the practice of seeing clearly

I’ve been thinking about how some people show up in your life just to teach you about your own energy. How it moves, how it changes, how it protects itself.

It starts small. Someone shows up on a regular Tuesday and tests your patience in some minor way. They say something that shouldn’t matter but somehow does. They’re mirroring back something you didn’t know you were still holding onto. These little moments become like tuning forks—they show you exactly what energy you’re putting out and what you’re letting in.

Then there are the ones that stick around longer, the ones that turn into something like friendship. It feels easy and good until your body starts sending up quiet alerts: be careful here.

I’ve gotten better at listening to that voice, though I still resist it sometimes. It’s more of a knowing than a thought. It doesn’t explain itself. It just says: step back. And when I actually do it, when I trust that flicker of intuition, the proof shows up fast. The truth comes out in layers.

This kind of lesson is never comfortable. I still want to make sense of it, to understand why someone would twist a moment of self-preservation into some kind of betrayal. But the harder I try to see it clearly, the blurrier it gets. Trying to understand becomes its own trap. The more I move, the deeper I sink.

Everything is energy. Every thought, every word, every gesture. We’re always in relationship with the energetic field around us, and every interaction gives us information. Some energies expand us—they feel like breath and light and space. Others contract us—they make the body small, the breath shallow, the mind restless. The practice isn’t about calling one good and the other bad. It’s about noticing the difference and acting from that clarity.

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

Yoga keeps teaching me this: trust what you feel, move from that inner current of knowing, let what isn’t yours fall away without needing to call it wrong. I haven’t mastered this. I probably never will. I learn it, forget it, and learn it again. Each time a little deeper, a little quieter.

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