The Best Kind of Happiness

It was mid-August 2005, and I was lying on a yoga mat in the lush green lawn outside Kripalu Yoga Center.

I had gone there to escape the confusion and upheaval of a pending divorce. While it was a necessary step for both my ex-husband and me—and we remained friends throughout the process—it was still one of the most unsettling experiences of my life.

I had never anticipated the complete disruption that dissolving an 18-year relationship and 15 years of marriage would bring. The disorientation was profound, like a concussion of the soul. Everything in my life suddenly felt in disarray. I was far from home with no clear vision of what would come next.

It felt like living in a Brothers Grimm tale—all I could do was follow the little white pebbles on the moonlit path and hope for the best. One day at a time.

We were in the final part of class, and the teacher was guiding us into supine pigeon pose as our last cooling posture. As I settled into the familiar stretch deep in my hips, a thought arose with startling clarity:

“This is all I need. Me and a yoga mat. And it will all be okay.”

It was a pivotal moment. In that instant, I simply knew that everything would be fine, that as long as I could reconnect with myself on my yoga mat – anywhere in the world- I would always be okay.

It wasn’t about knowing I was on the right path. I knew that right here, in this moment, was everything I needed. I could be perfectly content, for no particular reason, wherever I was.

There are many kinds of happiness—the joy of family, of falling in love, of children and grandchildren, of achieving success. But those all come to us from outside ourselves.

What I realized in that moment was that yoga could open a door to the best kind of happiness: A return to my own deepest reality and the kind of inner resilience that would always have my back.

That moment also marked the beginning of my serious journey into yoga’s transformative power—a path that eventually, through coincidences I could never have planned, led to creating YogaUOnline and getting the privilege of working with some of the world’s most experienced yoga practitioners and teachers who have dedicated their lives to this practice.

And through it all, there was this deep inner knowing that no matter what life brought, there was always a way to find refuge in my inner center. And yoga could provide that path.

Why A Return to YOU Matters Now

Now, more than ever, we live in a time of unprecedented complexity and disconnection. The pace of change, the constant stream of information, the sense of living in a reality that seems ever more fragile—all conspire to pull us away from the one place where true stability and wisdom reside: within ourselves.

In the midst of all the turmoil, yoga is the one thing that can reliably help you return to your sense of center and reconnect with the deep inner authenticity that will always guide you through life – if you are lucky enough to find the right teacher.

In our upcoming semester in our Empowered Aging Circle, we have created a program with some of the best teachers that really excel in helping us gain that experience on – and off – the mat.

A Return to YOU: Reconnecting with Your Wisdom Body is designed for those who sense there’s something deeper waiting to be rediscovered. It’s for yoga teachers and experienced practitioners who understand that the real practice isn’t about perfecting poses, but about coming home to the intelligence that lives in your body.

Think about it as your yoga studio away from home – a place where you will be able to practice with some of the best and most experienced yoga teachers in the world, and where you can always return to revisit the practices and lessons you enjoy the most.

Your body holds decades of experience, wisdom, and resilience. It has carried you through every challenge, every joy, every season of growth and change. Yet somewhere along the way, many of us learned to think our way through life rather than feel our way through it. We began to trust external authorities more than our own inner knowing.

This program invites you back to that fundamental relationship with yourself—the one that exists beneath all the roles you play, all the achievements you’ve accumulated, all the stories you tell about who you are. It’s a return to the simple, profound truth that you already contain everything you need.

Through carefully crafted practices that honor both ancient wisdom and modern understanding of the nervous system, you’ll rediscover how to listen to your body’s signals, how to work with your natural rhythms, and how to access the calm, centered strength that has always been yours.

This isn’t about becoming someone new. It’s about remembering who you’ve always been, beneath all the noise and complexity. It’s about finding your way back to that place where you can say, with quiet confidence, “This is all I need. Me, here, now. And it will all be okay.”

Because sometimes, the most radical thing you can do is simply come home to yourself. . .