Dr. Jacqueline
Yun.

Story

The secret no client knows.

I don't actually like to exercise. Never have.

I came to yoga the way many people do — through pain. I'd spent years bent over textbooks, then over CAD software, then over the keyboard of an engineering PhD. My back was a mess. My shoulders had migrated upward toward my ears. I was twenty-eight and felt fifty.

So I tried yoga. And what I noticed wasn't the spiritual part, or the flexibility, or the calm — that came later. What I noticed was that my engineering brain understood it.

Every pose was a question of load paths. Every breath, a question of pressure systems. Every adjustment, a question of leverage. The thing I'd been studying in mechanical engineering — how forces move through structures — was happening inside my own body, every minute of every day, with or without my consent.

From that point on, the practice changed for me. And later, when I started teaching, it changed for my clients. We stopped doing yoga at the body. We started doing yoga with the body.