Published November 15, 2026 09:15AM
“You’ll need surgery,” my doctor said. “After that, no yoga.”
Moments before, she had informed me that I had endometrial cancer, and it felt as if an anvil had landed on my chest. My mind flooded with questions I couldn’t yet articulate. Somewhere in that static, I tried to recall exactly what she said about the diagnosis. And wait, no yoga?
Yoga was the practice I turned to whenever life got big. And this was huge. As my doctor explained the “good news” was that we caught the cancer early, and if all went well I wouldn’t need chemo, I tried to focus. She said I’d likely need a full hysterectomy, followed by months of recovery with limited movement. My heart sunk. How was I supposed to navigate cancer without the thing that always helped me navigate all the other things?
Practicing Yoga Every Chance While I Could
I immediately stepped into a new rhythm, my calendar filling with appointments for testing, bloodwork, and specialists. I wrote down hospital addresses and watched as needle after needle entered my veins. I freaked out as bills racked up and I had to repeatedly check in with my insurance company because things were insanely complicated. I tried to let go of control where I could and take charge where I needed. It was exhausting.
At each appointment, I had to tell the cancer story all over again. As I traveled around New York City, I secretly hoped I’d find someone who would tell me this was all a mistake. It felt like my body had betrayed me or that I was suddenly in skin that wasn’t my own.
Most of the time I left a doctor’s office and went straight to a yoga class. I needed to feel my feet underneath me, to soothe my mind and heart with deep breaths. I told myself I was going to practice yoga as much as I could in the months leading up to surgery, almost as if I could stockpile it in my bones. It was often the only time I felt at home in my body.
Yoga provided a hum of consistency. There, on the mat, I felt that familiar alchemy of turning my anxieties over to the practice. I breathed. I moved. During these months of consultations and biopsies and test results, yoga was the only time I felt okay, sometimes even good, in my body.
Yet sometimes in Down Dog, it felt like my entire heart turned into a teardrop, heavy with emotion. I cried in Child’s Pose, processing the layers of emotions associated not just with the cancer but the fact that I’d be losing a part of my body.
Other times, I was hit with denial, fear, and shock. How had this happened? I was only in my 40s, and the most common age range for endometrial cancer was the 60s. Sometimes, lying in Corpse Pose, I’d let myself think about the truth underlying cancer, feeling my mortality. I was staring impermanence in the face.
Yoga was a place to feel all the things. Yet more often than not, I ended practice feeling awash with a rare calm I no longer took for granted. I wished I could escape into the post-yoga glow forever. I was clinging! Still, I wished there was a way.
Life and Yoga Post-Surgery
The day of my surgery finally came, and it was time to say goodbye to my cancer, my uterus, and, at least for a while, yoga.
That morning, sitting in my hospital gown on a gurney waiting to enter the OR, I tried to stay centered, but my body took over. I broke out in a cold sweat. Nausea rolled through me and my breath caught in my chest. The room swirled.
“You’re having a panic attack,” my doctor said, placing her hand on my back. I inhaled and exhaled for a count of five, over and over, instinctively practicing box breathing while trying not to jostle the many tubes hooked to me. My body knew this language. It eventually began to calm down.
In the days after surgery, my pelvis blared with pain. I couldn’t even sit up on my own in bed without wanting to pass out. Lying motionless and still feeling discomfort, I began to understand what the doctor had meant by taking a break from the poses. I couldn’t just unroll my mat and fall into Child’s Pose.
But I was starting to sense the ways yoga was still with me, even approaching me in this moment of pain and need.
While stuck in bed, I thought of the yoga teaching of purusha and prakriti. Purusha is the witness self, the spirit, the part of us that watches our experiences. Prakriti is the material world, including the body. As I cared for myself, taking my medications on a complicated rotation and hobbling around throughout the day to avoid blood clots, I realized I could watch my body yet also dwell in a different part of myself. I felt a small space between my body self and my witness self, and this space felt like a lifesaver.
Propped up by pillows, I listened to a recording of a yoga nidra guided meditation. The voice brought my awareness to various parts of my body that I hadn’t contemplated in months. One of my teachers, Dharma Mittra, had described yoga nidra as closing the open tabs on your computer, or your thoughts, while keeping the computer, or your consciousness, on.
Now I closed down one thing at a time, mentally minimizing the cancer, the pain, even the act of healing, and felt into the parts of me beyond that. I breathed and observed.
I felt inside me a quiet resilience I’d spent years getting to know and grow on the mat. I was in a forced state of slowing down, and here I saw a glimmer of an unprecedented intimacy with my life that no Netflix binge would blot out.
As I began to move through healing, I realized even pursuing treatment had been ahimsa, or non-violence practice, toward myself. I began to understand that my body hadn’t betrayed me. It was still my friend, just someone going through something, and my practice had been to try to be kind to it, advocate on my own behalf.
Coming to terms with cancer and the impermanence of my body had been a kind of satya, or honesty, practice. Walking the healing path and heading into surgery had been a sort of act of surrender, ishvara pranidana. Somewhere along the way I’d released into a kind of trust and faith that I would be carried by a higher power.
I realized there was so much of the yoga practice already deeply within me beyond the poses. It was a relief: yoga wasn’t going anywhere. Neither was I. The practice’s philosophy and lessons were an invisible scaffolding supporting all aspects of my life. I even felt a sense of joy remembering I was more than my body.
Yoga was strengthening me just when I most needed it. It was teaching me about myself, a kind of svadhyaya, or self-study.
Yoga didn’t “save” me. It didn’t distract me from the realities of my situation. What it did was provide me with tools and a framework for navigating those realities and remaining acutely present with myself throughout the better part of a year. I had built these tools over decades of practice, and they were indeed inside me, deeper than I even knew.
I’d given myself to yoga years earlier. Now, it was giving back to me.
Exhaling Cancer
A few months after my surgery, I went to yet another post-op appointment. I was tired of being poked and prodded, but as my doctor checked my stitches, I stepped into the role of witness again, more consciously this time.
I took a breath.
“You’re cancer-free!” she said, reviewing the final pathology report. “You’re now a cancer survivor. You can go back to yoga now.”
I didn’t tell her, but I’d been practicing all along.
