It is Mother’s Day and there is a young woman asleep in the bedroom next to mine.
She is not my daughter. I did not raise her. I missed most of her teenage years and all of the in-between years when she was figuring out who she was without the people who were supposed to show her. But she is here. In my home. In the room next door. And I love her so much it occasionally takes my breath away in the particular way that only love you thought you’d lost can.
So. Not quite a mother. Not quite not.
I want to talk today about trauma. About the way our past lives inside our bodies long after our minds have decided they are done with it. About what yoga — and breath, and the brave act of creating stillness — can do to those buried places. And about what happens when life, in its infinite wisdom and occasional cruelty, sends you a test you thought you had already passed.
I have had a dedicated yoga practice for fifteen years. I have taught it, lived it, built my entire professional life around it. I believe in it the way some people believe in church — not blindly, but with the full weight of experience behind me. I have watched it change people. I have felt it change me.
And here is what I know to be true, in my body and in my bones: our past is recorded in our tissues. Every loss, every shock, every moment of love that ended badly — it does not just live in our memories. It lives in the held breath. The tight hips. The shoulders that never quite come down from the ears. The jaw that clenches at 3am for no reason you can name.
The body keeps the score. The mat is where we settle it.
I have seen things happen in my studio that I cannot fully explain and have stopped trying to. I have watched people weep in child’s pose for reasons they could not articulate. I have held space for grief and rage and joy and the particular kind of release that happens when something that has been stuck for a very long time finally moves. In our breathwork events especially — where we breathe with full intention, deeply and rhythmically, granting ourselves access to the nervous system in ways we rarely allow in ordinary life — I have witnessed the body shake and writhe and cry as old energy finds its way out. These are not performances. These are liberations. The energy fields of an older, more wounded self, leaving the physical body one breath at a time.
The work then becomes awareness. Time. Patience with yourself as your internal world catches up to what your body already knows. New patterns of thought emerge slowly, like light through a window that has been painted over for years. You do not force it. You create the conditions and you wait.
I thought I had done this work. I had done this work. Years of practice, years of therapy, years of building a life so full and so mine that the old wounds felt distant — healed over if not entirely gone.
And then life sent me a test.
There was a relationship. A significant one — the kind that reshapes you, that you move across the country for, that you build a whole imagined future inside of. There were children involved, which is its own particular kind of love and its own particular kind of loss when things fall apart. There was a man who, after a perfectly ordinary dinner one evening, said “I don’t know” when I asked if we were breaking up — and then walked out. Left. Gone. He took my car for two weeks and dropped the keys at the front desk when he decided to bring it back, like a library book he had kept too long.
No conversation. No closure. No explanation that could make sense of a decade. Just: gone.
I have processed this. I have yoga’d this and therapy’d this and talked about it with my girlfriends until we were all exhausted by it. I have built a beautiful life in Washington DC that has nothing to do with him and everything to do with me. I have, by most reasonable measures, moved on.
And then his daughter knocked on my door.
We had been close when I was with her father — instantly, easily close in the way that sometimes happens between people who simply recognize each other. He resented it, which told me something. When things got hard for him she was shuffled away from me, the way inconvenient things get shuffled away by people with limited emotional capacity. I lost her. I lost him. I grieved them both, differently, for a long time.
She has grown into a funny, smart, beautiful woman — largely on her own, which makes her funnier and smarter and more beautiful to me than she might otherwise be. The years apart did not touch what was between us. She is in the bedroom next door and we are figuring out this next chapter together and it is one of the greatest unexpected gifts of my life.
But here is the thing about gifts that come wrapped in old grief: they make you feel everything twice. The joy of having her here. And underneath the joy, quieter but persistent — the grief I thought I had finished with. The love I gave to that family that never quite found a home. The version of my life I imagined and then had to un-imagine. It surfaces in small moments, sideways, the way unexpressed things always do.
I had a wonderful and secure childhood. I do not come from abandonment. And yet here I am — a grown woman, a yoga teacher of fifteen years, someone who has done more inner work than most — sitting with what I can only describe as a fear of abandonment that was not there before him. Does that make me anxiously attached? Or does it just make me human — another person navigating the long wake of someone who leaves when things get hard and calls it survival? These are questions for my yoga mat. Literally. I will take them there this week, and the week after, and as many times as it takes.
Because here is what the practice has taught me more than anything else: healing is not linear and it is not final. It is not a destination you arrive at and unpack your bags. It is the chop wood, carry water of the inner life. You do the work. You feel the freedom. You think you are done. And then life sends you something that cracks you back open — not to punish you, but because there is more light to let in.
The trap I fell into — and I say this gently, for anyone who recognizes themselves here — is the trap of out of sight, out of mind. When the reminders are gone it is easy to mistake their absence for healing. Real healing gets tested. Real healing can hold the girl in the bedroom next door and the grief of how she got there at the same time, without collapsing under the weight of either.
I am not there yet. I am working on it. On the mat, in the breath, in the quiet moments when she laughs at something in the next room and I feel the particular ache of love that almost was not.
I am not quite a mother. Not quite not. And on this Mother’s Day I think that is enough. I think I am enough. Wounded and healing and showing up anyway — which is, I have come to believe, all any of us are really doing.
Chop wood. Carry water. Keep breathing.
If this touched something in you — something you have been carrying in your body that has not found its way out yet — I want you to know that breathwork changed my life and I have watched it change others. It is brave work. It is worth doing. You do not have to do it alone.
— Maggie Centeredish | Hot yoga teacher. Single in DC. Ish.