SparkleHeart Yoga

At some point, practice stops being something that only happens on the mat.

It starts showing up in regular life.

In the conversation where your chest gets tight.

In the moment your jaw locks before you even know you’re angry.

In the pause before you say yes when your whole body is already saying no.

That’s when you realize yoga has been training more than flexibility.

It’s been training awareness.

The kind that catches the old reaction before it takes the wheel.

The kind that notices the breath getting shallow.

The kind that gives you one small second to choose something different.

Not perfectly.

Not peacefully.

Just honestly.

Because the practice is not working only when you feel calm.

Sometimes it’s working when you notice the grip.

When you hear the edge in your voice.

When you feel yourself reaching for the familiar version of you, and something interrupts it.

That interruption matters.

That breath matters.

That tiny moment before the old you walks in?

That’s yoga too.

💖💖💖✨

Swaraj (self-rule) is a Vedic term. It has been around thousands of years and predates its use in the Indian independence movement.
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It’s rooted in the understanding that the highest spiritual state is self-rule. Swa means self. Raj means rule. Not rule over others but rule over yourself. ⁠
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Gandhi and the other nonviolent freedom fighters for Indian Independence took this ancient yogic concept and made it the spine of India’s entire freedom movement. And when India got political independence in 1947, many spiritual leaders said that we still hadn’t achieved swaraj. ⁠
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Because swaraj isn’t just about who’s in charge. It’s about whether you are governed from within or controlled from without. That’s a yoga question. It always has been, and its the question we face today.⁠

Follow Susanna Barkataki for more conversations about yoga for liberation.

Do you teach yoga for Swaraj? How do you do it?

Sunday Yoga is now a twilight session, 8pm mountain time, 7pm pacific, 10pm eastern. Contact me for a link to the meeting.

Two planets. One ancient monument. One unforgettable night.

Above Stonehenge tonight, Venus and Jupiter appeared so close together that they looked almost like a double star.

In reality, these worlds are separated by hundreds of millions of miles. Yet for a brief moment, from our tiny corner of the universe, they seemed to meet.

Stonehenge has stood beneath the sky for thousands of years, witnessing countless sunsets, storms, and celestial wonders.

Tonight, it witnessed another.

Some moments remind us how small we are.

And how extraordinary the universe truly is.