Like Water on Stone, Yoga Softens Our Armor & Reveals Who We Are
Not through force, but through presence. Not by breaking, but by softening.
Yoga isn’t about touching your toes.
It’s about how you meet what’s hard.
How you show up.
How you stay.
More than movement, it is the way we engage with the world.
Yoga is in the moments we choose to pause, to breathe,
to stay when everything in us is telling us to run.
We start out in life open, unguarded.
But over time, life chips away at the softness.
Trauma.
Grief.
Disappointment.
Survival.
Each one another sharp break.
Yoga doesn’t erase those edges.
But through practice, we soften them.
It doesn’t take away what’s happened.
But it reshapes us—
smoothing out the rough spots,
teaching us how to hold our stories differently.
The Armor We Build
I once believed I could do anything.
As a young child, I carried that confidence like a banner—until life chipped away at it.
When home became unpredictable, I learned to stay on guard, to stay quiet, to anticipate the next explosion.
Outside wasn’t much safer.
Some lessons come too early:
That my body was not always mine.
That no matter how fast I walked, I could not outrun certain things.
So, I learned to shrink.
To make myself small.
To go unnoticed.
And I built armor.
I became self-sufficient to a fault.
I worked nonstop.
I never asked for help.
I smiled through the panic attacks, the stress that sat in my throat,
the feeling that I was always bracing for impact.
And on paper? I was fine.
I had the job.
The house.
The security I once dreamed of.
But I wasn’t living.
The Softening
I stepped onto a yoga mat in my early 30s, hoping to fix the tension in my back.
At first, it was just movement—
poses, breath, the occasional moment of stillness.
But something kept me coming back.
The poses were unfamiliar, but the feeling was not.
The more I practiced, the more I recognized it:
This was the part of me I’d lost.
Yoga wasn’t about bending my body.
It was about yielding, letting go, and
learning to flow like water
—without force, without resistance.
I didn’t need to break my armor.
I needed to let it change shape.
Even the hardest rock is no match for water.
Water doesn’t resist.
It doesn’t force.
It just keeps moving.
And in time, the rock that once seemed unbreakable becomes smooth,
not because the water fought it,
but because the water stayed.
That, too, was yoga.
Yoga Didn’t Save Me. It Brought Me Back to Myself.
Yoga didn’t erase my scars.
But it gave me a new way to hold them.
I am still me.
But I don’t brace the same way.
And when I do,
I notice.
I have tools to soften.
To breathe.
To stay.
Most of the time, yoga doesn’t look like yoga at all.
It’s the moment in traffic when I exhale instead of honk.
It’s in hard conversations when I listen instead of rushing to fill the silence.
It’s in the way I notice the wind in the trees,
the warmth of my coffee in the morning.
That, too, is yoga.
Yoga isn’t something you master.
It’s something you return to.
It’s in us from the beginning before the world hardens us.
And if we let it,
it can bring us back to ourselves again and again.
Maybe you, too, are already living your yoga.
Maybe it’s woven into the rhythm of your breath,
the way you move through the world,
shaping you in ways you haven’t yet noticed.
The next time you catch yourself bracing against life—
pause.
Breathe.
You don’t have to force softness.
You don’t have to make yourself relax.
Just let yourself be here
exactly as you are.