kind.”
It is a radical commitment to:

• dropping shame and self-punishment

• interrupting cycles of judgment and comparison

• noticing where we are sharp, cruel, or impatient

• choosing thoughts and actions that support life, not harm it

Yogi Swami Rama said:
“Love all and exclude none.”

That includes ourselves.

If we want true health, we must become love within—not as sentimentality but as alignment with our true nature.

Violence is everywhere in the world. But it doesn’t have to live in us.

Ahimsa in Practice: Food, Animals, and Daily Life

For me, Ahimsa showed up in a clear and unexpected way: food.
I’ve been vegetarian or plant-based for years, but through Ahimsa, that choice deepened. It helped me see the subtle violence not only toward animals, but toward my own body and the earth.

Ahimsa became a practice of:

• nonviolence toward my body

• nonviolence toward other beings

• nonviolence toward the planet

And no, this doesn’t mean perfection.
Negativity still arises. Old patterns still surface. The mind still reacts.

But the practice becomes:

Notice. Breathe. Choose differently.

We can learn to stay grounded enough inside that we are not so easily pulled into reactive violence—whether in thought, word, or action.

No Yoga Without Ahimsa

Yoga is not about flexibility or strength.
It is about creating a mind and heart that can hold life without causing harm.

Ahimsa is the very beginning.
It is the root.
The ground of yoga.

Without nonviolence, there is no yoga—only performance, ego, or spiritual decoration.

Ahimsa reminds me:

• to speak more gently to myself

• to give my body time and space to heal

• to step out of self-destruction

• to move through the world with a little more care

If you want to explore your truest health, start here.
Notice where violence lives in your thoughts, your habits, your choices—then cultivate the opposite, little by little.

Healing is not just physical.
It is mental, emotional, and energetic.

Create a nonviolent inner environment, and the body will know what to do.

The Twist and the Cringe

How a Split-Second Trauma Shaped My Body for Twenty Years

My body reacted before I even knew what was happening.
One instant I was racing down the road on my Triumph Daytona — the next I was tumbling across the asphalt. My head tucked, my shoulders shrugged, and my entire body curled sharply to the left. I didn’t choose any of this. My nervous system did.

I remember the world spinning: sky, fields, asphalt, gravel — over and over.
I felt myself rolling like a stone skipping across water. I wasn’t resisting; I felt nothing, but saw everything. I was witnessing it happen as if it were a dream playing in the background.

My only conscious thought was, “Just stop rolling. just stop rolling…”

When I finally came to a stop, I stood up in shock. My shoes and socks were gone. My shirt shredded. My pants torn. And my motorcycle — the one I had so many close calls on — lay twisted on the ground in front of me. I had rolled directly behind it the whole way, watching it flip through the air as I tumbled after it.

I couldn’t believe where I stopped rolling — and that I did — for that matter. It was endless, I rolled so far, how I lived, I have no idea.

The Place I Crashed Was the Place I Once Found Peace

As I stood there shaking, adrenaline flooding my system, I looked around and realized exactly where I was.

The crash had happened right at the entrance of the Isaac Walton Wetland and Conservation Area — the place where I walk my dog, Murphy, almost every single day. I was here all the time, I loved this space, and would get lost there for hours. As I stood in the parking lot I looked back, the curve where I whipped out, was a long way away. How far did roll?

I knew that area so well.
I knew the fields, the river, the forests.
I had walked that path countless times.

Every time I drive there I come from the east, always entering the lot from the opposite direction — never from the side I rode in from that day. The curve was sharper than I anticipated, I hit gravel, and my bike disappeared from underneath me.

I was surprisingly unbroken, barefoot and trembling, I stood in the parking lot where my daily walks used to begin… except this time, my motorcycle was lying wrecked beside me, and my body was buzzing with shock, and ripped with road rash.

A place that had once been part of my routine, a place of familiar comfort, suddenly became the scene of a violent trauma.

And after that day —
after the rolling, the tumbling, the impact, and the month in the hospital —
I never returned.

It wasn’t a conscious choice.
My nervous system made that choice for me — drawing a boundary around the place where danger became real. Even years later, I stayed away without fully understanding why.

It would take two decades before the deeper significance of this accident, finally revealed itself.

The Imprint That Never Left

It wasn’t until twenty years later that I began to feel the echo of this trauma.
One day, while practicing Mountain Pose, I felt a subtle internal pull. I let it happen — curious, patient, open — and my body moved on its own:

My chin tucked left.
My shoulders spiraled left.
My abdomen cinched and braced left.
My entire left side curled inward.

And instantly, the memory of the motorcycle accident rushed back.

I had completely forgotten how violent the crash was. I always focused on cancer as the major trauma of my life. I never considered that this accident had shaped my posture, breath, and health just as much — maybe even more.

