A Grateful Life

What if protecting your energy didn't mean keeping the world out?

When I was training as a psychologist, I was taught to imagine a stop sign as people shared their stories with me. Later, in yoga circles, I was told to surround myself with white light.

Neither worked for me, and holding everything at bay took so much energy. What I've learned over the years is to let things in, to feel them, and then let them go.

So when Michelle Cassandra Johnson (she/her) described the practice of becoming a transparency, it made a whole lot of sense to me.

Michelle is an author, activist, spiritual teacher, racial equity educator and intuitive and shamanic healer, who has spent over 25 years working with communities and organisations. Her new book,You Are Protected, offers practical ways to tend to ourselves so we can keep showing up for others and for the world.

Michelle opens our conversation by casting a circle of protection, and from there we sit at her grandmother Dorothy's kitchen table, where black coffee and a daily devotional became Michelle's first lesson in ritual. We talk about what honeybees can teach us about rest, why the crone archetype knows exactly when to say no, and the many allies we can call on, from ancestors and animal energies to the elements that live within our own bodies.

When I first held this book in my hands, I wasn't sure how much of it would be relevant to me. Then I found it threaded with things already in my life: chanting, rest, the elements on my altar, the herbal teas I make, the candles I light. I just hadn't thought of them as protection before.

If you hold space for others, in a yoga class, a therapy room, your family or your community, I think you'll find something here to take with you.

In this episode, we explore:

• A circle of protection to open, guided by Michelle from the introduction of You Are Protected
• Michelle's grandmother Dorothy, and her daily ritual of remembering she was a divine being before going out into a world shaped by white supremacy
• The transparency practice: being fully present with someone's story while letting it pass through you, and why our nervous systems aren't designed to carry everything
• Rest as protection, and what honeybees teach us about contraction, longevity and sustaining our energy
• The protective allies in the book: archetypes, animal energies, saints and deities, energetic forms, the elements, ancestors and natural curios
• The crone archetype, discernment and the wisdom of saying no
• Simple ways to work with air, fire, water and earth for protection
• What Michelle is chanting right now, including her devotion to Durgā
• Remembering that we are worthy of protection and care
• How to use the book's invocations, or write your own
• Whether protection comes from within us, from beyond us, or both
• Why openings and closings matter, from washing her hands between clients to watching a comedy after deep spiritual work
• A closing practice to imprint your own protective circle

Connect with Michelle Johnson at https://www.michellecjohnson.com

Join the final hybrid Mental Health Aware Yoga training today at https://www.mentalhealthawareyoga.com/hybrid

Get my Spotify playlist for nervous system regulation at https://www.yogapsychologyinstitute.com/join/ 

This podcast is for general informational purposes only and is not a substitute for professional advice or training. Please consult a qualified healthcare professional for personalised guidance or come and join one of our programs at the Yoga Psychology Institute for professional training. While we are grateful for our guests and sponsors, any statements, claims or endorsements made are their own, and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of the Yoga Psychology Institute.

Before I spoke with Dr Kelly McGonigal (she/her) on the podcast, I spent a day reading her new book on joy.

That evening, when I walked into a yoga class and the teacher asked how I was, I heard myself say, ‘I am so good.’

It took me a moment to realise why.

Kelly is a psychologist, author and educator. All of her books are based on classes she has taught at Stanford University, including The Upside of Stress, The Joy of Movement and her latest, Joy Is a Risk Worth Taking.

In this conversation, Kelly defines joy as the human capacity to be uplifted by what makes life worth living. She believes we have this capacity for a reason. Being human is hard, and joy helps us keep going.

We talk about why joy can feel like such a risk. And why, for many of us, myself included, there can be so much guilt about expressing joy when there is so much suffering in the world.

Her response to that guilt gave me tingles down my spine, especially her story of two people in Ukraine who joined her online joy class and told her joy mattered more than ever.

Listen in as we explore lowering your threshold for joy, what pain and joy have in common in the brain, and why joy, more than any other emotion, wants to be let out.

