AI and the Future of Teaching Yoga – Part 1

By Kristine Kaoverii Weber | June 7, 2026

COMMENTS

Lately, fake movie clips have been popping up on my social media feed (I clicked on one so, of course, the algorithm threw a bunch more at me). These clips look like trailers for real movies, but I soon learned that they are entirely constructed by AI – actors and all. And while they’re pretty terrible, they also duped me.

Which made me think, hmm… I bet there are some 100 percent AI generated yoga videos out there.

So (despite my better judgment), I googled it and found this creepiness.

I also discovered that you can build a creepy fake yoga instructor voice with AI.

Then I found that there are creepy YouTube channels made up entirely of AI generated yoga shorts like this one.  

Yikes. 

However, despite the nonsense, while other industries are truly being disrupted by AI, I don’t think yoga teachers have too much to worry about.

Not only was the AI generated yoga stuff I saw just as bad as (or worse than) the fake movie trailers, it also reflects the biggest mistake perpetuated in yoga teaching in the West for over 40 years: yoga as a fitness work out (maybe with a little “Om” sprinkled on top). The reality is that the more AI yoga slop that gets generated, the more the demand for real yoga teachers will rise – especially for those teachers who not only understand but also provide access to the deeper practices.

How AI Will Impact Real Yoga Teaching

There is doom and gloom looming in many sectors because of AI. Everyone from lawyers to marketers, travel agents, cashiers, and accountants are being told their jobs are going away – and soon. It’s a scary time for many people in a wide range of industries.

And while AI is definitely causing disruption in job markets, I don’t think that’s going to be the case in many of the human services industries, including yoga teaching. AI is useful for many things, like organizing and processing information, finding the right pair of sneakers, or trying to suss out that rash on your dog. But AI will never be an embodied human. It has no feelings or emotions, it completely lacks intuition, and it happens to be a freakin’ computer program.

Human beings are not.

We are much more like trees than machines – we grow from a single seed, we’re always whole, even as we grow from babyhood to adulthood. We possess an embodied intelligence that is distributed throughout our nervous system and fascia and connects with the biointelligence of other human beings through energy fields. And, through intuitional practiced like meditation, we have the capacity to interface with a universal, spiritual, higher self.

Humans are biopsychosocial spiritual beings. AI isn’t. It’s got value, but it’s boring. It’s got no sense of humor. It’s not poignant. It doesn’t make me feel like I wanna hug it. It’s not sentient.

What Human Beings Need

So as organic, interconnected, natural beings, it’s relevant to think about what we need – and how it differs from what AI offers.

Like trees, we need to be nurtured, we need resilience against storms of our lives, and we need to live in community, feel supported, feel connected, and be treated with compassion. We need to connect with ways to harness, increase, and utilize prana, not just intelligence. And many of us strive for understanding the meaning and purpose of our lives. And we long for the limitless – for a connection to the intangible source of everything.

AI fractionates attention, perpetuates loneliness, increases anxiety, and increases distraction. Humans desperately need the opposite, we need human connection. Right now in the yoga world, we’re seeing a resurgence of demand for in-person experiences. People will increasingly search for yoga teachers, particularly those who have expanded their offerings beyond the workout, and who understand how to help people use all the tools of yoga to become more human.

Yoga teachers can help people learn how to think more clearly, pay better attention, regulate their nervous-systems and their emotions, connect more deeply to a sense of meaning and purpose, and connect spiritually to their higher selves.

And so in the future, your work is going to become more and more important, necessary, and more sought after.

How do get ready for it? Learn to teach yoga beyond asanas. Go deep into the self-regulatory practices of pranayama. Go deep into the expansive practices of meditation. Go deep into yoga philosophy and learn how to make it all relevant to your life and your students’ lives.

Yoga teaching is not going away in the age of AI. It will only become more and more relevant and important because yoga provides the technology of being human.

Two big things are happening in the Subtle Yogaverse: 1. The Subtle Yoga Resilience Society semi-annual sale at the end of June and 2. We will be announcing our 300 hour advanced training in July. So, please keep an eye out. Sign up for our newsletter to stay posted. 

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If Shutdown Is Not Driven by the Dorsal Vagus, Then What Creates It?

By Kristine Kaoverii Weber | May 24, 2026

COMMENTS

Check out this 6 minute “Bed Yoga” practice – it’s for anyone, but I made it specifically for folks who come to chair yoga classes, but struggled to get up and down from the floor easily (so they miss out on supine practices – but they can do this at home). Comes with Stick Figures!

Yoga Teachers: Never Force Someone Into Their Body

By Kristine Kaoverii Weber | May 17, 2026

COMMENTS

When she was 17, Tammy and her older brother Jack (not their real names) were out late partying one night. On the way home, she wrapped her car around a telephone pole. Jack was killed instantly.

To Tammy, Jack was not only a brother, but also her best friend. She was frozen with grief, shame, and guilt.

A family friend had repeatedly sexually abused Tammy when she was a child, and she had subsequently started partying young – alcohol, drugs, and lots of wild teenage escapades.

After the accident, Tammy’s drinking and substance use increased. Eventually her parents admitted her to an inpatient program. I met her when she had stepped down to the partial hospitalization program where I was leading a yoga therapy group twice a week.