But in that moment, it was undeniable.
My body had been remembering all along.

Trauma Changes Posture

The protective shape I curled into during the crash became the pattern I lived in for decades. It became the hidden blueprint for how I stood, moved, breathed, and coped.

That twist became:

• chronic low back pain

• shoulder and neck tension

• emotional heaviness

• fatigue and depression

• digestive issues

• breath restriction

• a constant sense of imbalance

Working in a kitchen amplified it.
Cancer amplified it.
My lifestyle amplified it.

I believed that training hard, eating paleo, and pushing myself mentally would heal me.

It didn’t.
It made the trauma pattern stronger.

I didn’t understand that trauma lives not in memory but in shape.
I didn’t understand that the nervous system stores protection in posture, and breathing.
I didn’t understand that the body keeps reenacting the moment it braced — until it feels safe enough to unwind.

The Nervous System Never Forgets

Even when the mind forgets, the body doesn’t.
When trauma goes unresolved, the nervous system keeps replaying the event — not through conscious memory, but through:

• tension

• posture

• reflexes

• breath

• emotion

• movement patterns

Mine replayed as a leftward spiral.
A kink.
A guard.
A cringe.

A shape learned in a split second and practiced unconsciously for twenty years.

Somatic Awareness: A Way Back

When I finally let my body show me its truth, something shifted.
Somatic practice taught me to:

• feel the twist instead of collapsing into it

• follow the pull without fear

• explore the protective shape gently

• unwind the trauma pattern slowly

• retrain my breath and posture

• rebuild a sense of internal safety

It’s not easy to sense misalignment when it’s all you’ve ever known. Even after a tremendous amount of practice. It can veil itself from our focused awareness with ease, and requires patience, persistence and positivity to shine the light into our darkest areas.
And, as awareness grows, the body reveals its story.

And with that story comes the possibility of change.

We can reprocess old experiences.
We can rebuild safety.
We can retrain the nervous system to let go.

A Shape of Protection, Not Failure

That twist — that cringe — was not weakness.
It was survival.
It saved my life. And is deeply ingrained in my being.

But survival mode is not meant to be permanent.

Yoga therapy, somatic movement, and breathwork helped me release the imprint, retrain my system, and come back toward center.

I’m still working on it.
Twenty years of a trauma pattern doesn’t disappear overnight.
But with consistent, dedicated work I continue to learn a new way, a way that not only feels great, but is reshaping the entire fabric of my well being. I know I will only continue to improve up until the day I die.

Healing isn’t magic. Your body IS the magic.
And every step — every breath — every moment of awareness can reshape your existence.

Living in Fight-or-Flight

When “Go Mode” Becomes a Way of Life

For the longest time, I lived in constant go mode.
I couldn’t slow down — not mentally, not physically — no matter how loudly my body cried out. I had just come out of a brutal motorcycle accident, and instead of rehab or any real recovery, I went straight back to work. No rest. No therapy. No pause. Just back into the chaos of restaurant life as if nothing had happened. I did as I always did, bury it. I was in pain, so what, keep going, you have work to do. I never recovered.

Something had happened.
A lot had happened.

I never healed after the motorcycle crash.
I never healed after cancer.
I never healed after years of pushing, grinding, and living under stress.

I just went back to life as if survival was the only path forward. And in many ways, it was — but not in the way I needed.

The Slow Descent

Deep down, I was in pain.
My body was deteriorating, and I didn’t even realize it. I tried to push through it — physically, mentally, emotionally — but my system was slowly collapsing under the weight of unresolved trauma.

I dissociated from my body because it hurt too much to feel it.
The subtle signals were there all along, warning me, begging me to stop, to rest, to listen — but I had no awareness of them. My mind was noisy. My breath was tight. My body was bracing in ways I couldn’t perceive.

To sleep, I drank.
To get through work, I drank.
Numbing became easier than feeling.

Everything became daunting.
Everything became a battle.

I tried every exercise routine, every diet, every “wellness strategy” I could find, hoping something would fix me. But my stomach kept getting worse. My energy dropped. My body felt heavy, toxic and exhausted. My mind never settled. My back pain was endless. And the tension… the tension became my baseline.

I looked healthy enough from the outside.
I ate “healthy” (or so I believed). I “exercised” (and greatly over did it).
But inside, I was hurting.
Inside, I was slowly shutting down. My candle was burning out.

Years of this — bracing, gripping, pushing, overriding — created deeper patterns I couldn’t see. My thinking, my breathing, my posture, my digestion… everything was shaped by stress. Everything was shaped by fear.

The Turning Point

It wasn’t until I found SomaYoga that something shifted.
Something cracked open inside me.
For the first time, I felt like I had found something that could actually help me — something that made sense, something that wasn’t about forcing or fixing, but about listening.

