Not Your Average Yin Class

This morning, just before teaching my weekly live Yin Yoga class, someone said they had a question. I expected something about alignment, anatomy, or perhaps an elemental theme.

Instead, they asked:

“Does everything that happens in the universe have relevance to me personally?”

The question was so large it seemed to stretch the air around me. Philosophically, it brushes against solipsism—the view that only the self is real—which is usually wielded as an insult. But this wasn’t the smug certainty of solipsism; it was the open, trembling curiosity of someone trying to find their place in the scheme of things.

I’ve heard its cousins before: Is it all random chance? Is it just cause and effect in a billiard-ball universe? Or is there an invisible source that pervades everything? Does everything happen for a reason? Why do bad things happen to good people? If there’s no greater meaning, why go on? If there is a God-given meaning, why do children starve?

I had no answer—no metaphysical blueprint to unroll, no theology to hand over.

So I did what I had come to do: I taught Yin Yoga. The day’s practice (in the practice video above) was devoted to exploring the Earth’s quiet, constant support beneath us—rooting our attention through the body, mobilizing the spine through its six directions: rotation, extension, side-bending, flexion. A simple sequence, nothing grandiose.

And yet, at the end of class, the student said:

“I felt like you were answering my question throughout everything you said.”

I was startled. I hadn’t set out to address their question. As always, I was simply speaking from whatever felt most alive in my own practice—lately, that means surrendering to not knowing, listening for the next step rather than demanding the whole map. It means wrestling with James Hillman’s The Soul’s Code and its idea that our lives carry an invisible pattern that only reveals itself over time.