Your Practice Begins At The End

You don't start when the teacher says “begin.”
You start when your story breaks.

The Performance Phase

The first 15 minutes of practice are a show.
You perform your strength.
You present your control.
You try to remember your alignment, your playlist, your face.

The ego is loud in the beginning.
It wants to be seen.
It wants to prove that you’re still capable, that you haven’t lost it, that your edges are clean and your presence is centered.

But that’s not your practice.
That’s your costume.

And like any good costume, it starts to fall apart
once the sweat rises, once the heat kicks in, once you start to lose track of what you came to prove.

The story cracks first.
The breath stays.

The Unraveling

At some point, your exhale gets shorter.
Your grip slips.
Your transitions lose their sharpness.
The part of you that came to perform starts to back away,
and what’s left is not polished, not filtered, not curated.
What’s left is you.

The part that’s not trying.
The part that’s just breathing.
The part that doesn’t care how it looks anymore, only that it’s still there.

This is your entry point.
This is your first death.
The end of the image.
The beginning of the work.

The Drop

Maybe it happens in Warrior II.
Maybe in your third round of Inferno Pilates.
Maybe in Savasana, when everything you’ve been holding drops into the mat.

There’s no formula for arrival,
but when you feel it, you know.

The tension unhooks.
The noise softens.
And your breath becomes an anchor, not a weapon.

You’re no longer practicing shapes.
You’re practicing presence.

The Happy Death Moment

You didn’t come here to perform.
You came here to remember.

But first, something false had to die.
An identity. A story. A layer of defense.

Happy Death is not about the dramatic breakdown.
It’s the quiet shift.
The second you stop trying to control the pose, and start listening to what’s under it.
The second you stop pretending to lead the practice, and start letting it lead you.

That’s when your practice begins.

It begins at the end,
when all the noise has melted
and all that’s left is breath.