Personal Experience: I Came To Yoga for My Body And Stayed For My Mental Health

by Sana Bun

Personal Experience: I Came To Yoga for My Body And Stayed For My Mental Health

23 Nov 2025

A couple of years ago, I started slowly picking up yoga as a remedy I hoped would stop me from falling apart — physically, mostly — and at one point even wrote a column about how things were going. Long story short: as a thoroughly non-spiritual person, I treated it like a practical health investment, but somewhere along the way, something shifted. It stopped being about my back and started being about my mind.

It was a long process of trial and error, and I am convinced many things had to align for yoga to work its way into my life.

When I first began, I tried a bit of everything. Some teachers ran their classes like bootcamps, others floated around the room radiating so much enlightenment I felt like I had walked into a cosmic seminar by mistake. Once it even felt like I accidentally joined a low-budget cult meeting, while all I wanted was a healthy balance of mindfulness and physical load.

This experimental stage left me with a fair share of yoga stereotypes — and not all of them flattering. Yet despite all the internal eye-rolling, I kept looking and eventually found the place that actually made sense.

At that studio, teachers kept the philosophical focus, but made it very clear: no worshipping, no rituals, no religious obligations. They still call it a spiritual practice — just not in the way I had always assumed.

Photo: Ginny Rose Stewart

That is where everything started. My most dedicated period of practice happened when I wasn’t feeling great mentally. I felt lost and unsure of where my life was even going. But stepping onto the mat helped me disconnect from the noise and actually feel grounded.

Yoga unexpectedly became a kind of my comfort zone. I was genuinely astonished to discover that physical practice can make you look inwards and, in a way, make you want to be a better person. And the strangest part? No one tells you to do that. Yoga isn’t a lecture on how you should think or behave. The real work happens quietly and slowly, somewhere in the back of your mind, while you are busy trying not to fall out of a lunge.

The more I practised, the stronger I became — physically, yes, but mentally too. I was doing things I once thought were impossible, and it made me realise I am capable of far more than I give myself credit for. You shake, you wobble, you doubt, you fall... and then you try again. Your brain quickly starts applying the mindset you built in practice to everyday life, making you more resilient far beyond the yoga mat. In the end, your perception of vulnerability shifts too — you start seeing it as the beginning of strength, not the opposite of it.

Photo: THLT LCX

By adulthood, most of us have collected a decent number of disappointments — especially around trust. People you relied on let you down, you let others down, and eventually you start relying mostly on yourself, because it feels safer. Yoga, oddly enough, unravels that.

When you are learning to get into a headstand and two absolute strangers are holding your legs so you don’t collapse, you have no choice but to trust — slowly, reluctantly, but undeniably. And then comes the moment when you are the one supporting someone else. That is when it clicks: if I can rely on people I met five minutes ago (while actually managing to stand on my head) — and they can rely on me, even upside down — maybe I can figure out my life, too.

At the beginning of every class, my teacher says: “Think of someone near or dear to you — practice for someone who needs this more than you do.” The idea is simple: the world gets better only when your words, thoughts, and actions contribute to it. Hearing it over and over softens you. You start reflecting, empathising, forgiving more, judging less — both others and yourself. You begin questioning your own patterns: your attitude, your priorities, your obsession with individualism. You start looking inward while simultaneously thinking about others, paying attention to what you can give rather than what you can get.

Photo: THLT LCX

And while yoga is empowering, it is also humbling. One day you balance effortlessly, the next you collapse like a newborn deer because you are tired, ill, stressed, distracted — or simply human. And you learn to live with that. You learn to be gentler with yourself, and by extension, with others. You accept that strength isn’t linear and stability isn’t guaranteed — and that is strangely comforting. It makes you stop chasing impossible perfection and kindly reminds you that sometimes the strongest thing you can do is to let go and try again tomorrow.

by Sana Bun