In this episode, we explore:

• Sharing joy as a first practice, and why ‘positive empathy’ connects us as much as compassion for each other's pain
• Letting someone help you as an underappreciated act of joy
• How conversations about joy brought Kelly closer to her father during his final illness
• Kelly's definition of joy and its functions: a signal of what makes life worth living, a signal to others that they matter, and an energy that moves us toward connection
• Joy as small and fleeting rather than peak happiness
• Lowering your detection threshold for joy, and tracking one micro uplift a day
• The barriers that make joy feel risky, including fear of loss and guilt amid suffering
• Joy as part of our moral responsibility, and why calling joy a privilege is dehumanising
• How depression can make joy harder to access, and why every practice in the book was tested with people who were struggling
• How pain and joy both work through the brain's meaning system
• The ‘champagne bottle’ of joy: why joy has more ways of being expressed than any other emotion, and how shared joy builds trust and closeness
• Kelly's hope that her book helps people feel better about humanity

Connect with Kelly McGonigal at https://www.kellymcgonigal.com/

Join the hybrid Mental Health Aware Yoga training today at https://www.mentalhealthawareyoga.com/hybrid 

Download the free Patanjali’s Eight Limbs and Mental Health Aware Yoga ebook at https://www.mentalhealthawareyoga.com/8limbs

This podcast is for general informational purposes only and is not a substitute for professional advice or training. Please consult a qualified healthcare professional for personalised guidance or come and join one of our programs at the Yoga Psychology Institute for professional training. While we are grateful for our guests and sponsors, any statements, claims or endorsements made are their own, and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of the Yoga Psychology Institute.

Think of the last time you were so absorbed in something that the world fell away. A good book. Hands in the garden. Watching the ocean. For a little while there was no to-do list, no worry, no self-judgement. Just the moment itself. 

These ordinary moments are doorways into the final four limbs of yoga, where we head inward.

This is the last episode in our five part series on Patanjali's eight limbs.

Now that we’ve moved through the yamas, the niyamas, asana and pranayama, we now turn fully inward, through pratyahara and on to dharana, dhyana and samadhi.

These aren't limbs that we can force or achieve. They're what unfold on their own when the conditions are right.

In this episode, we explore:

• Pratyahara, the turning inward, and why it can't be forced any more than sleep can
• ‘Throwing the mind a bone’, and why a busy mind settles when we give it something simple to rest on
• What a Byron Bay heavy metal band next door taught me about pratyahara
• Why we never instruct our students to close their eyes, and how to offer the choice safely
• Dharana, dhyana and samadhi as the fruits of practice, rather than practices in themselves
• Why ‘I'm meditating’ really means ‘I'm creating the conditions in which meditation might arise’
• Why these deep inward states can be destabilising for some
• How all eight limbs, in the end, point us home to ourselves and our own inner wisdom

Download the accompanying Patanjali’s Eight Limbs and Mental Health Aware Yoga ebook at https://www.mentalhealthawareyoga.com/8limbs

Join the online Mental Health Aware Yoga training in September at https://www.mentalhealthawareyoga.com/online 

Join the hybrid Mental Health Aware Yoga training today at https://www.mentalhealthawareyoga.com/hybrid

This podcast is for general informational purposes only and is not a substitute for professional advice or training. Please consult a qualified healthcare professional for personalised guidance or come and join one of our programs at the Yoga Psychology Institute for professional training. While we are grateful for our guests and sponsors, any statements, claims or endorsements made are their own, and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of the Yoga Psychology Institute.

Ask most people what yoga is, and they'll picture the postures. Maybe the breathing. And fair enough, it's what we mostly teach, and what most people think we're doing. 

But in Patanjali's Yoga Sutras, asana barely gets a mention. So what are the postures and the breath actually for?

In this five part series on Patanjali's eight limbs, we've finally reached the two limbs most people think of as yoga - the postures and the breath. But in Mental Health Aware Yoga, these were never about achieving the perfect posture. They're tools for regulating the nervous system, and for coming to know ourselves from the inside.

In this episode, we explore:

• Why asana barely gets a mention in Patanjali's Yoga Sutras
• Sthira sukham asanam, steady and comfortable, and why this is quietly radical in a culture that prizes the hardest version of every practice
• Why how we invite our students to practise matters more than what we teach
• The gunas as a practical map for reading the energy in the room
• How the Window of Tolerance and ancient yogic maps line up beautifully
• A more useful question than "what's wrong with this person," and how it changes the way we teach
• The breath and the mind as a two-way street, and how we can breathe our way toward calm
• Why we invite students to slow the exhale rather than force it, and what to do when the breath feels unsafe
• A simple breath-led movement practice you can take into your very next class

Download the accompanying Patanjali’s Eight Limbs and Mental Health Aware Yoga ebook at https://www.mentalhealthawareyoga.com/8limbs  

Join the online Mental Health Aware Yoga training in September at https://www.mentalhealthawareyoga.com/online 

Join the hybrid Mental Health Aware Yoga training today at https://www.mentalhealthawareyoga.com/hybrid 

This podcast is for general informational purposes only and is not a substitute for professional advice or training. Please consult a qualified healthcare professional for personalised guidance or come and join one of our programs at the Yoga Psychology Institute for professional training. While we are grateful for our guests and sponsors, any statements, claims or endorsements made are their own, and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of the Yoga Psychology Institute.

