In 2016, I made fun of yoga. Useless, I thought — just stretching, no real strength involved. I ran 10km, four times a week. I was strong. Yoga was for people who weren't.

Then I did my first class.

I couldn't get through seven rounds of Sun Salutation. Couldn't lift both legs eight times in a simple leg-raise. Couldn't get anywhere near a headstand forward bend. My back was stiff in ways I hadn't noticed. My arms weren't as strong as I assumed. The runner who thought he was fit couldn't do things a beginner's class asked of him.

That was only the physical part. At the time, I also had digestive issues, anger I couldn't explain, mood swings, back pain, hair loss starting far too early. And my answer to all of it was to look outside myself — some other exercise would fix it, more protein would fix it, there had to be a medicine somewhere with my name on it.

I kept practicing anyway. My teacher never told me to change any of this. He didn't lecture me about running, or diet, or my temper. He just inspired me to keep coming back to the mat.

Ten years later, I know something I didn't know then: I am responsible for what I feel, what I do, and my own health. Not a supplement. Not a doctor with a quick fix. Me.

Somewhere along the way, I also started understanding what the practice was actually doing inside me — not just muscles, but organs, glands, the endocrine system, the skeletal system, digestion, all of it working together. I was poor at biology in school. Avoided it completely. Yoga is what made me fall in love with it — with my own body, and how closely it's tied to the mind. Learning that changed how I see myself as much as the practice did.

The practice has changed more than my body. It's changed how I look at life, at people, at God, at yoga itself. I stopped running entirely in 2016 — yoga is the only practice I do now. No protein supplements, ever. A light diet. And at ten years in, I'm healthier than I've ever been in my life — younger, if I'm honest, than I felt the day I first mocked the whole idea. And it all started with one simple, traditional hatha yoga class.

If you'd told the 2016 version of me this is where I'd end up — not just practicing, but teaching — he wouldn't have believed you. That's exactly why I teach the way I do now: because I know what it's like to sit in a class certain you're already strong enough, and to be wrong about it.