Ashtanga Yoga Hua Hin
11/2025, Mysore
What Ashtanga taught me about fear
The best lessons were never about hard postures — they were about meeting fear, and learning to carry on with it sitting beside you.
What Ashtanga Taught Me About Fear
I have been writing about this since last season when I was in Mysore, never quite ready to post it. It feels like the right time now to share how I have learned to meet the fear inside me.
For me, the best lessons from Ashtanga were never about hard postures. They were about meeting fear.
I still remember the fear before my first drop back. The years of working towards Kapotasana, wondering if my body would ever trust itself enough to go there.
I felt that same thing in very different places. I felt it on my first freediving course, going down under the surface. I felt it at the top of a backcountry line, wondering if I would set off an avalanche or fall from the cliff. I felt it again when I packed my life into a suitcase and moved to another country, not knowing if I would make it, or if I had chosen right.
They were all asking me the same question.
Could I stay present, even when I was afraid?
Over time, I stopped thinking that courage meant having no fear. Courage, I began to see, is carrying on even when fear is sitting beside me. It does not leave the room. I just learn to practice with it there. When life got uncertain, I found myself answering it the same way I had learned on the mat.
What interests me most is not whether Ashtanga can reduce anxiety by a certain percentage, but how a long-term practice changes the way people relate to life.
Research by Dr. Daniela Ramirez-Duran and her colleagues explored the experiences of regular Ashtanga Yoga practitioners. Rather than measuring flexibility or physical fitness, they asked practitioners what the practice meant to them. One of the strongest themes was that Ashtanga becomes more than exercise. It becomes a daily ritual that gradually shapes the way people respond to challenges, uncertainty, and everyday life.
Reading that research touched something in me. It did not prove my experience, but it gave words to something I had already recognised. The lessons I learned on the mat never stayed on the mat. Over time they quietly became the way I met fear, and change.
References
Ramirez-Duran, D., Kern, M. L., & Stokes, H. (2022). More than a feeling: Perceptions of wellbeing in regular Ashtanga Yoga practitioners. International Journal of Wellbeing, 12(2), 88–113.
Ramirez-Duran, D., Stokes, H., & Kern, M. L. (2022). Going within, between and beyond: An exploration of regular Ashtanga Yoga practitioners' conceptualizations of five dimensions of wellbeing. Frontiers in Psychology, 13, 1018620.
Ramirez-Duran, D., Stokes, H., & Kern, M. L. (2025). From practice to lifestyle: Conceptualizations of yoga in regular Ashtanga yoga practitioners using reflexive thematic analysis. Frontiers in Psychology, 16, 1582275.
