The Day She Stopped Forcing Her Body: What I Learned From Teaching Yoga

Sarah tore her hamstring trying to prove she was flexible enough…

I watched it happen during our morning yoga class at Ubuntu Bali. One moment she was moving into Hanumanasana—the full split—and the next, she crumpled. The sound she made wasn't a gasp. It was the exhale of someone whose body had finally said "enough."

The Performance Trap

Sarah had been coming to classes for two weeks. Always in the front row. Always pushing harder than everyone else. I'd noticed the way she'd glance at her phone propped against her water bottle—checking her form, maybe recording for Instagram. I kindly asked her to put her phone away as we encourage presence and inner focus in the yoga class rather than distraction from the outer world.

"I just need to get this pose," she told me once. "Everyone back home does it. It can't be that hard."

I recognized that determination. That belief that yoga is about achievement, about checking poses off a list, about proving something to someone—maybe the world, maybe themselves.

What Her Body Taught Both of Us

Sarah couldn't demonstrate any poses for two months. She came to class anyway—sitting on her mat, just breathing, watching. At first, she seemed frustrated. But slowly, something shifted.

"I'm noticing things I never noticed before," she told me during week three. "Like how everyone breathes differently. I was always too busy trying to keep up to actually see any of it."

She started asking different questions. Not "when can I do the split again?" but "why does my left hip feel tighter than my right?" Not "am I doing this correctly?" but "what is my body trying to tell me?"

She discovered something profound: yoga isn't about the pose. It's about the breath between movements. The microsecond you choose to ease off instead of push through. The radical act of saying "this is enough for today" and meaning it. This is where true rejuvenation lives—not in perfection, but in honest presence.

Listening to What's Already There

Now when I teach our yoga classes, I watch for that look Sarah used to have: the gritted teeth, the held breath, the determination to force something that isn't ready. And I gently remind students what she taught me—that the deepest practice isn't pushing past your limits. It's respecting them.

The body is astonishingly wise. It knows when it needs rest. It knows when it's ready to expand. Our only job is to listen.

Sarah still comes to our morning sessions. Some days her practice is twenty sun salutations. Some days it's five minutes of seated meditation. Some days she just walks barefoot through Ubuntu's gardens after class, understanding that renewal doesn't always look like movement.

Her hamstring healed, eventually. But more importantly, her relationship with her body transformed. She stopped treating it like a project to complete and started treating it like a conversation partner.

Before she left Ubuntu after six weeks, she told me: "I came here to master yoga. Instead, I learned to stop mastering and start listening."

That's the real practice.

Ubuntu Bali's eco-retreat  is designed for this kind of gentle transformation. Our wood cottage  accommodations sit nestled in nature, built with sustainable materials that breathe with the bamboo jungle around us. Wake to bird songs, practice yoga surrounded by pandan fields, and let the natural rhythm of this place remind you what it feels like to just... be.