My co-author Alexandra DeSiato and I just released our new book, Yoga Off the Mat, and to mark the occasion we sat down for a live conversation about it inside our community. If you have ever walked out of a yoga class thinking there’s something more going on here than stretching, this one’s for you. Yoga off the mat is the practice of taking what yoga does to your attention—the noticing, the breathing, the returning to now—and letting it shape the rest of your life: work, parenting, hard conversations, and the inside of your own head on an ordinary Tuesday afternoon. Below is the full conversation, followed by the ideas we kept circling back to.
“Now” Is the Whole Practice
The Yoga Sutras open with a single word: atha, usually translated as “now.” I like to joke that it lands the way an old announcer voice does—“And now, the HBO original series”—a cue to put the popcorn down and arrive. If you never read past that first word, you’d still have plenty to practice for a lifetime. Yoga philosophy asks you to show up for the life you’re actually in, including the parts you might rather skip.
The Two Arrows: The Suffering We Add Ourselves
One of the most useful ideas in the book comes from the image of two arrows. The first arrow is the pain that’s simply part of being alive—loss, discomfort, the hard things that arrive whether we want them or not. That one we can’t avoid. The second arrow is the one we shoot at ourselves: the worry, the replaying, the story we build on top of the first. That’s the suffering we add.
Alexandra tells the story of her daughter dreading an ear piercing for months—sweating, backing out, agonizing—only to say “oh, that was nothing” the moment it was over. So much of our suffering lives in that gap between anticipation and reality. The Sanskrit word for it, dukha, literally means “bad axle space”—a wheel with an off-center hole that makes the whole ride bumpy. Come back into alignment with the present moment, and the ride smooths out. The first arrow will still come. The second one is optional.
Do Your Duty, Then Let Go of the Results
Alexandra read from the chapter on the lesson of letting, which draws on the Bhagavad Gita: do your duty, with no attachment to the results. A parent loves, sets boundaries, and offers comfort—not as a transaction with a guaranteed outcome, but because that’s the work of parenting. What our kids do with it is out of our hands. I think of putting my daughters in swim lessons: you do everything you can to get them safely to the water, and then you have to let them swim. The only thing ever fully in your control is your own action. Everything downstream is not.
Secular Spirituality, Defined
A thread that runs through the whole book is what we call secular spirituality—harnessing the philosophical and spiritual ideas of yoga without the “you must” of any single religious framework. You come to the teachings and interpret them in a way that makes sense for your life right now, and you take what you need. For many of us, yoga philosophy is less something we adopt and more a language for what we already sensed was true.
Yoga in One Minute
The back of the book is full of practical actions: what yoga can look like in one minute, in five minutes, in thirty, or as a retreat you set aside once a year. A minute of real attention counts. So does five, so does thirty. The practice is portable, and it fits the life you already have.
You’re Already Living Your Yoga
You’re already living your yoga. The book simply gives you the language for it, along with small, doable practices for the ordinary moments where philosophy actually gets tested. Whether you read it, listen to Alexandra and me trade chapters in the audiobook, or hand it to a friend who has never set foot on a mat, I hope it meets you where your real life is happening.
If it lands for you, a five-star rating or a request at your local library helps more than you’d guess. You can find all of our books, including Teaching Yoga Beyond the Poses for the teachers in the room, on the books page. And if you’d like to be in the room for the next live conversation like this one, they happen every month inside our free community at Comfort Zone Yoga. These conversations are an extension of my podcast, Yoga Teacher Confidential—come keep the conversation going there, too.
