Even though I’ve been practicing yoga for over 20 years, I haven’t always particularly liked yoga. For many years, it was a means to an end — a necessary thing to do to help me become more flexible.
When I found teachers who focused more on esoteric theory, I was drawn to return to their classes for the intellectual stimulation more than the physical practice. I never believed myself to be “good at yoga” — certainly not to the point where I would one day become a yoga teacher.
Through the spiritual teachings offered by some of my early teachers, I learned to see yoga not as a means to gain more flexibility, but as a practice of coming home to my body — a way to find internal grounding and stability even when life uprooted me.
Yoga as a Practice Coming Home to My Body
As a real estate agent, I viewed my role as helping my clients navigate transitions when they need to move. Eventually I came to see my yoga practice as the “inner work” version of this process.
As I learned from my early teachers — and in my eventual yoga teacher trainings —yoga is a practice that teaches us how to find grounding, maintain perspective, and move through the sticking points of life with greater ease.
Long at war with my own body, my yoga practice became a fundamental tool to help me learn self-acceptance and move with confidence.
Yet many yoga practices still left me feeling out of place.
Maps and Metaphors
That changed when I discovered Katonah Yoga, a branch of yoga developed by Nevine Michaan that is rooted in Hatha yoga and Taoism.
Instead of using vague esoteric concepts rooted in a foreign language, Katonah uses the language of metaphor and the visual aid of maps.
As a lover of both maps and metaphors, I was instantly hooked.
In the Katonah practice, yoga poses are not just strange shapes to make with the body — a form of contortion that’s inaccessible to many normal human bodies.
Rather, each pose has a purpose: grounding your being, flushing kidneys, stretching a liver, opening the lungs, stimulating the glands, getting perspective, accessing higher vision.
In the Katonah practice, poses are forms designed for function. Forms can inform, deform, reform, and transform. Through the practice of techniques, repetition, and time, poses become accessible, the body becomes more functional, and the spirit becomes formidable.
The Body as a Home
If I needed anything more to seal the deal, I found it in one of Katonah’s core metaphors: the “body as an abode.”
Suddenly, my perspective on yoga as a practice of “coming home to my body” wasn’t just esoteric and philosophical. In the realm of Katonah yoga, it is practical, embodied, and illustrated with a map.
Katonah yoga helped me understand yoga as a practice of “house maintenance” and “house cleaning.” Through the poses, you flush your toilets, air out your windows, regulate your thermostat, sweep the floors, and clear out your chimney.
In your house, if the water in your shower is cold, you don’t open up the wall behind the shower; you first go to the basement to check your boiler. In the same way, Katonah’s maps give me a route to find the cause of an injury or issue, and techniques to address it.
A Practical Tool Beyond the Body
Katonah’s maps don’t just give a metaphorical overview of the body; they also offer routes to solving issues and achieving goals beyond the forms of a yoga pose. Using the magic square as a template, I can map out the path to a goal, and diagnose where I’m getting stuck — whether in the body or the mind.
This is a tool I use with myself, as well as with my students and clients.
Reframing Identity
Katonah helped me see more clearly how my roles as a real estate broker and yoga teacher weren’t separate identities, but different expressions of the same driving purpose: to help clients find their homes, navigate transitions with greater ease, and move with confidence.
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