During a supine twist, as I moved my knees to the right, I felt it: that familiar, sharp pinch of my sciatic nerve. This wasn’t new. This pain had been my unwelcome companion for over 35 years. My back is, to put it bluntly, jacked, and I’ve always been sensitive about it.
When the instructor came over to guide me deeper into the pose, I tried not to flinch, but my body had other plans. The movement was reflexive—a protective jerk that betrayed my vulnerability. “Are you okay?” she asked softly.
“I have sciatica on my left,” I whispered back, the words barely audible between the three of us: me, her, and the wall.

What happened next changed everything. In that hushed, sacred space, she didn’t just adjust my pose—she truly saw me. She gently stretched and positioned my arm so my left shoulder stayed grounded. Then, with incredible care, she smoothed her hand along my leg, tracing the path from my spine through my hip to my knee. As I processed what she was doing, something inside me finally let go. I relaxed into the pose with a quiet sigh that had been waiting to escape for what felt like my whole life.

During savasana, lying flat with my eyes closed, an extraordinary image appeared in my mind: my skeletal spine, rotating slowly on its axis like a gentle spiral. My focus traveled down each vertebra until it settled on my lumbosacral junction.

That’s when the tears came.

They leaked from my closed eyes uncontrollably, and I simply let them flow. I wasn’t sure why I was weeping, but every time I allowed that image of my spine to return, streams of salty liquid rolled down my cheeks. I felt them trace their path—over my ears, along my hairline to the nape of my neck, where they had already cooled before rolling away onto my yoga mat.

The image released something profound in me. Suddenly, everything connected: my mysterious back issues as a baby, the constant lumbar pain, the sciatica, the scoliosis, the compressed vertebrae. It had always been there—this pain I’d been carrying around belonged to that baby with the bad back. And it has never gone away no matter what I did. I always felt broken. Unfixable. Living an invisible life of pain from the moment I started walking. I let that pain control me and never believed I would be free of it.

I realized that what I felt was my inner child desperately seeking comfort. It was *her* pain. It was *her* frustration. It was *her* trauma that my body was storing. My body was remembering all of it and letting me see for the first time that I was not alone anymore.

In that moment of connection, my inner light showed me the way to forgiving my body and healing myself. No one had ever been that caring with my back before. This yoga teacher radiated genuine compassion—she truly saw me and wanted to help me heal, not because I was paying her or because it was her job, but because she genuinely wanted to.

And that made me want to heal too.
So I did.
And continue to do for myself and others.
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*Sometimes healing happens not through force or fixing, but through the simple act of being truly seen and held with compassion. Our bodies remember everything—the pain, yes, but also the moment when someone finally says, “I see you, and you deserve care.”