25 Years After 9/11: A Yoga Reflection on Oneness and Love
This morning, I taught my regular Friday yoga class.
I knew that today—the twenty-fifth anniversary of September 11—needed to be acknowledged. I wanted to create space for remembrance without entering politics or prescribing how anyone should feel.
I did not anticipate just how potent, powerful, and cathartic the practice would become.
Nearly every person in the room had tears or a mist in their eyes at some point. Many of us more than once. More than an hour after class ended, I was still breathing through the emotional waves.
Something was close to the surface, and together, we created a safe enough space to let it move.
The experience felt too powerful to remain within the walls of that room. It wanted to be shared. This yoga reflection on 9/11 is my way of carrying what moved through eleven of us into the larger community—a community of people who are also feeling, healing, raising consciousness, and choosing what we will write next.
A Yoga Reflection on 9/11, Twenty-Five Years Later
At the beginning of class, we took time to honor and reflect upon September 11, 2001.
That day changed our country.
Whatever our individual experiences may have been, there was a palpable shift. Something changed in the way we understood safety, one another, and the world beyond our own lives.
Twenty-five years later, we can still feel the effects of that turning point.
I invited everyone to notice the impact it had on their own lives.
What do you remember?
What changed within you?
What fear, grief, anger, confusion, or tenderness entered your experience?
What might still be living in your body twenty-five years later?
We honored the people we know whose lives were forever changed. We also opened our hearts to the people we will never know—the families who lost loved ones, the first responders and survivors, and the countless people throughout the world whose lives were altered by everything that followed.
Suffering does not stop at the boundaries we create. It moves through families, communities, generations, and nations.
So does love.
The Oneness Within the Breath
From that reflection, we moved into the breath.
I invited everyone to feel the inhale and the exhale as two distinct experiences.
The inhale rises and expands.
The exhale descends and releases.
We could call them opposites. And yet, without one, the other cannot exist. Together, they create one continuous breath.
The inhale does not have to try to become the exhale for unity to exist. Each retains its own direction, purpose, and expression, yet both belong to one whole.
This is oneness.
Oneness does not mean sameness.
It does not ask us to ignore or erase the differences between us. We may carry different identities. We may be male, female, both, or neither. We may have different skin colors, cultures, religions, beliefs, histories, and ways of understanding the sacred.
These distinctions are real. They matter. And they are still not the whole truth of who we are.
Beneath every label is a human being who needs breath, belonging, dignity, safety, love, and freedom.
Like the inhale and the exhale, we can be distinctly ourselves and still belong to one living whole.
A Prayer for All Beings
From the breath, we moved into mantra:
Lokah Samastah Sukhino Bhavantu.
May all beings everywhere be happy and free.
May all beings know that they are valued.
May all beings know that they are worthy.
May all beings know that they are loved.
And may our thoughts, words, and actions contribute to the happiness and freedom of all.
At the end of the mantra, I began to sing:
I see love everywhere.All is love.
And then we sang it together:
We see love everywhere.All is love.
(Listen to my version of Lokha inside SOULutions App or on your favorite streaming platform.)
This does not mean everything happening in our world is loving. Clearly, it is not.
It means we are choosing to look for the deeper thread of love that remains available beneath the fear, suffering, and division. We are choosing to become part of its expression.
There is so much separation in our world. We are continually shown reasons to fear, distrust, label, and distance ourselves from one another. Not everyone can see our oneness yet.
But we can.
Learning to Listen to Love
From there, we moved into the physical practice.
The movement was easy and nourishing. We honored the darkness of the new moon and allowed ourselves to create space within our bodies. Instead of striving toward a pose or forcing ourselves into a particular shape, we practiced listening.
What is love asking of me right now?
And how does that answer reveal itself through my body?
Perhaps love asks me to soften.
Perhaps it asks me to become stronger.
Perhaps it asks me to stay, rest, breathe, reach, release, or choose a different way.
Love is not always asking us to do what is easiest. Sometimes love asks us to remain present with discomfort. Sometimes it asks us to honor a boundary, speak a truth, or stop participating in a pattern that keeps us small.
The body often recognizes this before the mind can explain it.
Our task is to become quiet enough to listen.
Releasing the Stories
And because sacred work does not always have to be solemn, the practice also gave us some much-needed levity.
A song playing during the flow offered a reminder to release the old stories we keep rehearsing—because, as the lyric so perfectly put it, “I release and let go of my story. No one’s even reading it anyway.”
I pointed it out, and the room softened.
Of course the flow becomes easier and more nourishing when we stop working so hard to follow an outdated script.
How much energy do we spend maintaining identities, expectations, beliefs, and ways of being simply because that is who we have always believed ourselves to be?
We rehearse stories about what we must carry, how we must behave, who we are allowed to become, which side we belong on, and who other people are. Eventually, those stories can begin to feel like absolute truth.
They separate us not only from one another, but from our own essential nature.
The invitation is not to deny our histories. It is to stop allowing them to dictate every breath that comes next.
When we loosen our attachment to who we think we have to be, something more spacious becomes available. Beneath the labels, roles, and stories is Sat Chit Ananda—the truth of your existence is bliss.
Not bliss as constant happiness or an escape from suffering, but the deeper wholeness that remains present beneath everything we experience.
Sometimes we touch it through tears.
Sometimes through the breath.
And sometimes through a fantastic song that makes the whole room laugh.
Turning the World Upside Down
Near the end of the movement practice, most of the class chose to explore an inversion.
