Backseat Driver

The other day I ended up riding in the back seat of my own car, something I guess I hadn't done before.  I noticed things I’d somehow missed all this time; cup holders, an armrest, a whole little setup I didn’t even know existed. My older brother laughed and said, “It’s kind of fun to ride in your own back seat every once in a while.”

When you’re always the one driving, your view is limited. You’re focused on the road, on where you are headed, on keeping everything moving. But when you let someone else drive, you get to actually see. The world opens in small, surprising ways.

That’s what coming to a yoga class can feel like. Sure, you could practice on your own. You know the shapes, the sequences, how to breath. But something different happens when you let yourself be guided. You don’t have to plan or control or decide what’s next. You get to experience the practice instead of managing it. In that space of following, you notice things you’ve been too busy to see: the texture of your breath, the way a pose feels from the inside, the moments of stillness that arrive when you stop trying to get somewhere.

Śraddhā is a kind of luminous trust — not blind belief, but an inner confidence that arises from experience. It’s what allows us to be led by something deeper than intellect, intuition, truth, or the wisdom of the heart. Being led in this sense means trusting the path even when the destination is unclear. 

Sometimes it’s only when we move to the back seat that we realize how much we’ve been missing.

XO

JK