Timid and reserved, Tammy was distant and skeptical about doing yoga from the get-go. But, as she told me she’d learned from being in treatment (with a sigh and an eyeroll), it was important for her to be “willing to participate” in her recovery so she was trying to do what had been recommended by her therapist – including attending my yoga therapy sessions. One day I led the group through Goddess pose. After we discussed what it means to be empowered, my intention was to offer them an embodied experience with yoga practice. But, while we were doing the pose (I found out late) Tammy dissociated – she left her body.

A new systematic review paper links dissociation to interoceptive dysfunction. Interoception is the capacity to notice the feelings in your body and engage in appropriate behavior based on what you notice (e.g. I’m feeling thirst, so I drink some water). The authors suggest that across the interoception research literature, there appears to be some correlation between dissociation and poor attention to internal body signals, a mistrust of those signals, and/or a disruption in the ability to integrate, make sense of, and act appropriately in response to those signals.

Tammy stopped practicing and left the room. I thought maybe she was going to the bathroom. However, I learned later that she was actually disoriented and confused. She made it down the hall to her therapist’s office. Her therapist had her lie down on the couch; she spoke quietly to her, put on some soothing music, gave her some water, and stayed with her gently coaxing her nervous system back to a more settled state. It took four hours, but finally Tammy felt clear enough to go back to her room and take a nap.

After the class I went to find out what had happened. The program director told me that Tammy had dissociated while we were doing Goddess pose, it had triggered her and was too overwhelming for her system to handle the feelings that were arising, so she left her body.

At that time, I’d been studying trauma for about 7 years. I had experienced other students dissociate during class so I knew that it could happen, and I’d worked with hundreds of folks with substance use disorders in groups. Still, I’d never seen anyone have as strong a reaction as Tammy’s. So, it was scary (for me and for everyone else involved, including her therapist, the other clients, and the program director). It was also sad, humbling, and an uncomfortable but significant learning experience.

The easiest thing is to conclude that yoga causes people to dissociate, and there can be some truth in that. But people in yoga classes can dissociate for all sorts of other reasons. In one of my programs a participant dissociated because a bunch of emergency vehicles blew past our building, sirens blaring. She had been living in a South American country under a dictatorship, watching friends and relatives be disappeared, and had finally escaped with her family to the U.S. – so no, yoga poses weren’t the biggest issue. In another training, a student dissociated because the practice had left her feeling good, but wide open, then her ex-boyfriend called during a break. So, while it’s important for yoga professionals to understand trauma and how to be trauma-informed, there are many factors over which we have little or no control.

Still, it’s just best practice to be tuned into the fact that some people come to yoga with a lot of unintegrated trauma and getting triggered, or even dissociating, can happen.

What can be helpful for teachers is to learn to read cues like struggling with coordination, or looking bored or frustrated, or wanting to be pushed harder, or intolerance for slowness, śavāsana, or meditation. I used to think that those kinds of responses were just a dislike for my style or teaching, until I started to understand that they can actually be signs of trauma, and a way to avoid being in the body.

Now, with more and more interest in somatic therapies, and more and more health care professionals recommending yoga for trauma symptoms, there is a greater risk that some of the people coming to your classes may get triggered.

My golden rule as a yoga teacher has become, “never force anyone into their body.”
Which can be challenging, because what I teach is largely a body-based practice, and there is great potential in using yoga to recalibrate the nervous system and help folks develop better interoceptive skills – which, according to the research, is what people who tend to dissociate probably need.

So, to begin with, embodiment can be offered as an option, but it should never be forced onto anyone.

Language like, “If you like, you can try this…”, “the invitation is to…”, and “you’re welcome to explore…” can be helpful. Also, titrating the experience of embodiment by mixing up slow, mindful, breath-centered movement with quick, fun, simple things like shaking it all out, swinging twists, joint rotations, or just noticing which muscles you’re using in each poses can be a way to break up long exposure to experiencing the sensations and feelings of the body.

It’s also helpful, especially if you think a student is struggling, to talk to them individually.
Ask them what they want to get out of their yoga experience and if there’s anything you can do to help support them in the process. Let them know that they are welcome to do what they like, sit things out, and choose not to participate in anything they don’t want to do. Let them know that they will never be shamed or told they are doing anything wrong in your class.

Tammy took a break from yoga group for a few weeks, then she came back. The first thing she said to me was “I’m here because I’m willing, but I’m not doing that Goddess pose.” I said I was really happy that she told me that, proud that she was trying again, and that she could sit out anything she preferred not to do. Inside, I was smiling for her, so proud of her courage and her desire to reclaim her life.

I wish I had a list of “5 Magic Bullet Poses for Yoga Teachers to Prevent Your Students from Dissociating,” but trauma recovery doesn’t work like that, and neither does yoga. There are no magic poses – but that doesn’t mean there’s no magic.

Yoga can be helpful. It may take a while for the nervous system to rewire and that’s okay, because real healing always takes time – and the joy and freedom that arises from the work involved in post-traumatic growth, like any true learning/healing process, is completely worth it.

McDonald, C. W., Sleight, F. G., Mattson, R. E., & Fani, N. (2026). “I’m not here, this isn’t happening”: Interoception and its role in dissociation: A systematic review. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 184, 106582. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neubiorev.2026.106582

We are discussing trauma and dissociation this month in the Subtle Yoga Resilience Society, my weekly membership group, check it out here.

