Beyond Yoga
Letting go of a cherished practice and embracing change.
What’s In This Post:
The Story
My yoga practice as it moved from fringe subculture to the mainstream.
How injury and chronic pain forced me to shift radically and look beyond yoga.
A revelatory exposé on the yoga community's dark side, which confirmed a larger systemic problem.
The Breakthrough
What happens when you practice in a ‘false body’—the one you fantasize about—versus the body you actually have.
The search for solutions to chronic pain for my clients and myself led to letting go of harmful practices.
The Outcome
The Birth of Espira Moves: a therapeutic mobility practice that replaces yoga’s aspirational postures with fluid progressions that transform pain naturally.
From Fringe To Mainstream
I’ve always moved.
As a child, physical coordination and agility came very easily to me - so when I discovered yoga in the late 1980s, it felt like a very natural embrace.
In those early days, yoga in Toronto was pure subculture: studio classes were scarce and people generally regarded it as weird and unconventional.
I learned from a combination of books and classes, complementing my explorations with freestyle dance at home. Yoga, breathwork and meditation became a thread that wove quietly and centrally through my life.
For decades, my practice was an unbroken chain. It was simply what I did, and it was my place of peace.
As the years progressed, yoga shifted from fringe to mainstream. I began teaching studio classes but maintained a certain purity around my own personal practice - keeping things on my own terms, doing yoga largely in solitude at home.
But in the spring of 2010, my relationship with yoga changed forever.
Listening To My Body
Inspired by my recent trip to India, I signed up to study Ayurvedic medicine with Matthew Remski, a trailblazing teacher and thinker in the yoga world. One day after class, fate intervened in the form of a construction-site accident. A misstep left me with a very serious knee injury.
Being my first real injury, I had no clue how to navigate the aftermath and the result was I never properly recovered. I suffered through debilitating cycles of inflammation that became chronic - spanning months into years. Still, I kept teaching yoga and kept my own practice steady, until the pain forced me to change.
After two years of grappling with this injury, I knew I had to make a radical shift.
I committed to working with a personal trainer and started strength training on a regular basis to support my knee. I devoured information on functional anatomy, so that I could finally understand why the pain wasn’t going away.
During this process, I realized something fundamental:
I had to stop striving for external shapes and start listening to my body.
I began radically changing the way I practiced yoga. I learned to say no to postures that were not anatomically sound - like hinging at the hip.
Instead of forcing my body into yoga’s extreme angles and static shapes, I experimented with more fluid, circular movements that progressively unwound my tension and expanded my range of motion in an unforced way.
What Are We Actually Doing In Asana?
In the midst of this prolonged recovery, Matthew Remski launched a Toronto-based project called, WAWADIA: What Are We Actually Doing In Asana?.
It was a community gathering and exposé of the darker side of yoga. In a series of group meetings with dozens of Toronto area teachers, I heard confessions and revelations that exploded my naive perception of the yoga world. A surprising number of teachers admitted to injuring themselves - sometimes seriously - in the pursuit of asana.
Often, they kept quiet and continued pushing themselves and their students past healthy limits. My knee injury and its impact on my yoga practice was not at all exceptional; it appeared to be part of a much larger endemic.
This dual confrontation—my body’s vulnerability and the hidden shadows of the yoga community—completely changed how I related to yoga.
The False Body
In one of his journals, Remski warns us about the dangers that can ensue when we allow the mind to force the body.
He discusses how people get hurt because they are practicing in a ‘false body’ - the body they fantasize about, instead of the body they actually have. He asks a very valid question:
“What happens to the tissues when the mind presses them into the performance of a fictional suppleness and strength? Can the fantasized body push the real body, the inner body, too far, too fast?”
The WAWADIA revelations served as an awakening for me. I am deeply grateful for the experience, as disturbing as it was, because it made room for a more authentic version of myself to emerge.
I stopped the relentless pursuit of yogic perfection and focused on listening to my body. I explored new shapes and progressions that felt natural, intuitive and healthy. I let go of the fantasy version of my body and embraced my true inner form.
Letting Go of Harmful Practices
My goal here is not to dissuade anyone from pursuing yoga. The practice of yoga is foundational to my life and offers many health and wellbeing benefits. I haven’t abandoned it, I have adapted it. After decades of repeating the same movements over and over, my body had had enough.
I admitted to myself that the Sun Salutation sequence was slowly destroying my body. Endless repetitions of hip hinging was disengaging my glutes and exacerbating tension in my hip flexors.
Making these changes finally led to the end of my chronic knee pain. Today, yoga is still a cherished part of my life but one that I approach with a combination of humility, skepticism, and gratitude.
My journey beyond yoga is not about leaving something behind, but instead integrating its lessons into a more honest version of me. This personal evolution led me to create Espira Moves.
Serving My Community
Born out of my need to recover from injury and heal my chronic pain, Espira Moves reflects my evolution away from idealism into embodiment. Similar to yoga, Espira is a mobility practice that enhances flexibility, engages the core, and reminds us to stay present. What makes Espira Moves different is that it is:
Anatomically functional.
Therapeutically focused.
Structurally safe.
It is more accessible for people with pain, injury, and low flexibility.
I needed to achieve these four goals through my movement practice in order to better serve my clients.
For over two decades, I have been running a private massage therapy practice, dedicating more than 40,000 hours to helping people with all kinds of stress, tension, and pain. After my knee injury I transitioned away from offering studio classes to one-on-one sessions with my clients who were navigating chronic pain.
I needed to target specific muscles and fascial lines that were directly involved in chronic neck, shoulder, and lower back pain - the top 3 problem areas my clients were struggling with. I have spent my entire working life hunting for methods to transform pain naturally - for myself and the people I work on with on a daily basis.
The Birth of Espira Moves
The Espira method allows for imperfections and limitations. There are no idealized shapes to aspire to. It is a fluid progression through a safely expanding range of motion that puts the health of the joints, spine and fascial network into focus.
My movement practice evolved slowly and organically over many years, until one day I realized it was actually a ‘thing’. I gave it a name and began sharing it exclusively within my network. The response has been deeply encouraging and has motivated me to offer online classes, which I am preparing to launch in 2026.
If you are still reading this post and are resonating with it’s message, then I invite you to join the conversation and get on the list for my upcoming offerings. I also encourage you to message me directly and share your own experience with yoga or chronic pain, and tell me what you need out of a therapeutic movement practice.
Espira Moves is in continuous evolution and your voice matters!
