Two Years of Sadhana: Lessons From 731 Days of Daily Yoga Practice

Two years.

731 days of showing up for my sadhana.

And after all of it, I have come to one very profound realization:

I still know absolutely nothing. 😂

Maybe that is the wisdom.

When I began this sadhana two years ago, I wasn't new to yoga or spiritual practice. I had already been practicing and teaching various styles of yoga for well over a decade. Yoga had carried me through countless versions of myself, seasons of my life, trainings, teachings, transformations, endings, and beginnings.

But sadhana asked something different of me.

Sadhana is a devoted practice, something we return to consistently as a way of meeting ourselves, tending to our inner world, and deepening our relationship with the sacred. It can take many forms: movement, meditation, mantra, kriya, prayer, breathwork, contemplation, ritual, or simply intentional presence. The practice itself matters, but perhaps even more important is the devotion of returning to it again and again.

And two years ago, I needed something to return to.

I did not begin my first forty-day sadhana because I was disciplined, enlightened, healed, or particularly spiritually evolved.

I began because I was desperate.

My grandmother had died, and I was drowning in grief. I needed somewhere to put it. Somewhere to put the sorrow, anger, confusion, love, longing, and everything else that death had cracked open inside of me.

So I committed to forty days of sadhana.

Forty days of showing up.

Forty days of giving myself somewhere to go with everything I was carrying.

Forty became another forty.

And somehow, one practice at a time, one breath at a time, one day at a time, I arrived here.

731 days later.

I wish I could tell you that two years of daily spiritual practice means I have transcended grief.

I haven't.

I still move through grief. Anger. Suffering. Sorrow. Sadness. Fear. Attachment. Old habits. Vices. Self-sabotage. The stories my mind loves to resurrect when I am tired, overwhelmed, disconnected, or hurting.

If anything, sadhana has shown me just how much unprocessed life I have carried.

And strangely, that has become one of the greatest gifts of the practice.

Because I used to think healing had a destination.

I thought eventually I would get there.

Healed enough.
Disciplined enough.
Spiritual enough.
Wise enough.
Free enough.

Now I don't think there is a "there."

There is only deeper.

Another layer. Another season. Another version of yourself asking to be witnessed. Another attachment ready to loosen. Another truth waiting underneath something you once believed was truth.

We are never done.

And I don't find that discouraging anymore.

I find it incredibly freeing.

Learning the Rhythm Instead of Fighting It

For so much of my life, I fought the rhythm.

I fought the hard seasons. I fought discomfort. I fought myself. I wanted to accelerate what felt slow and hold onto what was already trying to leave.

Sadhana has slowly taught me something different:

Life is cyclical.

We expand and contract.

We rise and fall.

We create and dissolve.

We grieve and celebrate.

We become someone, and eventually that version of us begins shedding too.

And as we change, the practice changes with us.

There have been seasons when my practice has been fiery, disciplined, sweaty, loud, rhythmic.

There have been seasons when it has been soft.

Seasons of kriya. Seasons of mantra. Seasons of movement. Seasons of stillness. Seasons where I could lock in completely and seasons where simply getting onto the mat was the practice.

I used to think consistency meant doing the same thing every day.

Now I think consistency is learning how to stay in relationship with yourself through all of it.

The practice becomes a dance with life.

Sometimes the music accelerates.

Sometimes everything slows down.

Sometimes you know exactly where you are going.

Sometimes you are stumbling around in the dark trying to find the beat.

But you keep dancing.

And somehow that dance makes life richer.

Fuller.

More intimate.

The Practice Didn't Make Me Less Human

This may be the most important thing these two years have taught me.

I am human.

Profoundly, imperfectly human.

I ebb and I flow.

I make mistakes.

I get caught in vices.

I let my mind sabotage me.

I speak badly to myself sometimes.

I lose my center.

I forget what I know.

I am an addict. I always have been.

I feel incredibly hard. I always have.

For a long time, I thought those parts of myself were things I needed to conquer, hide, fix, or spiritually evolve beyond.

But my practice keeps asking something much more difficult of me:

Can you stay?

Can you stay with yourself when you aren't particularly proud of yourself?

Can you sit beside the anger without becoming the anger?

Can you feel grief without needing to escape it?

Can you notice the vice without collapsing into shame?

Can you witness your darkness without deciding that darkness is all that you are?

That is a very different kind of discipline.

Sadhana has given me a container to feel what needs to be felt.

It has helped me look at the parts of myself that aren't pretty without immediately running away from them.

It has taught me how to soften.

How to let go.

How to surrender.

How to do really fucking hard things.

And maybe most importantly, how to begin again.

And again.

And again.

There Is Wisdom in the Darkness, Too

I have an enormous capacity when I am locked in.

I know this about myself.

I can be devoted, focused, disciplined, loving, creative, passionate, and wildly committed.

But I am beginning to understand that the moments when I am not locked in have something to teach me too.

There is information in the darkness.

There is wisdom inside the unraveling.

There are parts of myself I would never meet if I only celebrated the polished, disciplined, high-vibration versions of me.

So somewhere along these 731 days, the practice stopped being about becoming a better version of myself.

It started becoming about learning how to be Mandee.

All of her.

The woman who loves incredibly hard.

The woman who feels everything.

The woman who can be strong and disciplined and also messy and tired.

The addict.

The mother.

The teacher.

The wife.

The business owner.

The student.

The grieving granddaughter.

The seeker.

The woman who sometimes knows exactly what she is doing.

And the woman who, after 731 consecutive days of spiritual practice, can confidently say:

I have no fucking idea.

There is something beautifully liberating about that.

I am learning to release the shame around the parts of myself I once believed disqualified me from being spiritual, wise, worthy, or whole.

I am learning to let myself simply be Mandee.

The light.

The shadow.

The beautiful.

The uncomfortable.

The sacred.

The wildly human.

Everything in between.

How tantric of me.
How Shakti of me.

Because maybe the sacred was never asking me to transcend my humanity.

Maybe it has been asking me to inhabit it.

Fully.

To meet life as it moves.

To stop demanding that the river straighten itself out for me and instead learn its currents.

To dance when the rhythm quickens.

To soften when it slows.

To grieve when grief arrives.

To celebrate when joy returns.

To surrender when something is ending.

To begin when something new whispers that it is time.

Two years ago, I began a forty-day practice because I didn't know what else to do with my grief.

731 days later, I am still grieving.

Still healing.

Still shedding.

Still fucking up.

Still learning.

Still becoming.

Still practicing.

But I am no longer waiting to arrive.

I am learning how to live inside the rhythm of it all.

And maybe that has been the practice all along.