The Body Vs. The Brain – Who’s Really Keeping the Score?

By Kristine Kaoverii Weber | May 9, 2026

COMMENTS

It’s not uncommon to hear yoga teachers say things like “trauma is stored in your hips,” or “your psoas is an emotional muscle,” or “the low back holds painful traumatic memories.”

But a new article came out last month in Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience challenging some of these assertions. The authors specifically take aim at the premise of Bessel van der Kolk’s wildly popular book, The Body Keeps the Score (2014), arguing that the body, in fact, does not store trauma, and that your issues are not in your tissues – but in your brain. Although I find this thinking way too dualistic (in reality, you can argue that the brain is distributed throughout the body via the nervous system anyway) – but the authors present an important refinement to this popular thinking.

Van der Kolk’s book presents a different version of a dualistic perspective – during traumatic experiences, because of feelings of overwhelm, the rational and emotional parts of the brain may become less integrated, and so traumatic memories, too painful to face cognitively, can show up, unexplained and misunderstood, throughout the body.

The popularity of these ideas goes back a lot further than van der Kolk. In 1984, Louise Hay had already popularized the idea that physical symptoms express unresolved mental, emotional, and even spiritual issues. And, over the years, all sorts of somatic therapies have been developed to help people resolve physical manifestations of emotional experiences.

What van der Kolk contributed was a much more clinically relevant, neuroscience-informed version of “your issues are in your tissues.” His work helped many people understand why their trauma produced physical symptoms, as well as how to reduce or resolve them.

Somatization is certainly a real phenomenon. What this article brings into question are the mechanisms behind it. Rather than traumatic memories being “stored” in the body, the authors hypothesize that the mechanisms behind the symptoms are actually dysfunctions in the brain.

They suggest that trauma symptoms are a result of something called predictive coding – which means that in the presence of trauma your brain becomes hypervigilant – danger feels present, even when it isn’t, and somatic symptoms arise from that miscalculated milieu.

Your heart races, even when there’s no tiger chasing you. Your chest tightens, even while you’re sitting quietly. Your digestion is lousy, even when life feels easy. Your neck hurts, even when your relationships are good.

According to the authors, it’s your brain that’s predicting threats, not responding to danger.

The brain is metabolically expensive. That little three-pound lump of tofu in your head uses roughly 20 percent of your daily energy. One of the ways the brain saves energy is by predicting what’s going to happen next. That way, you don’t have to process every situation from scratch. Prediction happens in situations like driving a car, riding a bike, or playing a game – as well as in predicting danger.

While walking down a forest path you almost step on a copperhead – your eyes bulge, your heart races, you start sweating, your breathing speeds up, your stomach clenches, your muscles tense, your mind hyper-focuses – and instantly you jump away.

The next time you go on that hike, you approach a branch lying across the path, but before you can tell yourself, “That’s just a branch,” your body leaps out of the way and produces the same pattern of tension and stress.

Your brain has predicted danger based on your past experience.

The snake story makes a good metaphor – when the path of your life has been covered in snakes, and you’ve barely escaped danger time and again, or worse, you’ve been bitten a lot, your brain will predict that snakes are lurking everywhere – even in safe experiences. And this prediction causes physical symptoms in the body.

The authors write, “The body does not keep the score; the brain keeps predicting it.” They also write, “Where the storage model leads to metaphors of exorcism: finding and purging what was buried. By contrast, [their] model leads to training: recalibrating precision, retraining expectations, and expanding the brain’s capacity for adaptive variability.”

(BTW, this argument is very similar to what scientists, like Lorimer Moseley, have said about chronic pain)

So, the big question is: how do you unravel the patterns that cause somatic trauma symptoms? And this is where this article gets really good.

The authors suggest that an important way to unravel these patterns is by finding flow states. At this point in my reading, I dropped my highlighter, pumped my fist and exclaimed “Yes!” five times to my drowsy cat – who looked at me, yawned, and went back to sleep.

The authors acknowledge that many different types of treatment can work, because basically treatment restores flexibility to the vigilance system that has been rigidly stuck in the “on” position. But they highlight the idea of achieving flow states as something important in the untangling of trauma signaling. Flow, or being deeply absorbed in something meaningful, is very similar to the idea of dhyāna in yoga philosophy – and it’s a pinnacle yoga practice. All other practices like yamas and niyamas (ethical engagement), āsana (postures), prāṇāyāma (breathing practices), pratyāhāra (withdrawal of the senses), and dhāraṇā (focused concentration) are done in service to, and with the intention of, more easily practicing dhyāna – a flowing, easeful, connected, even blissful state of meditation.

The authors admit that they are speculating here. They don’t yet have much direct evidence that flow untangles trauma, and they call for more research. Still, I can’t help but like the direction of this line of thinking. Whereas van der Kolk mostly understands yoga as a physical or somatic practice that helps people recalibrate safety in the body (and don’t get me wrong, I greatly appreciate his advocacy), this article opens a wider vista to the healing potential of deeper practices from the tradition.

Wrapping up here, I want to say one more thing: the body doesn’t keep the score, and neither does the brain.

