There are many moments in life when we feel powerless—swept along by circumstances beyond our control. In our early years, our experience is shaped almost entirely by others: our parents, siblings, teachers. The food we eat, the places we go, the people we meet—all curated, often unconsciously, to provide what’s considered a “safe” upbringing. These curated experiences become the stories we carry today. And in most cases, those who curated our world were themselves shaped by a similar process. It’s a reactive chain—passed down, generation after generation—until we begin to grasp at our own power. At first tentative, then expansive, this reclaiming allows us to interrupt the cycle and reshape the narrative we’ve inherited.
But breaking the narrative doesn’t mean simply replacing the old with something new. It’s a subtler, deeper process of unlearning—and staying in that open, unbound space. Every child that enters the world is vulnerable to conditioning, unless those around her are free of their own. If we are unbound, we can offer children not a new story to adopt, but the tools to recognise their own unbound nature. Yet this freedom is often met with fear. We’ve all seen someone cast aside—branded eccentric, unstable, or simply “too different.” The primal, unrealised mind operates from this binary of us versus them, and so conformity becomes a strategy for safety. Anything outside the accepted script is seen as a threat. The greatest threat to a conditioned society is an individual who awakens to their inner power—the power to transform themselves from within and, in doing so, influence the world around them.
The embodied action of yoga isn’t externally driven. It’s not about performance or achievement. It is the natural consequence of internal transformation. External actions are many: the gesture of a hand during conversation, a fleeting expression of anger, the movement of legs toward desire or away from fear, the constant play of sensory appreciation and aversion, the spiraling of thoughts. These are but echoes of something deeper.
The clue to internal action lies in the dream state—when a freer self processes waking thoughts and emotions, weaving them into the symbolic narratives that offer insight and direction. In deep sleep, even this narrative dissolves, and what remains is the clear, vast nature of mind—unbound by identity.
In meditative states, we witness this process in reverse. From the still, expansive ground of the mind, an abstraction begins to form—a thought, a sensation, a thread from the dream web. Meaning arises. Conscious thought takes shape. In meditation, we learn to see this unfolding clearly. And with steady practice, we begin to carry that clarity into our daily lives—into the simplest actions: eating, bathing, walking.
This attentiveness—this return to the root of action—is the embodied action of yoga. It is mindfulness grounded in origin. It is a shift from reactivity to responsiveness, from inherited patterns to present-moment choice. It is the presence of the yogin that allows this inner turning, this subtle reclamation of power. No longer is the child’s world unconsciously curated. Instead, each moment is met fresh, unfiltered by the lenses of those who came before us.
Amman Advaita 
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