the practice of seeing clearly

I’ve been thinking lately about how certain people come into our lives for what seems like no real reason other than to teach us about our own energy. How it feels, how it shifts, how it reacts. The dynamic is often so subtle at first, an acquaintance that begins to grow into something like friendship. It’s familiar and light, until quietly something in my body starts whispering: be careful here.

I’ve learned, though not always gracefully, to listen to that voice. The one that feels more like a knowing than a thought. The one that doesn’t arrive with an explanation, only an instruction: step back. And when I do, when I honor that little flicker of intuition, it’s almost uncanny how quickly proof shows up that I did the right thing. The truth revealing itself in layers.

It’s never comfortable, this kind of lesson. I still find myself wanting to make sense of it. To understand why someone would twist or misread a moment of self-preservation as an attack. The harder I try to see it clearly, the cloudier it becomes. The effort to understand starts to feel like quicksand, the more I move, the deeper I sink.

The teachings remind me that everything is energy. Every thought, word, and gesture. We are constantly in relationship with the energetic field around us, and each interaction offers information. Some energies expand us, they feel like breath and light and possibility. Others contract us, they make the body small, the breath shallow, the mind restless. The practice is not in judging one as good and the other as bad, but in noticing the distinction and acting from clarity.

There is a particular kind of peace that comes when I choose not to engage the distortion, when I breathe, soften, and remember that what is real does not need to be defended. The same way the body finds its center again after wobbling in a pose, my energy finds its own balance when I stop fighting the tilt.

Yoga keeps teaching me this, to trust what I feel, to move from that inner current of knowing, to allow what isn’t mine to fall away without needing to name it as wrong. It is not a lesson I’ve mastered, not even close. It is one I learn and forget and learn again, each time a little deeper, a little quieter.

Maybe that is the real practice. Not in perfecting the pose, or even the story, but in remembering that truth itself is a form of grace.