Science, Intuition, and the Permission to Heal

Singapore, 2016. In our glass tower overlooking the Central Business District, the apocalypse arrives in high definition. CNN, BBC, Channel NewsAsia. Every screen broadcasts a world tilting off its axis. Brexit. Duterte. Trump. The impossible made inevitable. I wake at 2am for emergency calls with San Francisco, stumble through days that blur into nights, my body a timezone unto itself. We're all sleepwalking through history.

In that city of calculated precision, chaos felt cinematic. Theatre of the absurd. I ran after work in the equatorial heat to clear my head. Joined a gym to escape the humidity. There I stumbled upon a weekly Ashtanga class. The same sequence, the same postures, the same order each week. Finally, something predictable.

San Francisco, 2017. The fog hadn't changed, but I had. My muscle memory led me underground, to an Ashtanga shala beneath the Financial District's towers. At 5am on Sutter Street, while the city slept, we gathered. The teacher's terms were clear: daily practice. Every day. No exceptions.

"This isn't casual," she said.

It sounded severe. It was. But something in me reached for that certainty.

Each morning I arrived before dawn. Large windows framed the day's transformation from shadow to light. We practiced in shared silence broken only by breath.

What captivated me about Ashtanga wasn't its difficulty but its accessibility. Each student moved at their own pace. A beginner might spend an hour on sun salutations while beside them, someone threaded their leg behind their head. The teacher moved between us like a gardener, adjusting here, offering a new posture there, but only when she sensed readiness.

You build your practice incrementally, asana by asana, like learning a language one word at a time. In that room, we were all students of our own unfolding.

Those early days brought startling intimacy with my own existence. I could feel which muscles engaged, which released. Folding forward, I'd discover my toes as if for the first time. The extraordinary hidden in the ordinary, waiting only for attention.

Off the mat, this attention leaked into everything. Food tasted more vivid. Scents more potent. I began inhabiting my body instead of escaping it.

With clearer vision came unwelcome recognition: my home life and work environment were both ecosystems near collapse. Work had become an escape from home's dysfunction, yoga an escape from work. A triangle of avoidance.

This is when I encountered viveka, discernment. Not harsh judgment, but the ability to see clearly. The same attention that let me feel my hamstrings also let me notice the constriction in my chest when certain people entered the room.

In 2018, after #MeToo, buried truths about Pattabhi Jois erupted. Women worldwide who had practiced with the man credited with popularizing Ashtanga spoke of violations that contradicted everything yoga represented.

My teacher, herself a survivor, was devastated. In response to these revelations (perhaps to her own reactivated trauma) she closed our shala and left San Francisco.

The thread broke. We scattered like beads.

I felt anger at Jois. Hurt at my teacher's withdrawal. Confusion at how something that helped me see clearly could have such darkness in its lineage. Yet my body kept returning to the mat.

In those days, I dove into research, collecting studies about neuroplasticity, the vagus nerve, trauma stored in tissue. Building an academic fortress around a practice that had already proven itself in the laboratory of daily experience.

Looking back, I see this compulsion: if I couldn't trust the lineage holders, maybe I could trust the data. If authority figures failed, perhaps empirical evidence would hold.

But there's something else I'm seeing now, something that strikes at the heart of Soft Soil itself. This persistent need for validation, for justification. Even as I write about trusting personal experience, I find myself compulsively searching for peer-reviewed studies, showing my work like a student afraid of being marked down.

The real work isn't resolving this tension but diving beneath it. Understanding what drives this push-pull between lived experience and external validation. Maybe that's where the next chapter begins.

I began writing about the Ashtanga crisis, hoping to create space for conversations that should have happened decades ago. The broader dialogue never materialized, but something else did.

People started connecting me with a teacher they thought I should meet. When I finally reached out, she surprised me: "I know who you are."

Sometimes the universe has a sense of humor about its matchmaking.

When I practiced with her, I felt the soft click of recognition. Through COVID and Zoom, this teacher across the country became a regular presence. The pandemic that separated so many somehow brought us closer.

Those early days of connection through screens taught me something: presence doesn't require proximity.

Nine years in, I still practice daily. The forms change, sometimes at home, sometimes just breath in a hotel room. This practice has been my constant through upheaval, transitions, pandemic, evolution.

I'm resisting the urge to explain the science, how breath regulates the nervous system, how postures release stored trauma, how meditation changes brain structure. After our community fractured, I needed those studies like a lifeline. They gave me permission to continue when the moral landscape felt shaky.

Even in creating Soft Soil, I've fallen into presenting scientific evidence alongside personal narrative as if one validates the other. As I go deeper, I hope you'll keep me honest. Call me out if I'm still trying to make messy human experience fit tidy categories.

Beginning my ninth year of daily practice, I'm still learning to trust my body. But more than that, I'm questioning why that trust feels so difficult, so countercultural, so in need of defense.

The practice continues.