Maybe We’re All Recovering.
Recovery is a word we often reserve for tangible wounds—the kind you can point to, bandage, or count the stitches on. But what if we’re all recovering from things we can’t see, stories we don’t remember, or burdens we inherited? What if the act of healing isn’t a singular path but a collective, layered, and messy journey that connects us in ways we don’t fully understand?
Recently, I completed a 20-for-30 hot yoga challenge—or almost completed it. I made it to number 19. At first, I felt the sting of failure. I could hear the familiar voice whispering about what I didn’t accomplish instead of celebrating what I did. But as I sat with it, I realized something: recovery, growth, and healing don’t need to be perfect. Sometimes, the magic is in the effort itself, not in accomplishment.
This realization made me think about how often I get caught up in the numbers—in yoga, at work, in life. Grind culture, for example, is obsessed with metrics: KPIs, quarterly goals, milestones. Did we hit the number? Close the deal? Outperform last year? But life, like yoga, isn’t that linear.
Growth happens in the showing up, in the process, in the space between what we planned and what actually happens.
What Are We Recovering From?
Many of us carry things we’ve never named—wounds we’ve rationalized, angers we’ve buried, and histories that shaped us long before we were born. Some of it is deeply personal, bound to the contours of our individual lives. But some of it? It’s shared. It’s cultural. It’s systemic.
We live in the shadow of histories we didn’t create, shaped by ancestors we’ve never met and systems we never chose. Maybe that’s why we’re all in different places: sadness, anger, resentment, acceptance, healing. And yet, we’re expected to build relationships and community without fully understanding where we—or the people around us—are on their paths.
Recovery, like yoga or life, isn’t linear. Sometimes, you make it to number 19. Sometimes, you don’t even unroll the mat. Sometimes, you don’t even know what an asana is. And still, you try.
Is Grace Enough?
I keep coming back to the same question: is grace enough? Grace for ourselves when we’re not as far along as we want to be. Grace for others when their actions don’t align with our expectations.
Grace for the fact that healing is messy, non-linear, and deeply personal.
In addiction recovery, step one is admitting there is a problem. What if we all started there? Not just with the obvious addictions, but with the subtler ones—the addiction to overachieving, to perfection, to tying our worth to our productivity? What would it look like to bring the principles of recovery into our everyday lives: humility, accountability, patience, and compassion?
Maybe grace is a starting point, not a solution. It doesn’t fix everything, but it creates space - the most fundamental building block of yoga. Space to ask questions like:
What am I recovering from?
What might others be recovering from?
How can we create space for healing, even if we don’t fully understand it?
Falling Short and Moving Forward
Showing up to the mat 19 times and not 20 taught me something important: falling short is not always failure. It’s just part of the process. The real growth happens in showing up, in trying, in allowing yourself to be the imperfect human you are.
Here’s to the messy, nonlinear paths we all walk, alone and together. Here’s to making space for grace—for ourselves and for each other.
Because maybe we are all recovering, in ways big and small, seen and unseen. And maybe that shared truth is enough to move us forward—even when the path isn’t clear.
