Today in yoga, I lay on my mat and felt the earth holding me. The room was full, and yet there was a softness in it, a quiet hum of breath and bodies. Beside me was a woman from New York, practicing here for the third time. She spoke about her home, the guarded energy there, the tension, the politics that seem to press on people.
I have never been to America, but I understood what she meant on a human level. I know both the feeling of constriction and the feeling of freedom, the weight of collective stress and the relief of space. Her words weren’t only about place, but about what it does to the body and spirit. On that level, I recognized myself in her experience.
As we settled deeper into the practice, we were asked to rest our hands on our bellies, forming a soft triangle around the navel. I didn’t know the traditional meaning of the gesture, but my mind began to contemplate it, the umbilical cord, the first tether we have to another human, the way our mothers are tied to theirs, and the lineage that extends far beyond what we can name.
That thought led me to the image of an egg. Recently, I watched a video of an embryo forming, a heart pulsing in the darkness, bones beginning to take shape, life gathering itself in total silence. There was something humbling about that. We crack eggs without thinking, without considering the intricate architecture that could have unfolded inside.
Science explains the cells and signals, but it can’t quite touch the awe of it.
There is a mystery in that. A mystery I try to understand, but can never fully hold in my mind.
Somewhere between knowledge and wonder lies the unknowing we live with. It leaves me thinking about how much I yearn for peace, how often I try to anchor myself in it, especially at this time of year. The season paints images of comfort and togetherness, of lights and warmth and families gathering. Yet beneath that polish sits a different truth: strained attachments, unspoken grief, conflict in our homes and across the world.
So I find myself sitting with a contradiction.
We seek peace, but we can not pretend the world is only peaceful.
Which brings me to the next question.
Just beneath the surface of softness lives the opposite, anger, heat, propulsion.
The body remembers both.
It knows what it is to surrender, and it knows what it is to defend.
Anger is a force that can create or destroy.
I have seen the damage of uncontained anger, how it fractures safety, silences children, scars generations. I have also felt the fear of my own anger, its speed, its intensity, the way it overwhelms before the prefrontal cortex can catch up.
So how do we hold both?
How do we live in peace without denying anger?
How do we surrender without feeling like we might disappear?
When I look at this writing, I see a longing—to be held, to trust, to rest without fear.
I also see the part of me that hesitates, that knows how fragile safety can be, and how quickly it can be lost.
I want to surrender more consistently.
Yet when I imagine being fully held, a fear rises, of losing control, of being abandoned, of being engulfed. The mystery feels comforting and overwhelming at once. The idea of letting go invites freedom and panic in equal measure.
Perhaps that is why I reach for the earth.
It does not demand.
It does not withdraw.
It simply holds.
Today, on the mat, I felt that holding, not permanently, not completely, but enough.
Enough to soften. Enough to breathe. Enough to wonder whether peace and anger, surrender and vigilance, might coexist rather than cancel each other out.
I do not know the answer yet.
Maybe none of us do.
But I am learning to let the question live in me:
How do we allow ourselves to be held—by the earth, by others, by life—without losing who we are?
For now, I return to the breath, the body, and the ground beneath me.
Not certainty.
But presence.
And maybe that is where surrender begins.
Spaces In Between 