It’s the whole person, with all of their messy and wonderous life experiences, with the entirety of their mind, body, and spirit, who keeps the score. Every aspect of our weird and wonderful selves, including a sense of purpose, connection to a higher self, and feeling of belonging in community, is involved in the healing process.

Got some thoughts? Please share in the comments!

Did you know I have a Substack? It’s free and you can sign up for it here. 

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Yoga Teachers: Are You Creating More Confusion or Clearing it Up?

By Kristine Kaoverii Weber | April 25, 2026

COMMENTS

One of the first chair yoga workshops I took was taught by someone with MS who worked with other folks with MS and other neurological conditions. He had been a strong Iyengar teacher and practitioner before he was diagnosed so his challenges with yoga had become more about strength than flexibility. He taught us how to use the chair for supporting weight in poses like Warrior 2 and Side Angle. Basically, we were doing the standard, “clean-line” version of many poses, but using the chair to support the body weight.

At that time I was teaching chair yoga to older people in an assisted living facility. The kind of hip abduction as well as hip rotation required in that workshop was not something remotely plausible for most of my students. They had things like hip pain, hip replacements, knee arthritis, and limited shoulder mobility. Their problems were not the same as someone who had been practicing demanding yoga for a long time and then developed muscular weakness. The kind of approach that they needed was very different.

As a young yoga teacher, I wanted to take the best trainings and make sure I was giving my students what they needed. And I was working in the yoga teacher trenches with people who had lots of mobility and cognitive challenges. So, much of what I learned from that accomplished teacher, didn’t apply to the situation I was in at all.

Although I took that workshop at the end of the last millennium, today, there’s still a lot of confusion out there about what exactly chair yoga is and who it’s for.  As yoga teachers, it’s our responsibility to create clear definitions and distinctions, so that we deliver what we say we’re going to, so that we keep folks safe, and so that students and potential students can benefit from our work.

Chair yoga that can help people with mobility challenges is often not about trying to make a shape look as close as possible to the standard version. This kind of chair yoga serves a demographic that has mobility disability which may be the result of a stroke, arthritis, injuries, neurological conditions such as Parkinson’s, sensory motor issues, severe osteoporosis, heart conditions, and/or other chronic health challenges. 

This kind of yoga can be called “Accessible Chair Yoga.” In this style of chair yoga, it makes sense to offer lots of options, encourage smaller movements, sit in the chair for most of the practice (or all of it), and keep the focus on improving functionality rather than achieving or even trying to emulate the standard or “correct” version of a pose.

There’s not much functional purpose in trying to do sun salutations or modifications of Warriors in Accessible Chair Yoga. Basically, you want to offer practices that increase mobility and decrease discomfort – that’s the goal – in other words functionality over form.

You also may want to focus on improving cognitive function through such practices as eye yoga, trataka, and contralateral movements, and address nervous system dysregulation by carefully sequencing practices with appropriate breath adaptations. 

It’s a helpful way to think about, talk about, and advertise Accessible Chair Yoga and if more yoga teachers were donig that, there would be a lot less confusion.

Another kind of yoga that involves a chair is chair-as-a-prop yoga. You could call this kind of a class something like “Yoga with Props, Including Folding Chairs.” In this style of yoga, a chair (like blocks, a strap, or a bolster) acts as a prop to support a pose while deepening it (for example, a backbend over the back or the seat of a chair). This kind of yoga is meant for and should be marketed to people who would go to any regular yoga class at a gym.

Of course, the two could be combined, but you still might call it something “Accessible Chair Yoga with standing options.” In this style, the chair is used as a prop for support (for example to support balance in Mountain pose or Tree pose).

If we, as teachers, are unclear about the distinctions between these different approaches and simply call what we teach “Chair Yoga” without sufficient description, our students will also be confused – and confusion is a good way to turn people off. A person with a spinal fusion, cervical stenosis, and significant shoulder arthritis should probably not attempt a back bend over seat of a chair. And an athlete who wants to improve flexibility might feel that they need more than an Accessible Chair Yoga class.

As with so many other aspects of how we write about, talk about, and advertise what we do, when you put your stake in the ground and clearly say, “This is what we do in my class” then you can truly help students, potential students, and health care professionals who are eager to find options for their patients understand if your work is right for them.

Making these important distinctions is a way that we can help clear up the confusion out there about Chair Yoga.

Did you know I have a Substack? You can sign up for it free here.

I Got This (but getting there took time)

By Kristine Kaoverii Weber | April 19, 2026

COMMENTS

The other day a yoga teacher said to me “I admire your teaching confidence, it’s hard for me.”

Yeah, I get that it can be hard to feel confident – yoga is such a vast subject and teaching it can be really humbling. But the thing is, I’m not a naturally confident person. I didn’t bust out of my mom saying, “I got this!” I was actually a diffident and somewhat insecure child and teenager.

When I see how my childhood friends later became bankers, teachers, or lawyers, I think that for me, a “normal” profession like that would’ve chewed me up and spit me out pretty quickly. I don’t think I could’ve handled the stress, and I don’t think I would’ve ever been able to feel confident in myself.

But when I started to teach yoga, I felt like I’d found something that fit. It made me feel like I could be of service and, at the same time, enjoy meaningful work. And it wasn’t very stressful. I found I could handle the responsibility, the weight of it. Still, it took me a long time to feel confident in my skills.

