Hi everyone, happy New Year. I hope you have the most wonderful year ahead and that you feel well,

loved and joyful and that your year is filled with things that make your heart and spirit feel full.

I want to start the year with something that's very close to my heart. And if you've been a long-time

podcast listener, you would have heard me share

this story before. I'm going to share it again for all the new listeners who are now part of the

let's talk yoga community. My mother passed away a little over five years ago and she passed

due to a lung disease and without going into too many details,

it was essentially a type of disease that slowly and painfully hardened her lungs to a point

where she could no longer breathe and eventually ended up passing away. It took years of slow

degeneration and during those many years she also had multiple cancer

diagnosis and chemotherapy. In fact, sped up the lung deterioration and it was a very challenging

phase to say the least. But in all her hardship, she would ask me questions about praniyama

and she would try to practice.

Her lung disease had given her insane amounts of cough, persistent cough, for years on end,

which sometimes on rough days she couldn't even speak because her cough was that bad.

But she would try in her good days and even her good days were hard, she would try to

work on her breath and she was such an optimist. But eventually at the age of 61, her lungs

gave up and her organs gave up and she passed. So for the longest time, I felt very guilty about breathing deeply, especially

because it's something I tell people to do all the time, to take a deep breath. And I felt such a

deep sense of guilt just saying that. Because every time I said that, I had memories of her

struggling to breathe. Imagine your

entire day for years on end is just spent in trying to take a breath. Nothing else. You can do

...