Slowly, through yoga, somatics, and breathwork, my body began to open. My mind began to lighten. A sense of ease — something I hadn’t felt in decades — began to return.

But healing isn’t a straight line.
Some days I would feel major breakthroughs.
Other days, I would fall backwards into old patterns.

Healing is a challenge.
Coming out of twenty years of pain and suffering doesn’t happen overnight.
It happens in waves.
It happens in spirals.
It happens through repetition and patience.

It has taken me years — years of practice, awareness, stumbling, learning, and trying again — to begin unwinding the deepest layers of tension and holding in my body. And honestly, I’m still unwinding. I’m still learning.

The Paradox of Awareness

As I became more aware, everything became more complex.
People think awareness makes things easier — but it doesn’t.
It reveals the truth. And the truth, is challenging to face.
It reveals the subtle bracing, the unconscious habits, the hidden fear, the ways we’ve been moving through life on autopilot.

The more we observe something, the more refined it becomes, thus more complex.
The inner world is no exception.

When you truly dive in — when you feel deeply, honestly, without numbing or distracting — things get confusing before they get clear. The somatic landscape is layered, intelligent, mysterious. And when you start paying attention, you realize just how much you’ve missed.

But this is where the real journey begins.

This is where healing shifts from “fixing” to “experiencing.”
From controlling to sensing.
From striving to allowing.

This is where you learn to get out of the way of the mind and perceive from the deeper, quieter place within — the observer.

Breaking the Spell of Fight-or-Flight

Living in fight-or-flight had been my normal for so long that I didn’t even know there was another way to live. I was always tense, always vigilant, always bracing for something — even when nothing was wrong.

To heal, I had to break the spell.
The spell of stress.
The spell of memory.
The spell of trauma that had been shaping my every breath and movement.

And to break it, I had to practice one thing:

Safety.
Creating it.
Feeling it.
Returning to it.
Again and again.

When the body feels safe, it can surrender.
When the body feels safe, it can soften.
When the body feels safe, it can heal.

This is the work.
This is the path.
This is the journey I’m still on.

And this is the journey I now help others walk — slowly, gently, with awareness and compassion — out of fight-or-flight and back into their lives.

The Body Remembers

How Trauma, Stress, and Habit Shape Our Inner World

The body remembers everything.

In many ways, that’s what the body is: memory. Every sensation you feel today—your posture, breath, tension, and reactions—was learned, stored, and repeated until it became your normal.

Trauma, injuries, and stress don’t just happen once and disappear. They leave impressions in the nervous system that change how we breathe, move, think, and protect ourselves. Every shock, every surgery, every moment of fear or overwhelm shapes the way the brain communicates with the body.

How the Body Stores Pain and Stress

When something overwhelming occurs—an injury, surgery, accident, war, assault, loss—the nervous system responds immediately:

muscles brace

breath becomes shallow

heart rate spikes

blood pressure rises

the mind shifts into survival mode

This is the body trying to keep you alive.

But if the system never fully discharges this survival energy, it gets stuck. What began as a moment of protection becomes a pattern running in the background. Muscles forget how to release. Breath stays tight. The mind stays on alert.

Even small triggers begin to feel dangerous.

Over time, this chronic activation contributes to:

neck and back pain

digestive issues

chronic anxiety

sleep disruption

headaches

emotional instability

burnout

depression

In modern life, this inability to “let go” of stress is one of the major root causes of physical and mental illness.

Thomas Hanna & Sensory-Motor Amnesia

Somatic educator Thomas Hanna described a phenomenon called sensory-motor amnesia—a loss of voluntary control over muscles that have been bracing for too long.

These muscles aren’t tight because they want to be.

They’re tight because the brain has forgotten how to relax them.

This creates chronic holding patterns we don’t even notice:

Green Light Reflex — living in constant “go mode”

Red Light Reflex — collapse, rounding, withdrawal

Trauma Reflex — twisting, asymmetrical bracing

Somatic work helps reawaken these forgotten pathways and restores the conversation between brain and body.

Developing the Felt Sense

As we build the felt sense—the ability to feel internal sensations with clarity—we start noticing:

where tension lives

how stress shapes breath

what thoughts cause bracing

where fear sits in the body

how old habits show up automatically

This awareness is the first step in unwinding chronic patterns.

Through gentle movement, breathwork, and re-education, we teach the nervous system how to release old tension and return to ease. The body begins to understand that it is safe again.

Breath & the Fear Circuit

Stress changes breathing instantly. The breath becomes shallow, fast, choppy—signals of fear and unsafety.

A dysregulated breath keeps the fear circuit activated.

When breath becomes slow, soft, low, and quiet, the whole system begins to shift:

vagus nerve activates

heart rate lowers

muscles soften

thoughts slow down

clarity returns

the body learns safety

Breathing is one of the most direct ways to influence the nervous system.