One of the things I’ve seen a lot in the yoga world is people who go to a few classes, get the yoga bug, and then jump into teacher training. When they finish, they often don’t feel confident enough to start teaching. I totally get that. It’s easy to catch the yoga bug, and teaching feels like the next natural step. But teaching yoga tends to be a slow process. It’s not a two-semester kind of skill. You have to feed the fire for quite a while before it starts to burn.

Still, there are a few things in my teaching career that gave my confidence significant boosts.

Meditation

My daily meditation practice does a couple of crucial things. First, it’s where ideas coalesce and clarity emerges. Yeah, it’s not really what you’re supposed to be doing when you meditate, but sometimes I get the feeling that I need to flow with it because… Second, meditation kicks my ego to the curb and reminds me that teachings never come from me, they only come through me, so I can’t get overly enamored of myself, and hopefully, my filters don’t distort the knowledge too much on the journey from the source to my mouth.

Stepping Out of the Popularity Game

I had a great Iyengar teacher for a while. She was older, grounded, popular. Once she said to me, “I know I’m not the right yoga teacher for everyone.” Which made me think, “Huh? Her classes are always packed?” But then I got it. “Oh, even popular teachers can doubt themselves. Even popular teachers can wonder if they are good enough.”

So, “I know I’m not the right yoga teacher for everyone” became my mantra whenever I felt insecure, overlooked, or invalidated. And it’s completely true. Of course I’m not the right teacher for everyone. That would be overwhelming and exhausting.

So, I decided to let go of the numbers game and double down on my focus on the people who kept coming back to my classes, because, well, they are my people. It’s like a partner or a healthy family. You’ve made a commitment. You keep your eyes on the ones who are there for you, who show up for you, who want the best for you. Those are the people who matter. They are the ones who deserve my attention and care. That change boosted my confidence significantly and helped me step out of the popularity game.

Clarity about Methodology

I’ve studied several different methodologies from different yoga schools over the decades. Eventually my own began to emerge, heavily influenced by Viniyoga (for which I’m incredibly grateful). Before I had a clear methodology focused more on inner awareness and nervous system regulation than stretching hamstrings and nailing arm balances, I had little confidence that anyone would understand my teaching was something beyond watered-down “real” yoga. Having a method that produces predictable nervous system, mood, and energy results transformed my confidence. It helped me speak in an entirely different, much more authoritative, and authentic way. Without it, I think I may have quit teaching a long time ago.

Experience

As much as I wish there was a shortcut to confidence, there really isn’t. But there are ways to avoid pitfalls. Meditation, letting go of popularity, and studying methodology have all been accelerators for me. But experience also helps a lot. Experience sinks in, weaves itself into your being, and starts to emit itself as confidence. I admire experienced musicians, chefs, teachers, craftspeople, artists, etc. I know how much effort and dedication they’ve put into their skills, and it’s clear that their confidence comes from their love for what they do and how they serve.

So yes, teaching experience helps, but so does life experience. I think some of the best yoga teachers are people who took up teaching after retirement as a way to give back to their communities. I think it’s okay and actually quite meaningful to borrow a bit of confidence from other aspects of your life – because yoga is life.

What helps you feel more confident in your teaching? Please LMK in the comments.

P.S. Did you know I have a Substack? It’s free and you can sign up here.

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Have I Ever Told You About CJ?

By Kristine Kaoverii Weber | April 4, 2026

COMMENTS

I made a frenemy in my fifth grate class; I’ll call her CJ. We had recently moved into the area north of Philadelphia, scattered with farms and small towns at that time. My mom and CJ’s mom had quickly become good friends, so I spent time at her house and she at mine, at family cookouts and parties.

CJ played tennis and was a straight-A student. She had a tennis court and horses. My mom and I wanted a tennis court too, so my dad cut down some trees and pulled out the roots, smoothed over the land by dragging a railroad tie wrapped in chicken wire over it, and ingeniously made a tennis court out of the natural clay that was on our property. He built a fence around it, and then we had to nail down the lines, but it worked! Still, my dejected 11-year-old self thought, it’s not a real asphalt one like CJ’s. 😔 The green-eyed monster had settled down hard on my young shoulders.

As we grew up, through middle school and high school, CJ’s list of accomplishments continued to grow. She had a certain little smile that emerged when she beat me at something new. CJ was popular, had a fabulous, huge house, and great clothes (I shopped at Artie’s, the discount store, so sad 😂). CJ was the captain of the tennis team and played in the number one spot. I was number two. CJ was class president. I lost the VP election. CJ dated a football player. I didn’t have a boyfriend. CJ was smart, charismatic, unflustered, focused, on her way to greatness.

My mom would come home from playing tennis with CJ’s mom and tell me about all the wonderful things CJ was doing, which I mostly already knew. She thought it would light a fire under me, help me try harder to become my best self. But it didn’t seem to matter how hard I tried; CJ was always going to outshine me.

When high school finally ended and I went off to college, I felt so relieved. I found new friends who liked me as I was and wanted to lift me up, not compete against me. But I still struggled with feeling inferior.

