Practicing for 40 days
I did something I honestly wasn't sure I'd finish.
Forty days ago I committed to a daily yoga nidra sadhana. No skipped days. Not while traveling, not on vacation, not on the nights I didn't get to it until 8pm and had to lie down half-asleep already. I sat with myself — or laid down with myself — every single day for forty days.
I didn't miss one.
I want to tell you what that practice actually did, because it wasn't what I expected. I thought I was signing up for better sleep and a little more stillness. What I got was a quiet, steady dismantling of a lot of habits I didn't even know were habits — and a much clearer picture of who I am when I stop performing "productive."
The practice itself
Yoga nidra, like most of the practices I'm drawn to right now, isn't really about the physical body. It's about the subtle body — the koshas, the vayus, the layers underneath the layers. It's slow. It's often uncomfortable in its slowness. And forty straight days of it means you can't hide from yourself anymore. There's nowhere to perform to. It's just you, the floor, and whatever is actually there.
This particular sadhana was part of my five-month yoga nidra teacher training under Tracee Stanley and Dr. Chanti — forty days was the final piece of that training, the part where you stop studying the practice and just live inside it. (Link to their program if you want to go deeper.)
That's the container this all happened inside of.
I stopped needing to escape
This is the one that surprised me most. My favorite trail — the one I've loved for years, the one that's always been my outlet — isn't functioning as my outlet anymore. Not because I don't love it. I do. But I noticed I don't need to disappear into six or eight hours of nature to feel okay. I can find nature right where I'm standing. A few minutes. My own yard. A walk with my brother at 8pm on my parents' farm, the two of us pointing at plants and identifying them for an hour, completely unplanned — that was enough. More than enough.
I can sit and watch clouds go by with zero urge to be productive about it. I didn't used to be able to do that. I'd have called it wasting time. Now I just call it Tuesday.
Better boundaries, better regulation
I'm more selective about who I let teach me right now — whose voice I let in, whose content I consume. I noticed this most clearly with Indu's Ayurveda program for yoga teachers. I watched how subtly she taught before I ever signed up — I was reading her practice before I was reading her curriculum. That's new for me. I used to say yes faster.
I stopped social media for the summer. I'm more mindful of what I watch on TV. I'm reading a lot more. And somewhere in there I started going to bed at 9pm even when it's still light outside, which twenty-something-me would have found almost offensive.
None of that is about restriction. It's regulation. I can feel the difference now between the two.
The subtle body showed up in my teaching too
I'm jamming on vayus and koshas in my offerings right now — not as concepts to teach around but as things I'm actually living inside of. I'm loving somatic yin yoga in a way I haven't loved a practice in a while. And somewhere in these forty days, I got to a point where I can lead a yoga nidra without a script. I just know where to go now. That's not a small thing. That took years of practice to arrive at, and this sadhana is where it clicked.
I'm finishing my flower essence practitioner training too — more on that soon — but it's part of the same thread. Subtle. Underneath. The stuff that doesn't show up on a surface-level read of a person, but changes everything about how they move through a day.
What's actually changing in the background
Some of this is almost funny in how mundane it is. My coffee pot broke, so I switched to pour-over. Small thing. But it's the kind of small thing that happens when you're paying attention to process instead of rushing to the result — which is, not coincidentally, exactly what a forty-day sadhana teaches you.
I went back to strength training — two upper body, two lower body sessions a week — but I shortened them for summer instead of trying to force the same intensity I'd expect from myself in another season. That's a boundary too. Just a quieter one.
And I'm updating my passport. Not because anything urgent is happening, but because I know I want to go on the international retreats I've been circling for next year. That's the sadhana talking too — not urgency, just clarity about what I actually want.
The real work
Underneath all of it, the biggest shift is this: I'm noticing the real work I want to do in my business. Not the work I think I should be doing, not the work that looks good, not the work that keeps me busy. The actual work.
I crave more quiet. Solo parenting makes that hard to come by right now, and I'm not going to pretend that tension isn't real. But even inside that tension, I'm calmer than I was forty days ago. Steadier. Less reactive. More myself.
I didn't think forty days of lying on a floor with my eyes closed would do all that. But that's the thing about the subtle body — you don't see the change happening. You just notice, one day, that you're different.
This is exactly the kind of shift I built Nourished & Rooted for.
Not the forty-day intensive version — most people aren't going to lie on the floor every day for six weeks. But the same underlying work: getting quiet enough, consistently enough, to hear what's actually true for you. To notice your own subtle body instead of just managing your surface-level to-do list. That's what sixteen weeks of Nourished & Rooted is designed to give you — the vayus, the chakras, the flower essences, the yoga nidra, all of it in service of the same thing this sadhana gave me. Clarity that doesn't come from thinking harder. It comes from getting still enough to notice what's already there.
If any of this is resonating, that's your invitation. (Link to Nourished & Rooted.)
Want Support Getting Started?
If you've been feeling the heat — in your body, your schedule, your nervous system — and you're not quite sure where to begin, I made something for you.
My free 3-Day Pitta Cool-Down Challenge walks you through three gentle, doable days of Pitta-pacifying practices: morning, midday, and evening. It's designed for real life — not a retreat, not a complete overhaul. Just a few days of intentional cooling that you can carry with you into the rest of the season.
👉 Join the free 3-Day Pitta Cool-Down Challenge here
I'd love to see you in there.
Nourished & Rooted
I have opened up spots in my 1:1, 16-week Yoga and Ayurveda program. We can meet in-person or virtual. I crafted this for those "it depends" questions — so you can have those answers for yourself. Learning Ayurveda can be like learning a new language and seeing the world through a different lens. If you want to go deeper with your yoga or Ayurveda framework, you can read more about this new program above.