For a few moments, we literally turned our world upside down.
There is something powerful about choosing to change our orientation. When the familiar view is no longer serving us, we can shift our relationship to it. We can look again. We can allow a fresh perspective to reveal what our habitual way of seeing has concealed.
Perhaps this is part of what our world is asking from us now.
Can we look beyond the labels?
Can we question the stories that keep us divided?
Can we see another human being without immediately reducing them to a category?
Can we remember that a different perspective does not have to threaten our own?
Changing our view does not mean abandoning discernment. It allows us to see more clearly.
Held by the Divine Mother
Then we entered Savasana.
As my students rested, I began chanting the Lalita Devi mantra, as I often do. But today, its many expressions of the Divine Mother moved through me differently.
I cried my way through the verses.
First, we honored the creative power we all possess, Parashakti—the sacred capacity to create lives we can truly inhabit, flourish within, and open our hearts to.
Then we remembered that everything is changing, Maha Maye. Nothing in this human experience is permanent.
Because life is always moving, we are not imprisoned by who we have been. We are capable of flowing, growing, and choosing again.
We called upon Kali to help us confront the energies that limit us and keep us separate.
We called upon Durga for the courage to move beyond those limitations and become our fullest selves.
We called to the Cosmic Mother Earth, Bhuvaneshvari, asking her to help heal this planet and all who live upon her.
Finally, we spoke to the eternal bliss that pervades everything (tvam ananda - I am bliss) the oneness beneath all appearances.
This does not mean everything looks or feels blissful. It means something deeper is always holding us, even when life is painful. Something is asking us to dig beneath the surface, see a larger story, take things less personally, and trust that there is a way through.
Through it all, I felt such deep gratitude for the Divine Mother who supports me—and for the community I lead, belong to, and can feel extending far beyond the people I personally know.
Listen to my version of Lalita Devi inside SOULutions App or find it on your favorite music streaming platform
Safe Enough to Let the Tears Flow
As we came out of Savasana, we paused to honor ourselves.
Then, as we rose back to sitting, we shared a loving gaze of gratitude with the people around us.
We saw one another. We honored the presence, courage, and humanity within each person in the room.
Together, we chanted:
Om Shanti, Shanti, Shanti.
Three times.
Most of us cried our way through it.
There was no need to hide the tears or pull ourselves together. We were safe enough to let them flow. Safe enough to feel peace moving through us—not as an absence of grief, but as a presence large enough to hold it.
When the final sound faded, no one rushed to leave.
We stayed.
We hugged one another.
We felt each other’s presence.
We loved and honored one another.
We walked out of that room a little closer than when we entered it.
There were ten students in class. Eleven people with me.
Eleven people breathing, moving, grieving, remembering, laughing, and choosing love together.
And I know we were not alone.
A New Chapter Will Be Written
This twenty-fifth anniversary arrived alongside a new moon, and it feels like the beginning of a new chapter.
That chapter will not write itself.
Or, more precisely, perhaps it will write itself if we do nothing. Old fears, inherited divisions, and familiar patterns are always willing to keep telling the story for us.
But there is a larger community of people raising consciousness through empowered empathy, meaningful connection, and the courage to let love lead.
We may never know all their names. We may never practice beside them, hear their stories, or witness the quiet choices they make every day.
But I can feel them.
They are the ones choosing courage over fear.
Connection over division.
Curiosity over judgment.
Truth without dehumanization.
Love without self-abandonment.
I am deeply grateful for every single one of us.
We will be the ones who write something new.
We will be the ones who create the change we want to see in this world.
Love Is the SOULution
Radha teaches us the way of empowered empathy.
She reminds us that love is not weak, sentimental, passive, or naïve. Love is a conscious and liberating force.
Empowered empathy allows us to remain open without losing ourselves. It helps us witness pain with compassion while staying rooted in truth. It asks us to recognize our shared humanity without abandoning our wisdom, boundaries, or responsibility to act.
Oneness is not spiritual bypassing.
Love is not silence.
Compassion is not compliance.
We can tell the truth without dehumanizing another person.
We can stand against injustice without allowing hatred to reproduce itself within our own hearts.
We can love fully and remain sovereign within ourselves.
This is how love becomes a real presence in our lives.
Loving ourselves enough to return when we lose our connection.
Loving others through our differences.
Loving the world enough to refuse numbness.
Loving humanity enough to believe we can create something better.
Not naïve love.
Not love without boundaries.
Not love that excuses cruelty, violence, or injustice.
Fully conscious love.
Fully liberated love.
Empowered love.
Love that can hold grief and still choose life. Love that can see division and continue reaching toward connection. Love that remembers we belong to one another, even when we have forgotten.
I am profoundly grateful that helping people feel, see beyond the mirage of separation, and let love become a guiding presence is part of how my dharma lives through me on this planet.
Because their inner work matters.
My inner work matters.
Your inner work matters.
Every time one of us heals, softens, awakens, or chooses love without abandoning truth, that choice reaches beyond the boundaries of one life.
One person becomes eleven.
Eleven become thousands.
And together, we begin to write a different story.
Love is the SOULution.
Let love lead.
Live This Love in Community If this reflection is stirring something within you, I invite you into Shakti Rising Circle—an ongoing women’s community where we practice bringing sacred wisdom into the relationships, choices, and realities of our everyday lives. Guided this month by Radha, we are exploring empowered empathy, meaningful connection, and how to let love lead without leaving ourselves behind.
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