My roommate saw that in me. One day, when we were walking back to our dorm from the library, she gently said, “There are always going to be people who are better than you, and there are always people who are worse than you – at everything. But it doesn’t matter. You just need to be you. That’s all. You’re enough.” Somehow the universe had graced me with a 20-year-old Zen master.

That advice began to sink in. I realized I could let go of values that didn’t belong to me. I started to think about who I was differently. I came to realize that conquering others was not a path that would ever make me satisfied and happy. I started to do yoga, which helped me feel more grounded and less like I had to look outside of myself for validation.

However, CJ never completely disappeared from my life.

Over the years, she’s come back many times—in the form of various people. There was the CJ who dated the boy I liked sophomore year, the many CJs who were much more beautiful and thinner than me, the CJ who got a full scholarship for her PhD program senior year. After college, there was the CJ who got the promotion I wanted when I worked at a newspaper, the CJ who had much bigger yoga classes than me, the CJ yoga researcher who knew more than I did, the CJ who could write better than me, the CJ who was funnier, and on and on. Plenty of CJs.

But, through the years, CJs have wielded less and less power over me. And now, even when a CJ relishes her conquest, I am okay with it. Even, weirdly, I’m a little grateful. Because the CJs in my life come for one reason alone: to hold up a mirror, so I can see myself a little more clearly, make better decisions in how I think about and deal with a situation, and feel gratitude that they give me another chance to release a deep pattern that doesn’t serve me, or anyone around me.

The CJs in my life have helped me surface and revisit an unhealthy competitive streak, which is clearly an old vāsana, or pattern. But practice and aging have softened it significantly. When I meet CJ these days, I try to catch myself, and then just feel happiness for her, and think about all the ways she’s helped me grow.

Here’s Yoga Sutra 1.33: 

maitrī-karuṇā-muditopekṣāṇāṃ sukha-duḥkha-puṇyāpuṇya-viṣayāṇāṃ bhāvanātaś citta-prasādanam

It teaches that if we want to still the mind and overcome the kleśas, we should try cultivating friendliness to the happy, compassion to the unhappy, joy for the virtuous, and equanimity toward the non-virtuous.

Such a little gem.

Last week I got to have dinner with my dear old college roommate. She’s been a beloved OB/GYN in her community for decades now. And she still makes me feel completely accepted, just as I am. We always seem to pick up right where we left off – giggling like we’re 20 again. So yes, people who trigger us are always going to be part of our lives, but so are the Zen masters – and sometimes, we just need to remember that a little more often.

Today is the last day to watch the replay of my webinar, How to Teach Mixed Chair and Mat Classes with Confidence, and for the Early Bird discount on my upcoming course. 

Myth, the Apocalypse, and Yoga

By Kristine Kaoverii Weber | March 28, 2026

COMMENTS

​I have a 22-year-old son. Recently we were talking about his generation’s perspective on the future. He told me that so many of his friends, since they were kids, have heard that the world is ending – that they are the “last generation.” He said that he knows quite a few people who have chosen to ignore the future and live it up; they just want to dance, even if the world is burning, because who knows how long the fun will last?

The apocalypse used to be confined to the domain of evangelical “End Times” theology, but lately it seems to have jumped the fence and become a mainstream narrative. Plenty of people who are not even remotely religious have bought into it. With climate anxiety, the AI takeover, geopolitics, conspiracy theories, wars, and a flailing economy, it’s pretty much a dumpster fire out there, so it’s not surprising many feel certain the apocalypse is looming.

Joseph Campbell often spoke about how myths are masks of the transcendent. He explained that stories help us navigate the joys, sorrows, pain, pleasure, and worries of being alive by invoking something mystical. The apocalypse isn’t the only myth – there are many others. But if you only focus on destructive end-times stories, you miss out on the power of constructive myths about resilience, forgiveness, re-birth, growth, regeneration, and renewal.

Have you heard about what’s happened at Chernobyl? The area that was abandoned after the 1986 disaster has become an accidental nature reserve, teeming with life — plants, trees, wolves, elk, and bears. Yeah, it’s polluted, and no one should be living there, but nature is regenerating itself. And life, yeah, sure, it’s fragile, but it’s also very determined; its dharma is to regenerate.

The apocalypse is a myth, and a very strong one currently. But Indian cosmology doesn’t see history as a straight line ending with a jump off a cliff; its myths describe history as cyclical, progressing through eras, or yugas. Satya Yuga is the age of truth and enlightenment; Treta Yuga, the age of declining morality; Dvāpara Yuga, the age of materialism and power; and Kali Yuga, the age of ignorance and discord.

It’s not terribly surprising that, according to these myths, we’re in the era of Kali Yuga right now – an era of great strife, ignorance, and confusion, but not an apocalypse – a painfully necessary step on the way to truth.

When you doom scroll, the algorithm feeds you up more doom to scroll, which can make it feel like there’s no hope and increase feelings of helplessness, fear, and confusion.

It’s avidyā, and avidyā is a huge, sucking hole – but one that can be countered by minimizing the hopeless habits and engaging in sincere practice.

I’m not saying that we should ignore the challenges out there or spiritually bypass the bad things that are happening, but catastrophizing isn’t helpful either. Instead, the opportunity is to acknowledge that there’s some serious, world-changing stuff going down and stay informed but not obsessed. And then, take some time away from the screen, do some yoga, take a walk, and put whatever glimpse of hope you have into action. Do something, big or small, to make the world a better place, and remember that things always change.

