woven with three strands

Some days I step onto the mat and it feels like gravity has doubled. Every movement heavy. Every breath a small labor. My body slow to respond.

Other days, I’m restless before I even begin. The kind of energy that buzzes under the skin: breath short, mind already three steps ahead. I move, but it’s not easeful. It’s got this sort of chasing quality.

And then there are those rare, golden days when everything somehow lands in place. Breath steady. Movement fluid. Awareness soft and wide.

The yoga teachings have words for this. They call it the play of the gunas — the ever-shifting threads that weave together everything we can feel and see.

Tamas. The gravity of stillness. That sweet pull toward rest, or sometimes, the heavy blanket of not wanting to move at all.

Rajas. The spark that propels everything forward. The push. The effort. The “I should be doing more.”

Sattva. The clear light that sometimes breaks through… calm, even, awake.

None of them are bad. None of them are the goal. They just move, like weather through a sky that doesn’t belong to any of it.

Yoga reminds me that beneath all of it — the heaviness, the agitation, the moments of calm, there’s something quieter watching. Purusha, the witness. The part that doesn’t change, even when everything else does.

When tamas takes over, that witness can feel buried. When rajas runs the show, it gets lost in the motion. And when sattva shines, we catch a glimpse — clear, fleeting, beautiful.

But none of it stays.

Maybe the practice isn’t about fixing or chasing or clinging. Maybe it’s just about noticing. About asking, softly:

What’s alive in me right now?
What is this breath made of — heaviness, movement, light?
Can I let it be what it is, without needing it to change?

Some days, that feels like enough.
Maybe it always is.