In yin yoga we come intimately close with who we are. We witness our strengths and our limitations, and we come to love all of it.

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Let’s start with the breath. For every inhale you take, become aware. What does the air feel like as it passes through your nose? Where does it land in your body? How soft can you make your belly as you breathe? Close your eyes and listen to your body’s etheric ocean. Notice the pause between breaths. Notice the exhale. Repeat, repeat, repeat.

In my twenties, I picked up a gratitude journal and instantly resented it.

I found the practice too shallow for my heart to bare.

My Italian roots whispered to me that a life well-lived produces gratitude like a nutrient: One wouldn’t need to search for it if one were planted in the right soil.

And so I embarked on the journey of soil-searching.

I travelled from Toronto Canada to the East coast of Australia and that journey would come strip me of who I was; Take me across the world, force me to detach from my home, my family and friends; burn down the person I thought I would be only to rebuild the person I’d become

In that time I shed countless hopes and goals. I faced debilitating anxiety and many dark nights of the soul.

I lost myself before becoming this version of me, and every step of the way felt increasingly so important.

And now, here I am, many years older.

And the gratitude is overwhelming.

Are you being true to yourself, even when it means being honest with a loved one?

When it came to expressing feelings in our family, my siblings and I were told we were too much. Emotions were reserved for my mother, and the rest of us were belittled if we expressed boundaries, anger or “no” in any way.

In my twenties, I started to notice a habit forming: I didn’t want to be perceived as a ruthless, angry woman, and I wanted my family to see me as the kind and loving person I knew myself to be, so I began to bite my tongue. I started to hide my opinions, refused to confront situations that irritated me, and learned to put a mask on and smile.

I began a long history of repressing my anger, which only magnified inside of me, and for years I refused to let it out or address where it was coming from.

I now know that holding in anger causes tremendous physical and emotional exhaustion, but I had previously never connected my constant fatigue with repressed emotion.

I love seeing people happy.

I’ve had a weird relationship with happiness. I’ve both craved and shunned happiness. Chased after it and chased it away. Celebrated every high and wallowed in every low, attaching to both states as if they defined me.

Like most of us I’ve come to realise that the highs and lows of life have nothing to do with happiness. Highs and lows are simply that. Like the tide or the weather, things that come and go. Moods, feelings, phases, fortune, good times and bad.

Happiness deserves to be looked at differently; Maybe as a conscious a choice. We choose each day to welcome happiness or create it within our hearts and minds. It isn’t always easy: On days when the rent is missed or the relationship isn’t working or the black cloud blows in or whatever worldly thing occurs to pull us into a low state, it isn’t easy to choose happiness. And it’s okay not to.

Bypassing is when we spin the hard times into lies and tell ourselves, “everything happens for a reason.” We smile and say, “It’s a blessing in disguise,” before having a chance to savour the wound because we fear being seen as anyone other than an okay person; That if we’re not okay, there might be something wrong with us.

But happiness doesn’t require denial. It embraces grief and loss and despair. It sits in the background of the heart, aflame and ever-burning, only to fire up big and bright once the body and mind have digested the wounds and finished their healing.

And happiness is not a series of quotes on Instagram or a life lived on the beach. It can happen in the office and it’s there alongside the mundane routine of adulthood too.

I love seeing people happy because it reminds me that nothing is perfect, that nothing lasts forever, and that brief moments of happiness are beautifully fleeting. I’m reminded to cherish them without attachment. To celebrate the fact that they’re there, even when we can’t feel them. Even when we aren’t experiencing them.

Happiness doesn’t have to be a lifestyle. It isn’t a full-time job. It’s a subtle sweetness that never feels like how it looks in the movies or online.

I’m learning to savour it.

I used to think yoga was to be done a certain way in order to be right, and I’d shame myself for traveling outside the rules of my yoga teacher. I ignored my body’s sensations, mistaking it for the voice of my ego, and told myself to be a good student means to cultivate the ability to listen to my teacher.

As I’ve grown — both as a woman and a yoga practitioner — I’ve discovered for myself the healing that unfolds through listening to the needs of my body. I am learning that an embodied practice, where the student hones into the teachings that stem from within the body — as opposed to an aesthetically correct one — empowers the yogin to trust herself. I now teach this message to my students.