Yoga is Nervous System Medicine

People used to ask me why a doctor would become a yoga teacher.

These days they ask me why I continue to teach.

As a society, we normalize stress, depletion, and over-responsibility. We normalize it in parents, in physicians, and especially in mothers. We don’t even question it.

We assume this is just what life looks like when you care deeply and carry a lot.

I dove back into yoga at a very low point in my life. At that point I had been practicing pediatrics for years in a traditional system while also serving as a physician leader and physician wellness advocate. I loved my patients. I believed deeply in medicine.

And my life was not working.

I had three teenagers, multiple leadership roles, and my husband was struggling with his mental health.

I was doing what many high-achieving, capable women do.

I was trying to fix it, manage it, control it, and make sure everything turned out okay.

I was carrying far more than was mine to carry.

My approach was trying harder.

Yoga did not solve my problems.

But it offered me something I desperately needed and could not seem to find anywhere else:

space and clarity.

Not space as an abstract idea. Real space.

Space in my chest.
Space in my breath.
Space in my mind.

Space to feel what I was feeling without immediately trying to make it go away.

Space to notice that I was not actually helping by gripping tighter.

Space to choose a different way of being.

Yoga helped me remember something I was not taught in medical training:

Healing is not only something we deliver to patients.

If we want to stay whole enough to keep showing up, we need to care for ourselves too.

Yoga is preventive medicine—for patients and physicians

Yoga is movement, stretching, strengthening, and mobility.

It is also nervous system training.

Yoga teaches you how to notice what is happening in your body—and how to shift your state with more skill and less force.

The most portable yoga tool is breath.

Once you understand the power of your breath, you can bring it anywhere. Except in the most dire medical situations, your breath is available.

And when your breath changes, your physiology changes.

Your reactivity changes.

Your capacity changes.

And clarity emerges.

This is not a small thing.

Ahimsa: do no harm includes you

One of the core principles taught in yoga is ahimsa—do no harm.

In medicine, we are trained to apply that principle to patients.

Yoga makes something else clear: ahimsa applies to all beings, including you.

It applies to how you speak to yourself, how hard you push, what you expect your body and mind to tolerate, and how much depletion you call normal.

That perspective can be surprisingly uncomfortable for high-achieving, self-critical people.

Many physicians are excellent at caring for others and much less practiced at extending that same care inward. We are often taught—directly or indirectly—that self-compassion is optional.

It is not.

Yoga is not about judgment.

Yoga practices acceptance and allowing.

Pause and presence.

Self-compassion.

For physicians and mothers, this is revolutionary.

Community is medicine

Yoga also builds community. Community itself is medicine.

We know connection supports health, happiness, and longevity.

Isolation is not benign.

Connection interrupts the stress cycle in ways we often underestimate.

When people practice yoga together, something softens.

They stop performing for a moment and remember they are human.

They leave feeling better—not because everything in their lives has changed, but because something in them has shifted.

Why I keep teaching yoga

As a physician wellness advocate, I spent years trying to support physicians in a system that often asked for more than was sustainable.

Yoga became one of the most direct ways I know to help heal the healers.

When we nourish ourselves, we show up differently.

Yoga changes patient care.

It changes parenting.

It changes leadership and relationships.

Over time, it changes culture.

Somewhere along the way, I also became a YouTube yoga teacher. Not an influencer. Just a physician teaching yoga for women physicians and other caregivers who want a grounded, practical way to care for their bodies, calm their nervous systems, and come back to themselves.

I did not become a yoga teacher to leave medicine.

I became a yoga teacher to expand how I help.

To create space.

To teach nervous system steadiness.

To bring ahimsa into the lives of people who care for others all day long.

To help healers come back to themselves.

In my experience, the only thing with a similarly powerful impact is coaching. Coaching is mindfulness in a more directed form.

Together, yoga, mindfulness, and coaching create sustainable change because they do not just inspire you for a day.

They change how you live.

Where have you been treating depletion and stress as normal and expected?

What would it look like to practice “do no harm” with yourself today?

If you are craving a little more space in your own life, why not join me for yoga—on Zoom or in person at a retreat? It’s one of the simplest, most powerful ways to begin.

Nothing shared in this blog is medical advice.