The Yoga Teacher Who Taught Me I Don’t Have to Earn My Life

A love letter to Kathryn Budig — and to the practice that gave me back my body, my breath, and eventually, my work.

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I’m five feet tall. I’m curvy. I’ve got a big butt and curly hair, and I grew up being told by doctors that my BMI was a problem. I grew up in South Florida in a Baptist household where the Divine was something to fear and where my body was something to constantly manage, fix, and earn back into acceptability.

And I had this really strong aversion — I’ve always had this really strong aversion — to being told what to do. With my body. With my faith. With myself.

These things felt sacred and intimate and personal, and I just didn’t understand why anyone else got to be the authority on them. The same way sex is personal. The same way grief is personal. These are things that change as you change, and I strongly felt that faith and the relationship to the Divine and the relationship to the body — external structures can’t control these. Structure can be a backdrop. Structure can be helpful. But it can’t be more important than the sacred itself. Than the actual relationship.

I didn’t have language for any of this when I was sixteen. I just knew I was carrying something heavy I hadn’t asked to carry. And I was looking, without knowing I was looking, for somewhere to put it down.

Two Moments at Sixteen

I moved from Florida to Northern Virginia for in-state college tuition. I lived in a one-bedroom apartment with my grandparents and my dad — three generations in one small space. It was a real sacrifice, physically, emotionally, and mentally. It was this renegotiation of what I was willing and able to do to get myself in a better place. And leaving Florida was a huge chapter closing because it forced me into a new environment where I was walking more, where my relationship to food changed, and where the types of people I was around changed. I started eating more vegetarian food. I started reading Eastern philosophy. Things were shifting in me, and I didn’t even fully know it yet.

I was still in this limbo with my body — am I healthy, am I not? After years of calorie counting and restriction and trying different things and doing all the things, and then getting to this place where I was just walking and eating less processed food and not really restricting anymore. Just walking from high school to the Metro to home and back. That was it.

And two big moments happened.

The first was walking from high school one day and passing a yoga studio. Just — passing it. And seeing people with their mats, different shapes and sizes, moving in this way that wasn’t boot camp, wasn’t the kind of fitness thing I associated with working out and burning and earning it. It seemed serene. It seemed harmonious. And something in me took note.

The second moment was at the library where I was working part-time as a book-shelver — putting books back in the health section, the mind-body section, the non-fiction section — and I came across this book. Women’s Health Big Book of Yoga by Kathryn Budig.

I didn’t know who she was. I didn’t know what yoga really was. I just felt something pull, and I took the book home, and I practiced in the corner of the room I shared with my grandma. Whatever space was available. No mat yet, just the book and the floor and the beginning of something.

I eventually saved up and bought a $20 yoga mat from Target, and I kept practicing on my own until I felt brave enough to go to that studio I had walked past. They told me the first class was free. I remember taking that class, and at the end the teacher opened this book called *Meditations from the Mat* and read a quote to us and then walked around the room and put some sort of essential oil on everyone’s heads as we lay in savasana, and it was — I mean it was mind-blowing. Heart-opening. Because I’d never experienced something like that.

Being an only child and having always had to contain myself and support others — I was a mediator for my parents who fought my whole life — so the idea of just lying down and receiving, of someone coming to care for you in that space, of being held — that was new. That was something I hadn’t known I needed.

Yoga cracked something open in me. And Kathryn Budig’s book was the first door.

Almost Twenty Years of Watching Someone Be Fully Themselves

I kept the book. I stayed with the practice. I kept following her — her website, her work, her journey in yoga. When she came out with DVDs, I bought them, and I’d follow those practices in my apartments when I couldn’t access a studio for financial or time reasons. There were stretches of years where those DVDs and the Women’s Health Big Book of Yoga were the main way I maintained the thread of the practice, and I’m so grateful they existed.

I remember when she did the nude yoga photographs — these beautiful images of her in yoga poses, and I just thought wow, she seems so comfortable in her body and in her craft and I really wish I had that. That courage. That comfort in my skin. It wasn’t something I had yet, but I could feel the direction. I could feel that I was moving toward something like that, even if I didn’t know how long it would take.

I got my Baptiste yoga teacher training in 2016 at a studio called Dancing Mind in Falls Church, Virginia. Hot vinyasa. I’d actually never taken a Baptiste class before — I just signed up because the finances worked and the timing worked, and I needed the grounding, I needed the community, I needed to take a break from trying to figure out what I was/needed/going to do with my “career” and direction in life. And it turned out to be ashtanga-esque, which felt right because as I learned and explored the different yoga styles, I had a sweet spot in my heart for Ashtanga (gotta love that structure).

I worked the front desk at the studio. I was a kindergarten teacher at the time, and I did the whole teacher training that summer, and it was just bliss. Being in that space. Being in that world. Every class was 90 minutes of heat, and this felt like I had peeled back another layer of myself. I got my Yin Yoga certification alongside it and learned about this Yin-Yang philosophy of the physical practice — the intensity and the healing, the doing and the receiving —, and that felt really true to me.

And through all of it, I kept following Kathryn.

