Comfort with comfort, not just comfort with discomfort
Two years ago, J. Brown and I talked on his Yoga Talks podcast about yoga for athletic recovery. This time, he invited me back to catch up, and the conversation went somewhere I didn’t expect.
J. recorded from his usual spot in the attic—hot as always, though he’d learned to keep a fan going and his hair pulled back after getting caught out by the heat once before. He asked what had changed since we last spoke, and there was plenty: I sold my stake in the studio I’d run for fifteen years, moved my teaching fully online, and wrote a new book, Yoga Off the Mat, with my co-author Alexandra DeSiato. We also landed on something we’d each been chewing on separately: the difference between comfort with discomfort and comfort with comfort, and why a teaching life needs real stretches of the second one to make sense of the first.
Knowing when to walk away from a 22-year class
I taught my Monday night class for 22 years. Year ten, I felt proud. Year fifteen, the same. By year twenty, I was asking a harder question: how do you know when you’re at the top of your game, and do you walk away then, or wait until you’ve lost a step?
The trigger was smaller than the question deserved: our studio’s toilets. We’d moved to a space with our own plumbing, which meant every flapper and running tank was now our problem instead of a landlord’s. That wasn’t the real reason to leave, but it was the thing that got me journaling on retreat about whether I was ready to let go.
The next day, my business partner asked what I thought about selling the studio. I said yes—that was exactly what I wanted. She thought it over, decided she’d rather hold onto the revenue than let it go, and ended up buying out my half instead. I gave students six weeks of notice, told my core group in person before the email went out to everyone else, and called it semi-retirement, with plenty of teaching still ahead of me, just not there, and not on that schedule.
If you’re circling your own version of this decision, I’ve written before about knowing when to drop a class—the numbers on the spreadsheet usually tell you the truth before your ego will.
From pass cards to membership: what the pandemic actually changed
Before COVID, our studio ran entirely on pass cards. No memberships, no auto-pay, nothing recurring to track against overhead. When the pandemic hit, we froze everything and came back later that year without anyone locked into a subscription they’d forgotten to cancel. It was clean.
Coming back wasn’t. We’d already lost a room in our old space to a cancer research center’s expansion, and the move to a new location brought overhead we hadn’t priced into the old, flat pass-card model. Membership changed the math completely. Under the old system, a full class of thirty people was a great night for everyone, teacher included. Once revenue got separated from attendance, a full room and a healthy business stopped meaning the same thing.
A PhD in English literature and a career litigator built a studio on a working model inherited from the previous owner, and it took a pandemic to force an honest look at the spreadsheet. If your own pricing and planning have gotten tangled the same way, this piece on treating your weekly class as a marketing channel instead of your whole business covers the shift in more depth.
Yoga Off the Mat: philosophy you can use before Tuesday
The new book moves through five parts: an introduction to the yoga sutras and a simplified system of yoga, the positive-psychology side of practice, the shadow side and where we get in our own way, the models yoga offers for the subtle body, and the dualities that hold all of it together. The point isn’t to cover that ground like a syllabus. It’s to hand readers signposts instead of dogma, so they can choose which path to explore this week.
One action from the “quiet the mind” chapter is simple on its surface: ask why you’re being pulled away from the present moment by your thoughts. Sometimes there’s a real answer, and writing it down gets it out of your head. Most of the time there isn’t a real answer at all, just the mind’s habit of looping—and noticing that is its own kind of relief.
For teachers reading this: the book isn’t written for you specifically, even though you’ll recognize plenty in it. It’s for anyone who’s had one good savasana that stayed with them longer than it should have, and wants a way to think about why. That’s the same itch you’re scratching every time you plan a class hoping it lands the way the good ones do. This is the book to turn to when you can’t articulate what a class gave you, or to hand a student who keeps asking what all this is really about.
Practicing comfort with comfort
J. asked whether reaching the subtler, quieter parts of practice requires physical challenge first, whether stillness has to be earned. My answer: sometimes, yes. Lately, not so much, for me.
I named my virtual studio Comfort Zone Yoga on purpose, because so many of us have decided growth only happens at the edge, that the goal is always the next hard rep. The edge does build resilience—up to a point. Past that, your body gives out, the same way a teaching career gives out when every class is the hard one and child’s pose is never on the table.
Building in more repetition isn’t the opposite of growth. It’s what makes growth-zone work sustainable in the first place. I told J. about a workshop I’d just taken with Rolf Gates, who had us hold bridge pose and asked what we’d change about our form if he offered a hundred million dollars for holding it ten minutes. The whole group softened at once. Dial back from ninety-eight percent effort to ninety, and you can sustain the pose, the sprint, or the decade-long teaching career.
The parasympathetic nervous system gets described as rest and digest. I like the fuller version better: rest, digest, tend, and befriend. Yoga, at its best, is a chance to tend to and befriend ourselves, so there’s something left to offer everyone else. Deplete your own groundwater every single class, and there’s nothing left to refill anyone else’s. I’ve written more about what that depletion looks like for teachers specifically, and how to catch it early.
The throughline
Twenty-two years of the same Monday class, three studio locations down to zero, a pandemic-forced pivot to membership, a new book, and a running conversation about comfort: what ties it together is the same thing that’s always been true about refining a teaching voice over years, not months. The practice you needed in your twenties isn’t always the practice you need now, and noticing that shift, instead of resisting it, is most of the craft.
🎧 Listen to the full conversation with J. Brown
📖 Get Yoga Off the Mat: A Practical Guide to the Wisdom of Yoga