Deciding to reject apocalyptic thinking is a way to reclaim a sense of empowerment and agency. It’s a way to stop anticipating the end and start living in the present. No one knows how any of what’s going on right now is going to shake out, but yoga practice is a way to stay grounded, maintain an open mind and heart, and help others do the same.

Maybe what we’re going through is a time in which old ideas, ways, and myths need to die out, maybe it’s their time to go. And maybe what’s coming next is something much more human.

Feeling Ungrounded

By Kristine Kaoverii Weber | March 7, 2026

COMMENTS

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This past week the news made me feel a little dysregulated and emotionally all over the place. And then I started reflecting – what is dysregulation? What does it feel like? How does it play out in the body? What’s the sensory expression of it?

The language that’s often used is “ungrounded.”  And even though I have a lot of tools to ground myself and I’ve been helping people learn to ground themselves for decades, I had trouble getting my footing this past week. Somehow the sudden war, combined with personal life stressors, plus goddess knows what astrological forces, merged to produce a physical manifestation of ungroundedness.

For me, being ungrounded is often tactile – a literal feeling that the ground beneath me is slightly unsteady, that my vision, balance, and proprioceptive systems are not to be completely trusted, that my body is mildly unanchored.

We live on a planet with a powerful gravitational pull. It’s so strong that it takes a crazy amount of fuel for rockets to escape it. It’s so powerful that not only does everything here stay stuck to it, but there’s also a moon that’s kept in orbit by it.

So, how could anyone possibly feel ungrounded in the face of such a steady force?

Perhaps it’s because the mind is primary. The state of mind can shape physical experiences, making even the earth’s gravitational pull seem unreliable.  

The other day I saw a video, from a cell phone, of bombs dropping accompanied by audio – loud whistling sounds followed by earth shatteringly-loud explosions and panicked people running. My body reacted. I felt a sense of terror, and then a floaty, scary feeling of being ungrounded, like the earth had turned to liquid beneath me.

It’s not just the war, it’s the arguments, accusations, revelations of corruption, the suffering, and the reverberations of fear and pain that are seemingly everywhere right now.

I had to do a media fast.

I needed to get grounded. So I did yoga and walked. I hung out with friends and talked about normal things. When I was cooking dinner the other day, instead of listening to the news, I listened to a podcast with Bernardo Kastrup, a philosopher and scientist who worked with nuclear physicists at CERN.

Here’s an excerpt that struck me as beautiful:

“All indications are that nature’s instinctive, spontaneous purpose is to develop the ability to self-reflect…Nature achieves this through us – at unfathomable costs. The amount of suffering through the course of evolution by natural selection that has played out on this planet is inconceivable, it’s overwhelming, the price is enormous… And it all seems to be focused on this unique ability of nature through us to take explicit account of itself…and say, ‘Oh, this is what I am.'”

(You can listen to the whole conversation here.)

The biopsycho mechanisms that cause a loss of grounding are survival based. They offer a temporary reprieve – not just from suffering, but from our awareness of suffering (our own or others’). It’s a defense mechanism to protect against witnessing the universe’s “unfathomable costs” – the suffering byproducts that emerge as the universe lumbers towards its evolutionary goal.

God that’s a hard one to bear.

So, my mind prefers to check my body out sometimes.  

Then I started to think, maybe the defense mechanism that makes me feel ungrounded is not simply telling me to brace against witnessing suffering, maybe it’s actually telling me to learn how to surf the evolutionary waves that creep up unexpectedly and at the most inconvenient moments.

Growth is never easy – personally or collectively. So many people all over the world are suffering right now at this moment, largely due to geopolitical forces that are being revealed to be much more brutal and unfeeling than gravity. And yet here I sit in my quiet, breezy, un-bombed home, feeling grounded and grateful, writing about philosophy and yoga.

The injustice is astonishing, humbling, embarrassing.

As I’ve said many times, yoga practice keeps me grounded and helps me navigate what’s going on out there and in my own life, but my hope – rather, my prayer – is that the amped-up suffering we are currently seeing everywhere, and the veils of illusion surrounding entrenched power structures being torn away, are signs of an evolutionary leap. My prayer is that we can (because we must), collectively, change our very unevolved ways.

My prayer is that the evolutionary expansion of awareness is not a blind pointless force, but actually and ultimately, the passageway to compassion.

I’ll be teaching a live workshop next weekend (March 14-15) at the Yoga Center of Columbia in Maryland called The Neuroscience and Psychology of the Chakras – please join me in person or online.

Polyvagal Theory Debate Flares Up (again) and How Yoga Philosophy Might Help

By Kristine Kaoverii Weber | February 15, 2026

COMMENTS

The polyvagal theory debate (PVT) has flared up again. Last week Paul Grossman (who has long been an adversary of the theory) and a group of 39 psychophysiology and neuroanatomy experts published an article in the February 2026 issue of Clinical Neuropsychiatry: “WHY THE POLYVAGAL THEORY IS UNTENABLE. An international expert evaluation of the polyvagal theory and commentary upon Porges.” In the same issue, Stephen Porges, the founder of PVT published a response.