In this third episode on Patanjali's eight limbs of yoga, we’re exploring the niyamas and how they can support mental health in our yoga teaching.

While the last two episodes were on the yamas, on how we engage with the world, in this one, we turn inward to the niyamas, on how we relate to ourselves.

We look at the five niyamas not as a self-improvement checklist or an impossible ideal to measure ourselves against, but as practical ways of tending our inner world with awareness, clarity and care.

In this episode, we explore:

• Sauca as clarity rather than purity and how it shapes the spaces we teach in and the way we tend to our own inner world
• Why cleanliness and purity can quietly tip over into shame, and the importance of ahimsa 
• Santosha, contentment, and why choosing it is a quietly radical act
• The science of gratitude, and how it can help to down-regulate the nervous system
• Tapas, the inner fire, and why it is never about self-punishment
• Svadhyaya, self-study, and the discernment that only you can make about when to push and when to rest
• Isvarapranidhana, surrender, and making this niyama accessible for those for whom the language of God feels difficult
• How the niyamas keep our practice and our teaching resourcing rather than depleting

Download the accompanying Patanjali’s Eight Limbs and Mental Health Aware Yoga ebook at https://www.mentalhealthawareyoga.com/8limbs  

Join the online Mental Health Aware Yoga training in September at https://www.mentalhealthawareyoga.com/online 

Join the hybrid Mental Health Aware Yoga training today at https://www.mentalhealthawareyoga.com/hybrid 

This podcast is for general informational purposes only and is not a substitute for professional advice or training. Please consult a qualified healthcare professional for personalised guidance or come and join one of our programs at the Yoga Psychology Institute for professional training. While we are grateful for our guests and sponsors, any statements, claims or endorsements made are their own, and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of the Yoga Psychology Institute.

Welcome to the second episode in a special five-part pop-up series on Patanjali's eight limbs of yoga, exploring what each limb means for us as yoga teachers supporting our students' mental health.

In the last episode, we explored ahimsa. In this one, we dive into the other four yamas - satya, asteya, brahmacarya and aparigraha.

We look at how these four yamas can guide our yoga teaching, from finding our own yes and our own no, to letting go of the endless comparison that leaves so many of us feeling we're not enough.

In this episode, we explore:

• Satya, truthfulness and why honesty is always held alongside kindness
• Being truthful with ourselves, and the quiet cost of saying yes when we mean no
• Why you don't have to have all the answers to be a good teacher
• Asteya, non-stealing, and moving from comparison and envy toward appreciation
• Cultural appropriation, and the questions asteya invites us to sit with as yoga teachers
• Brahmacarya as energy management, and being mindful of sexual energy and the power imbalance in the teaching relationship
• Aparigraha, non-grasping, and letting go of how we think our classes, our students and ourselves should be
• How every one of the yamas points us back toward our own inner compass

Download the accompanying Patanjali’s Eight Limbs and Mental Health Aware Yoga ebook at https://www.mentalhealthawareyoga.com/8limbs

Join the online Mental Health Aware Yoga training in September at https://www.mentalhealthawareyoga.com/online 

Join the hybrid Mental Health Aware Yoga training today at https://www.mentalhealthawareyoga.com/hybrid 

This podcast is for general informational purposes only and is not a substitute for professional advice or training. Please consult a qualified healthcare professional for personalised guidance or come and join one of our programs at the Yoga Psychology Institute for professional training. While we are grateful for our guests and sponsors, any statements, claims or endorsements made are their own, and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of the Yoga Psychology Institute.

Welcome to the first episode in a special five part pop-up series on Patanjali's eight limbs of yoga, exploring what each limb means for us as yoga teachers supporting our students' mental health.

We're beginning where Patanjali begins, with ahimsa.

Ahimsa is the ground everything else is built on, so it felt only right to start here.

In this episode we look at what ahimsa asks of us as teachers, what real students told me helped their mental health in class and what harmed it, and how we can create a safe container for the people who walk through our doors.

