On practice, accountability, and choosing love when it isn’t easy.
Every year, I choose an intention… Not quite a resolution. Not a goal to accomplish or something I expect to master by December. More like a lens through which I want to practice for a while. I carry it onto my mat. Into my teaching. Into my relationships. Into the uncomfortable places where what I believe and how I actually live have an opportunity to meet.
Years ago, the practice was standing in my own power—with integrity… This year, it has been softness… And somewhere in between, at the beginning of 2024, it was:
Lead with love.
What I’ve learned is that these practices rarely belong only to the year I assign them. They linger…They layer themselves into one another. Sometimes I don’t fully understand what they’ve taught me until years later and then suddenly, I have this lightbulb moment of “oh…that’s the thing you’ve been working toward. Something I practiced deliberately eventually becomes a rhythm. A home base. A place I know how to return to, and I think maybe that’s what practice is supposed to do.
Yoga gives us frameworks for this—the eight limbs, the Yama and Niyama, teachings written thousands of years before any of us arrived here. But knowing the philosophy and living it are very different things.
I can teach these practices…Living them is another story.
And Lead With Love has asked more of me than I expected. Because love is easy to romanticize. It sounds beautiful printed on a shirt or written across a studio wall.
Lead with love——Sunshine. Butterflies. Kindness. Compassion.
But that isn’t really the practice…The practice is leading with love when you’re angry. When someone has hurt you. When you’re disappointed. When you’re exhausted and overwhelmed and absolutely certain that the other person is wrong. When every part of you would rather react than pause long enough to ask:
What would love actually require of me here?
Sometimes the answer is compassion. Sometimes it’s forgiveness. Sometimes it’s an apology. Sometimes it’s accountability. And sometimes the most loving thing you can possibly do is say no.
That part has taken me longer to understand… I spent a lot of my life believing love meant giving more. Carrying more. Forgiving more. Making room. Sacrificing. Trying harder.
There can certainly be love in those things. But love without boundaries can become abandonment of ourselves. And learning to lead with love has meant learning that I belong inside the circle of my own compassion, too. Sometimes leading with love means tending to myself so that what I offer everyone else isn’t coming from an empty place. Sometimes it means honoring a boundary even when someone else doesn’t like it. Sometimes it means accepting the very real consequences of my own choices. Sometimes it means looking honestly at the ways I haven’t shown up well, without turning that recognition into another reason to punish myself— I gotta admit, I’m still learning this one in very real ways… it’s an ongoing battle to honor my imperfect humanity, to forgive myself when I make a mistake, to move forward in love when I’m ashamed of my actions, to recognize and balance my ego and my Self.
That might be one of the hardest balances I’ve practiced:
Accountability without shame. Grace without avoidance. Strength without hardness. Softness without abandoning myself.
This year has given me plenty of opportunities to practice all of it. I haven’t always done it gracefully. There have been moments when I’ve been reactive. Moments when fear, exhaustion, grief or frustration spoke before love did. I’ve hurt people I love. I’ve gotten things wrong. I’ve looked at the person I want to be and the way I actually behaved and felt the uncomfortable distance between them. And sometimes, particularly because I spend so much of my life wearing the labels of teacher and leader, that distance can invite another voice in:
Who are you to teach any of this when you still struggle to live it yourself?
But perhaps being a teacher was never supposed to mean being finished… I am still a student… Again and again and again.
My practice doesn’t exist because I’ve mastered these things. My practice exists because I haven’t. Yoga gives me somewhere to return when I forget. Lead with love gives me somewhere to return when I forget. And returning matters.
A poem I have loved for years by Hannah Napier Rosenberg begins with the idea of no longer separating good days from bad once she began thinking of herself as the ocean. She describes the sea as both “wild and soft”—capable of containing seemingly opposing truths at once.
That image has stayed with me. Because I think we are like that…Strong and soft…Grateful and grieving…Certain and questioning…Healing and hurting…Teacher and student.
We can love someone deeply and still need a boundary. We can regret something we’ve done without deciding that one moment defines who we are. We can be swimming through grief and still encounter joy. We can be doing the best we know how to do and still learn how to do better.
None of those truths have to cancel the others. Maybe love is spacious enough to hold all of it.
Over the years, Lead With Love has traveled farther than I expected it to.
I’ve watched students carry it into their own lives. Friends have repeated it back to me when I needed it. People I love have talked about putting the words permanently on their bodies…And every time someone tells me that the phrase means something to them, I’m reminded that it doesn’t belong only to me anymore… Maybe it never did.
Because this isn’t something I invented. It’s simply a way of remembering. A small interruption in the spiral…A question we can return to:
What would it look like to lead with love here?
Not the easiest thing. Not the nicest thing. Not the thing that keeps everyone happy…The loving thing—Toward the person in front of me—Toward the world around me—And toward myself.
I don’t think we’re meant to perfect this. I think we’re meant to practice it. And when we forget—and we will—we begin again.
Lead with love.
Take care,
Cashel