Grossman and co.’s argument in a nutshell:

• Heart Rate Variability: HRV reflects cardiac vagal influence only, not whole-body vagal tone.
• If someone’s HRV looks better in readings, it might simply mean that they were breathing slower during the measurement, not that their nervous system is universally calmer or more resilient.
• The dorsal vagal branch isn’t tied to freezing/dissociation in humans.
• The ventral vagal branch is not only about social engagement, it can also be involved in defensive reactions (at least in other mammals).
• Evolutionary issues: The idea that the ventral vagal branch is uniquely related to mammals’ social engagement is reductive. Non-mammals also have highly complex social behavior.  

Porges’ response in a nutshell:

• Straw man argument: Porges argues that the critique evaluates an incomplete version rather than looking at the theory’s systems claims.
• PVT is about the big picture: and it can actually be tested. It looks at what happens in real life with autonomic states (regulated, mobilized, shut down), and how these states organize in your body, emotions, and social interactions. He also says that he was always clear about how the theory could be proven wrong scientifically.
• The idea behind “ventral vagal” is evident in real life: heart rate, breathing, facial expressions, your voice, swallowing, listening are all involved in feeling safe and being present – they’re all part of the ventral vagal system.
• Measurement debates: getting into the weeds with how HRV is measured isn’t the same thing as disproving PVT. To truly test the theory, you need studies that deliberately shift people into safe states vs. threat states, and then check whether or not the whole pattern (heart, breath, facial/voice cues, and social behavior) shift, not just the HRV number.

I posted about Grossman’s critique on my Facebook page this week and the comments were a spectrum – there were people who said they’ve been “telling folks Porges blather is not even close to science for many years,” to those who reject a theory developed exclusively for and by men (including Bessel van der Kolk’s work), to a person who worked with Paul Grossman and has been trying to help get PVT corrected for years, to many therapists and clinicians who attest that PVT has greatly helped their clients better understand their feelings and behavior.

It’s interesting that the debate often divides into what each group wants from the theory – mechanisms vs. clinical application. Porges’ critics want mechanisms and biomarkers, but many clinicians are interested in whether or not a model is coherent and useful for helping folks better understand and resolve trauma.  Evidence-based practice has three equally valid component areas: research evidence, clinician experience, and client preference – research alone isn’t enough.

The debate reminds me of a classic story (which I’m retelling slightly to amend the ableism) of several blindfolded people describing an elephant. One person is touching the tusk and saying “it’s clearly a spear” and another is touching the tail and saying, “No, it’s a rope!” And others arrive at different conclusions. Scientific claims are often proved wrong – or they get built upon, and new versions or theories emerge. Clinical experience alone is insufficient. If you can’t replicate what you’re doing, why should others accept it? The elephant helps us understand that a partial explanation isn’t the same as a whole one, that none of us can easily remove our blindfolds, and that if we are willing to talk to people who look at and experience life differently than we do, we might just learn something valuable – and come to more accurate conclusions.

Behavioral responses to trauma can’t be completely boiled down to neural correlates because human beings aren’t machines – relationships, context, culture, etc. are part of the story. If science wants to get better at explaining what’s going on behaviorally, it will need to expand its lens. I think that’s what Porges is trying to do, and why he’s gotten so much flack for it, cause critics don’t like when you color outside the lines.

Many human processes are emergent; you can’t predict the whole from discrete parts – like one nerve. While science is good at measuring outcomes, it’s not always good at explaining what we are as human beings – we need a broader philosophy for that and I think yoga is an excellent one.

Yoga doesn’t start from the ground up. It doesn’t claim that you are a complex system of cells and your mind is an epiphenomenon of your brain. It start from the top down – that you emerge from a collection of vāsanās and saṃskāras assembled as a unique human being, who came here to have unique experiences and help others in unique ways. All models are wrong, but some are useful. And ultimately a useful model is one that helps people suffer less, understand themselves better, and contribute to the world in positive ways. Sure if the science of PVT is wrong, it needs to be fixed, and that’s what good science always does, fix, build upon and make its theories better – so I hope that’s what can ultimately emerge from this debate.

I’ll be teaching The Neuroscience and Psychology of the Chakras March 14-15, 2026 at the Yoga Center of Columbia, MD – live and online. Please join me!

References: Grossman, P., Ackland, G. L., Allen, A. M., Berntson, G. G., Booth, L. C., Burghardt, G. M., Buron, J., Dinets, V., Doody, J. S., Dutschmann, M., Farmer, D. G. S., Fisher, J. P., Gourine, A. V., Joyner, M. J., Karemaker, J. M., Khalsa, S. S., Lakatta, E. G., Leite, C. A. C., Macefield, V. G., … Zucker, I. H. (2026). Why the Polyvagal Theory is untenable: An international expert evaluation of the Polyvagal Theory and commentary upon Porges, S. W. (2025). Polyvagal theory: current status, clinical applications, and future directions. Clinical Neuropsychiatry, 23(1), 100–112. https://doi.org/10.36131/cnfioritieditore20260110

Porges, S. W. (2026). When a critique becomes untenable: A scholarly response to Grossman et al.’s evaluation of Polyvagal Theory. Clinical Neuropsychiatry, 23(1), 113–128. https://doi.org/10.36131/cnfioritieditore20260111

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