My heart is breaking over Gaza.

I see the devastation, the families torn apart, the children’s faces — and the grief is unbearable. The violence is not mine, and yet in some deep way it is.

As a woman with Native American blood, the stories of settlers and stolen land awaken something ancient in me. My ancestral memory stirs. It knows displacement. It knows erasure. It knows the weight of survival in a world built on someone else’s taking.

And there’s a truth that sits heavy in my chest.
Every time I show up for work and earn my living, I know a portion of that income will be taken in taxes — and those taxes are helping to fund bombs that take lives. This reality is woven so deeply into the fabric of our systems that it feels impossible to separate from it, impossible to untangle myself from the harm.

It’s a heavy knowing to carry, to realize that even in the safety of my own home, even in the joy of sharing a meal, I am still inextricably connected to the machinery of harm. I feel the guilt when I walk through a grocery store, when I laugh with friends over dinner, when I hold my loved ones close.

Yoga teaches me to regulate my nervous system, to ground, to breathe, to be present. And yet the undercurrent of grief remains. It hums beneath every inhale. It curls itself around the edges of my joy.

Each day I sit with it. I pray with it.
I chant Lokah Samastah Sukhino Bhavantu again and again, not because I believe it will stop the bombs, but because I believe intention has weight. That sending love into the collective field matters. That small ripples can one day turn the tide.

This is the struggle — to keep my heart open when it would be easier to close. To let my yoga not just be about flexibility or calm, but about holding space for the unbearable. About remembering that we are all connected, that no suffering is separate from my own.

I don’t have answers. 
Only my practice.

My desire to resist.

Only this vow: to keep showing up for the world, one breath, one chant, one offering at a time.

Lokah Samastah Sukhino Bhavantu.
May all beings be happy and free.
And may my thoughts, words, and actions in some way contribute to that freedom for all.

Om Shanti Shanti Shanti

... and free Palestine