Everyone is welcome to listen to this episode, but for this special series I'm speaking directly to yoga teachers.

In this episode, we explore:

• How Patanjali's Yoga Sutras still speak to our very modern mental health challenges
• Why almost 80% of yoga students come to yoga for mental health reasons, and what that means for us as teachers
• The yamas as conditions for safety and non-harming, rather than moral rules to live up to
• Ahimsa, non-harming, and why it might be the most important consideration when supporting our students' mental health
• What real students said helped their mental health in class, and what harmed it, in their own words
• Practical ways to create a safe container, including invitational language, predictability, consent, boundaries and scope of practice
• Ahimsa toward ourselves, and why the way we treat ourselves is part of what we teach

Download the accompanying Patanjali’s Eight Limbs and Mental Health Aware Yoga ebook at https://www.mentalhealthawareyoga.com/8limbs

Join the online Mental Health Aware Yoga training in September at https://www.mentalhealthawareyoga.com/online 

Join the hybrid Mental Health Aware Yoga training today at https://www.mentalhealthawareyoga.com/hybrid 


This podcast is for general informational purposes only and is not a substitute for professional advice or training. Please consult a qualified healthcare professional for personalised guidance or come and join one of our programs at the Yoga Psychology Institute for professional training. While we are grateful for our guests and sponsors, any statements, claims or endorsements made are their own, and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of the Yoga Psychology Institute.

Your throat tightens in a conversation, a few seconds before you've worked out why.

You feel a flutter of anxiety in your belly before your mind catches on to what’s happening.

Your body is always talking to you, sending signals from the inside, all day long.

That inward-facing sense has a name, interoception, and in this solo episode of A Grateful Life, I'm stepping out from behind the interview chair to explore it.

Instead of introducing you to one of my guests, I'm sharing something we've been exploring inside the programs at the Yoga Psychology Institute recently. What interoception actually is, why so many of us have turned its volume right down, and how we can gently turn it back up.

Whether you teach, practise, or are simply curious about the meeting place of yoga and psychology, consider this an invitation to listen inward, and to trust what you find there.

In this episode, we explore:

• The continuum of embodiment
• The spectrum of interoception
• Why inner signals get muted, and why that disconnection is so often protective
• The link between interoception and emotional literacy
• Learning to listen to the whispers of the body, rather than waiting until they're screaming
• Simple, practical ways to strengthen interoception in everyday life
• Why yoga is such a powerful vehicle for exploring our internal world
• How teachers can gently support interoception in a class, always with safety and choice first
• A small interoceptive practice to take away

Join the hybrid Mental Health Aware Yoga training today at https://www.mentalhealthawareyoga.com/hybrid 

Join the online Mental Health Aware Yoga training in September at https://www.mentalhealthawareyoga.com/online 

Listen to the music for nervous system regulation playlist at https://www.yogapsychologyinstitute.com/join/

This podcast is for general informational purposes only and is not a substitute for professional advice or training. Please consult a qualified healthcare professional for personalised guidance or come and join one of our programs at the Yoga Psychology Institute for professional training. While we are grateful for our guests and sponsors, any statements, claims or endorsements made are their own, and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of the Yoga Psychology Institute.

Some things are simple by nature and we tend to complicate them.

Others are complex by nature and we dilute them.

Indu Arora (she/her) is a Yoga and Āyurveda teacher, mentor and author who has been sharing yoga philosophy, yoga therapy and Āyurveda for over two decades, taught in the traditional guru-śiṣya paramparā of the Himalayan, Kashmir Śaivism, Kriyā and Sivananda lineages. I had the joy of studying Yoga Nidrā with her in Melbourne recently, and this conversation is what happened when we sat down together afterwards.

Indu teaches that yoga is a work-in, not a work-out, and we spent time unpacking what that really means. Not the shape our body makes, but the journey inward, towards the breath, the mind, the internal organs, the deeper layers of who we are. She spoke about her mission to not complicate that which is simple by nature, and to not dilute that which is complex, and how so much of modern yoga has glamorised the physical while rushing past the philosophy that needs time to unfold.

We went deep into Yoga Nidrā, and the way Indu shares it is quite different from how many of us have come to understand it. It is not a technique for better sleep, she says, it is not really about nidrā at all. It is about yoga. She draws on the many texts and traditions that describe it in their own distinct ways, and the invitation to let it be as spacious and layered as it truly is.

