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.

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.