The Mind as a Habit Loop

Every physical pattern begins as a mental pattern.

Our thoughts shape our breath, posture, and movement.

If we constantly react from old trauma, we strengthen a negative feedback loop:

fear → tension → pain → fear → tension → pain

This becomes our default operating system.

Shifting this loop is the heart of yoga therapy.

Yoga teaches us how to reshape the mind into a supportive, compassionate presence.

My Realization: Pain as a Learned Response

I didn’t realize until almost forty years old that much of my pain was a learned response to trauma. For decades I believed my back pain, digestive issues, and emotional struggles were separate problems. I didn’t understand that they were connected—and that they were patterns my body had learned.

Somatic work changed that.

The practices were gentle and intuitive. They brought relief I had been searching for my entire adult life. Most importantly, they gave me hope. I always believed the body held answers, but I never knew where to look.

Yoga therapy showed me how to finally listen.

Healing Takes Time

Pain doesn’t appear overnight, and it doesn’t disappear overnight.

After twenty years of suffering, I realized that healing was going to be a long, patient journey.

The body remembers what it knows—especially the painful things.

Old patterns return not because you’re failing, but because the nervous system is trying to protect you in the only way it has learned.

Healing is repetition:

release

relearn

repeat

Over time, the nervous system adapts to a new way of being.

The Path Forward

Build your felt sense.

Nurture your breath.

Train your mind.

Stay patient, persistent, and compassionate.

Healing is not a miracle.

It is a practice—one that transforms you from the inside out.

The Awakening — Remembering the Body

For as long as I can remember, I’ve wanted to help people live healthier, more connected lives. I imagined myself doing something holistic — guiding others toward balance, vitality, and purpose.

There was just one problem.
I was suffering deeply.

For years, I lived with debilitating stomach issues, intense back pain, and a heavy depression that drained every bit of life from me. I was broken — working in a high-stress industry that demanded everything and gave nothing back. I could never find the time to heal. I only found ways to numb it.

I felt trapped.
Trapped in a job.
Trapped in a body that hurt.
Trapped in a cycle that I couldn’t escape.

The Early Wounds

My body’s story of trauma began when I was seventeen.

A mysterious mass was discovered in my pelvic floor. It turned out to be a sarcoma, a serious cancer that immediately sent my life into a whirlwind of tests, surgeries, and treatments. My senior year of high school ended before it even began.

That was the fall of 1999.

Four years later, another blow — a carcinoma in my jaw. Thankfully, it was resolved with surgery alone, but the recovery was brutal and left lasting scars.

Not long after that, a violent motorcycle accident shattered what was left of my body’s sense of safety. I spent weeks in the hospital and months in agony.

All of this — the surgeries, the cancer, the crash — happened within a short span of years, right as my family was building and expanding our restaurant. I buried the pain, pushed through, and worked harder. The restaurant became my life — long hours, constant stress, endless motion.

My body didn’t forget any of it.

The Slow Decline

By my twenties, my health had begun to unravel. My digestion failed me. My bowels were a constant battle — often blood and mucus, no real relief, just waves of pain. Doctors offered little clarity.
I had colonoscopies, endless tests, and was told to take pills “for life.”

But something in me refused to accept that.

I began exploring holistic health on my own — diets, supplements, therapies, anything that might make me feel human again. I spent thousands of dollars chasing answers, following bad advice, trying every alternative approach I could find. But nothing seemed to address the root cause of my suffering.

Deep down, I was sure it all went back to my cancer — the trauma, the surgeries, the years of pushing and suppressing. My body was still holding the score, still fighting battles long after the war had ended.

Breaking Free

By my late thirties, the restaurant — the place I had grown up in, given my life to — was sold. And suddenly, I was free.

For the first time, there was space.
Space to breathe.
Space to ask who I really was without all the noise.

I knew one thing for sure: I could never go back. The restaurant world had consumed me. I couldn’t face another kitchen, another shift, another cycle of exhaustion and pain.

I thought about new paths — maybe working at the Mayo Clinic, maybe returning to school — but none of it stirred anything in me. Nothing made sense… except for one thing.

A yoga therapy program in Duluth, Minnesota.

I didn’t even fully understand what it was. But something in me — maybe the part that still believed in healing — knew I had to go. It was less a decision and more a calling.

So I jumped.

The Beginning of Remembering

That program became the turning point of my life. It was where I started to feel my body again — not just as a collection of symptoms, but as a living, breathing memory.

For years, my body had been screaming through pain and illness. Now, I was finally listening.

Through yoga therapy, breathwork, and somatic practice, I began to understand that my body wasn’t my enemy — it was my teacher. Every contraction, every ache, every knot of tension was a story I had never been allowed to tell.

This was the beginning of my awakening — the start of a journey inward.

A journey toward remembering the body.
A journey toward the breath.
A journey home.