We also talked about how to choose a teacher wisely, the red flags worth noticing, and the difference between what someone says and who they have actually are.

Indu was also generous enough to share a practice with us at the end, so consider yourself warned. There's homework.

In this episode, we explore:

• Gratitude as a daily practice, and how contemplating death can deepen our capacity to live
• Indu's journey into yoga from age 16, and the rare opportunity to live and study with her teacher
• What it's like to learn yoga with no syllabus, where the focus is on ethics and morals rather than technique
• Why ‘getting out of your own way’ is the real, ongoing work of a teacher
• The pressure many practitioners feel to ‘know it all’ before they begin, and why comparison keeps us stuck
• Not complicating that which is simple by nature, and not diluting that which is complex
• Why Indu describes yoga as a work-in, not a work-out, drawing on both the Yoga Sūtras and Āyurveda
• What Yoga Nidrā actually is, and the many texts and traditions that describe it very differently
• How to choose a teacher wisely, the red flags to notice, and the difference between what someone says and who they have become
• A closing practice, Ātma Tattva Avalokanam, offered as an invitation for daily practice

Connect with Indu Arora at https://yogsadhna.com/

Join the Australian 2026 hybrid Mental Health Aware Yoga training at https://www.mentalhealthawareyoga.com/hybrid 

Join the online Mental Health Aware Yoga training in September at https://www.mentalhealthawareyoga.com/online

Listen to the music for nervous system regulation playlist at https://www.yogapsychologyinstitute.com/join/


This podcast is for general informational purposes only and is not a substitute for professional advice or training. Please consult a qualified healthcare professional for personalised guidance or come and join one of our programs at the Yoga Psychology Institute for professional training. While we are grateful for our guests and sponsors, any statements, claims or endorsements made are their own, and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of the Yoga Psychology Institute.

It starts small. A teacher who tells you rather than asks you. A little too much praise when you fall in line, a little too much silence when you don't. 

Most of us have felt it and shrugged it off. Uma Dinsmore-Tuli has spent years mapping exactly where those small moments can lead, and what to do before they get there.

Uma (she/her) is one of the world's leading voices on cyclical wisdom, yoga nidrā and the rematriation of feminine power, and the author of six books including, Yoni Shakti: A Woman's Guide to Power and Freedom through Yoga and Tantra. 

In this episode, we unpack thirteen warning signs of abuse in yoga communities. Things like disrespect for other approaches, contingent flattery, secret teachings and the spiritual bypassing of sexual harm.

Uma is clear that these aren't only present in the most extreme cases. The same small seeds show up in ordinary classes and trainings too.

We also explore Uma’s nine calls to action, practical, doable things any of us can do when we notice harm. I was surprised to hear from Uma that I was the first person to ask her to speak about these nine calls to action. To me, these are so important. 

This is a difficult listen in places. It's also an important one.

In this episode, we explore:

• Why Uma added a new preface to the second edition of Yoni Shakti, and what it cost her
• The thirteen warning signs of abuse in yoga spaces, including disrespect for other approaches, contingent flattery, secret teachings, isolation of dissidents, inner circles, discipline and punishment, unsustainable imbalances, ridicule and silencing, boundary and consent violations, prejudice and hypocrisy, claims of omniscience, abdication of personal responsibility, and spiritual bypassing of sexual harm
• Why the need to belong can make people vulnerable to coercive communities
• The link between institutional abuse patterns and colonisation, hierarchy, and control
• Why testimony is evidence, and what it means to believe survivors
• Uma's nine calls to action, including withdrawing financial support, asking questions, listening to survivors, refusing to keep secrets, naming names, and working to decolonise yoga
• How to hold heart open, eyes open, even in spiritual and community spaces

Connect with Dr Uma Dinsmore-Tuli at https://umadinsmoretuli.com

Join the Australian 2026 hybrid Mental Health Aware Yoga training at https://www.mentalhealthawareyoga.com/hybrid

Join the online Mental Health Aware Yoga training in September at https://www.mentalhealthawareyoga.com/online 

Listen to the music for nervous system regulation playlist at https://www.yogapsychologyinstitute.com/join/ 

This podcast is for general informational purposes only and is not a substitute for professional advice or training. Please consult a qualified healthcare professional for personalised guidance or come and join one of our programs at the Yoga Psychology Institute for professional training. While we are grateful for our guests and sponsors, any statements, claims or endorsements made are their own, and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of the Yoga Psychology Institute.