I read her book *Aim True* when it came out and recognized something in it that I had been living without knowing what to call it. This idea that the aim is not perfection but presence. That you don’t have to be the best version of yourself to deserve the practice. That authenticity isn’t something you perform — it’s something you practice.

We were both women who divorced. And I remember reading something from an interview she had about that and just feeling less alone. Like, wow, she’s going through the same things. Not that our lives were parallel or identical, but there were these moments where I’d see her vulnerability and her transparency, and I’d think — she practices what she preaches. She lives it. That’s why I will always call her my yoga teacher even though I’ve never met her in person. Because a teacher teaches through how they live, and she has always done that.

And then she built Haus of Phoenix. 🐦‍🔥

Which is — I mean, the name alone. The myth of the phoenix. The sacred cycle of endings and new beginnings. A home for her community to breathe, move, read, eat, and learn together. Live and on-demand yoga, weekly meditations, moon rituals, mythology-themed movement classes, The Inky Phoenix book club that has its own publishing imprint championing underrepresented voices, and the Professor Phoenix series, where she brings in guest teachers whose work centers things like dismantling white supremacy, queer dharma, disability, environmental activism, and the healing of systems that keep people small.

This is not yoga as a wellness aesthetic. This is yoga as values work. This is somebody using her platform to say — the mat is not separate from the world the body lives in. That the practice of presence and the practice of justice are the same practice.

I have so much respect for that. I have so much love for that.

What Yoga Taught Me That Eventually Became My Work

Here is the thing that yoga taught me that took me a long time to fully understand, and I’m still understanding.

You don’t earn the right to exist in your body.

You don’t earn rest through productivity. You don’t earn stillness through effort. You don’t earn your worthiness through performance. The practice doesn’t ask you to be thin or flexible or advanced or impressive. It just asks you to show up, breathe, and pay attention to what’s actually here.

And this sounds simple, but it is not simple. It is the most countercultural thing I have ever been asked to do because I grew up in a world — and then entered a workforce — that was built entirely on the premise that you earn your place. You earn your right to take up space. You earn your rest. You earn your freedom. You earn your enoughness by producing enough, achieving enough, performing enough stability and value and competence that the system decides to keep you.

Yoga was the first place that told me — in the language of the body, which is the only language that really lands — that this is a lie.

That you don’t have to earn your breath. You don’t have to earn your heartbeat. You don’t have to earn the basic fact of your existence or your worth.

And that realization — felt first in a corner of a small apartment in Northern Virginia with a library book on the floor, deepened over almost twenty years of practice — became the philosophical foundation of everything I now do in my work.

I help people stop earning their lives and start living them.

I work with purpose-led professionals who are exhausted from performing their worth inside systems that extract more than they give. People who are spiritually aware enough to know that something is wrong but haven’t found the language or the pathway or the permission yet to build differently. And what I’ve found is that the thing holding most of them back is not a lack of skill or strategy. It’s this deeply internalized belief that they have to earn the right to want something different. That the desire for a different kind of life is indulgent or naive or not serious, unless it’s been suffered for enough.

Yoga dismantled that belief in me. Kathryn’s way of living, teaching, and building in public — with her full self, on her own terms, in community, rooted in something ancient and meaningful — showed me what it looks like on the other side of that dismantling.

So yeah. She’s my yoga teacher. She has been for almost twenty years.

The Manduka Mat

I still have my Manduka mat. I bought it in college, and I was so nervous about spending $100 on it; it has been with me for almost twenty years now.

Through every apartment and every city and every version of myself. Through the hot vinyasa years and the Yin years and the restorative years and the seasons where I couldn’t get to the mat at all. It has held me through all of it.

I think about that mat sometimes when I think about what it means to invest in something before you’re certain it will last. Before the practice has fully revealed itself to you. Before you know exactly who you’re becoming.

You buy the mat anyway. You roll it out in whatever space you have. You show up to what the body already knows.

That’s what Kathryn taught me. Not in one lesson, but in almost twenty years of watching someone live it.

Thank you, Kathryn. Genuinely. You’ve been my yoga teacher in every sense — not because you taught me how to hold a pose but because you showed me what it looks like to hold yourself. To build something that’s really yours. To be fully yourself in public, even when that’s uncomfortable. To keep going.

I’m grateful.

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P.S. — Kathryn Budig, if you’re reading this: I’ve been in your world since I was sixteen years old and a library bookshelver who didn’t know what she was reaching for when she pulled your book off the cart. I would be honored to have you on my podcast — The Clarity Shift — where I talk to people who are building different kinds of lives and the income sovereignty to sustain them. I think your community and mine have a lot to say to each other.

And if there’s ever a way to bring the work I do — helping people figure out whether their current path is worth the long doing — into the Haus of Phoenix as a Professor Phoenix session, I would show up for that with everything I have. Sending lots of love!

Miriam Raquel Sands | Work and Income Strategist. Former library bookshelver. Still practicing.

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If yoga philosophy resonates with you, I started my podcast exploring exactly this. The relationship between how we move, how we think, and how we work. You can explore those episodes here.

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