July 2026 Week 2

This week in yoga class and meditation we spoke about the alarming rise in anxiety. It is heartbreaking how many people are struggling. Even sadder...I can identify with it.
Part of it may be a new medication I'm taking, but if I'm honest, this transition into summer in my little beach town always asks something of me. After five years of living here full-time, I've built a life I truly love—a full, meaningful rhythm with wonderful friends and community. Then summer arrives. More friends return, calendars fill, invitations multiply, and suddenly there is so much happening all around me.
It is beautiful...and if I'm not intentional, it can also become overwhelming. So, selfishly, our intention for this month was chosen for me.
I am living from the inside out.
A big, bold reminder to become quieter, more intentional, and to remember that my peace cannot depend on what is happening around me.
This morning I listened to a meditation on contentment, and it stopped me in my tracks. What a beautiful place to live from. When I am living with contentment, I am not comparing. The grass isn’t greener. I am trusting that something bigger than me is unfolding. I am accepting my life exactly as it is today. And in that acceptance, I naturally begin living from the inside out.
The meditation posed a simple question:
What is blocking contentment in me right now?
In other words...
What is getting in the way of living from my deepest self?
Am I comparing?
Am I not trusting?
Am I resisting what is?
For me it truly is a process, I need to get uncomfortable, “un content” so I say oh right its time to dial in even closer to my inside voice.
That discomfort becomes my invitation. It's my reminder to turn down the volume of the outer world—the people, the activities, the gatherings—and turn up the volume of my own inner voice.
When I become consumed by all the outer noise, something else happens. My inner noise gets loud too. It begins whispering that I'm doing it wrong. And honestly...I don't even know what "it" is. Lol
Yoga has been gently revealing something I didn't even know about myself. Sometimes, without realizing it, I allow my sense of worth to rise and fall based on how connected, included, or needed I feel. I unconsciously look for evidence outside myself that I belong. I truly thought I was simply living a full and joyful life.
Instead, yoga has shown me there were moments when I was quietly searching outside myself for something only my own heart could give me. This realization is not comfortable, but as always, with awareness comes change and freedom.
We know how to analyze, achieve, and solve incredibly complex problems. But no-one taught us how to turn inward. Most of us have not learned how to become still enough to notice the quiet space beneath our thoughts—the place where intuition, wisdom, and truth naturally arise.
We haven't learned to observe the patterns of our minds, to question whether every thought is true, or to ask ourselves:
Is this reaction serving me?
Is this who I truly want to be?
Am I living from the inside out?
This is what yoga offers. Not simply a better way of thinking. A different relationship with our thoughts altogether. Yoga reminds us that we are not our thoughts.
As we practice, we begin to witness them rather than immediately believing them. We notice our emotions without becoming consumed by them. We recognize old stories and habitual patterns without assuming they define who we are. As this witnessing awareness grows, a deeper presence begins to emerge. One that is no longer driven by approval, fear, comparison, or expectation.
Instead, it is rooted in something much quieter. Something that feels a lot like contentment.
Yet practice alone isn't enough. We can meditate every morning and still spend the afternoon reacting from old habits—defending ourselves, seeking validation, blaming, controlling, or closing our hearts. The ego is so sneaky. It even learns the language of spirituality. It can become attached to being the teacher, the healer, the helper, the seeker...while the same unconscious patterns continue quietly beneath the surface.
Without honest self-inquiry, we may simply deepen our conditioning instead of becoming free from it.
This is why the yogic tradition offers us such a beautiful framework for living through Kriya Yoga:
Tapas — the willingness to stay with what is uncomfortable and allow it to transform us.
Svādhyāya — the courage to study ourselves honestly with curiosity instead of judgment.
Īśvara Praṇidhāna — the practice of surrendering to something greater than ourselves and trusting that we don't have to control every outcome.
Together they become more than philosophy. They become a way of living. A way of slowly removing the layers of conditioning until what remains is who we have always been beneath the noise.
Is this why living from the inside out can feel so elusive?
It isn't another goal to accomplish. It is a lifelong practice of noticing when we've wandered outside ourselves and gently returning home.
Returning through determination.
Returning through self-study.
Returning through surrender.
Maybe contentment isn't something we have to chase.
Maybe it quietly appears the moment we stop looking for ourselves everywhere else.
So here are the questions I've been sitting with this week:
If clear seeing is the goal, If living from the inside out is the intention:
How do we continue to cultivate it?
And what might be possible if, instead of trying harder to become someone new, we simply became more willing to come home to who we already are?
As for me, I know I'll lose my way again. I'll get caught up in the noise. I'll compare. I'll wonder if I'm doing enough or showing up enough. But maybe that's not failure. Maybe that's simply the practice. Each time I notice I've wandered outside myself, I get another opportunity to turn back inward.
This month, I'm choosing to live from the inside out.