Coming Back to the Body
- Lauren Koch
- 3 days ago
- 5 min read
People often ask me why I teach yoga.
It isn’t always immediately obvious — I’m also an artist, musician, herbalist, and spirit worker. The simple answer is that yoga helped me come back to myself — my breath, my body, and the present moment.
But the longer answer is a little more layered.
I first discovered yoga in high school and began teaching myself through books and videos (once a home schooler, always a home schooler I guess). At the time it was mostly physical exploration. I had always been strong and extremely flexible, but movement and coordination didn’t necessarily come naturally to me. What I didn’t realize then was that I had very little understanding of how my body actually functioned. I didn’t have a relationship with it — not in the deeper sense. In many ways, I was living at a distance from my own body and certainly didn’t know I was hypermobile.
As someone who is neurodivergent and living with CPTSD, being present in my body has not always felt safe or comfortable. After adolescence began — and it came very early for me — I spent a lot of time dissociating. My body could move and perform, but my awareness was often somewhere else.
At the time I didn’t yet understand that yoga was not just a system of physical movements.
Yoga is a way of being.
The Yoga Sūtras, one of the foundational philosophical texts of yoga, open with an invitation that I find incredibly powerful and to paraphrase…
“Now begins the practice of yoga.”
That first sūtra asks us to arrive in the present moment. It asks us to wake up and experience what is happening right now.
Yoga is not about achieving shapes with the body.
It is about transformation through awareness.
Over time, this practice asks us to loosen the constant pull of the past and the future and learn how to be here — in this breath, in this moment, in this body.
For many people, that might sound simple.
For me, it has been anything but. Because the practices most often associated with yoga — meditation and breath work — were incredibly difficult at first. Sitting still in my body meant encountering physical and emotional discomfort, anxiety, and old patterns of dissociation.
And yet the practice kept inviting me back.
Back to the breath.
Back to the senses.
Back to presence.
Then in graduate school, my relationship with my body changed dramatically.
During my second semester, several serious physical issues that I had effected me since childhood but had no understanding of suddenly became impossible to ignore. I lost a significant amount of mobility. At the time I was deeply immersed in physically demanding art practices — large installations, metal work, and printmaking. Suddenly the body I had relied on was no longer functioning the way it had before.
I felt betrayed by my own body in many ways.
Hopeless, at times, because my endurance tanked and I went from being able to walk everywhere on campus at UMD and in DC, to barely being able to stand for more than 10 mins much less walk very far without resting. This was not first time I had issues with my back or dealt with physical limitations that took something I loved from me. In undergrad, I ended up stepping away from my classical piano performance and pedagogy degree, because I was in so much mental and physical pain; regularly having to wear wrists braces and dictate papers because I couldn’t type.
Those experiences forced me to slow down — something that continues to be an ongoing practice for me, as I’ve been navigating burnout for the past 10 years as well.
Yoga became one of the tools that helped me rebuild. Not just strength and mobility, but awareness — and through that awareness, self-worth and autonomy. I began to understand how muscles work together, how stabilizing muscles support the joints, and how breath and nervous system regulation influence everything we do and how our body shows up to support us.
The practice became less about pushing limits — which had always been my tendency — and more about feeling and listening.
Slowly, patiently, I rebuilt my body.
There were setbacks along the way. After graduating in 2020 and beginning adjunct teaching, I severely injured my left ankle again during roller derby practice. People close to me would sometimes say yoga was just a “band-aid fix,” that it wasn’t really helping, it was a luxury. But they didn’t understand what yoga actually is. Yoga is not just the physical practice, as has been revealed to me over the years.
During that time I stepped away from some aspects of the physical practice — something that can happen in difficult relationships when you’re trying to make things work. But even when I wasn’t practicing asanas (physical postures) regularly, I continued studying the philosophies, dharma, and the deeper spiritual aspects of the practice, along with looking toward other paths of spirituality for guidance.
But it wasn’t enough - all facets of the practice kept calling me back and inviting me to dive deeper.
My body always felt better when I was on the mat — even as I’ve had to adapt for things like wrist pain and other limitations. Today I can honestly say I am stronger than I have ever been. But the strength I have now feels very different from that I had before.
It comes with awareness. Stability. Balance. And respect for the body’s rhythms. That journey has shaped the way I approach all of my work and teaching whether it’s yoga, art, or otherwise.
When I guide a class, my goal is not simply to lead people through movement. My hope is to help students begin building their own relationship with their bodies — learning how to listen to the signals, how to regulate their breath, and how to move in ways that support long-term resilience rather than short bursts of intensity.
Because yoga, is not just about movement, which is what it has been stripped down to by modern fitness culture. It is about learning how to be present, on and off the mat.
And sometimes that is the most challenging — and most transformative — practice of all.
If you’re curious about exploring a deeper kind of yoga practice, I hold space in Frederick, Maryland each week…
Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Frederick
Mondays 1 pm Yoga for the Advancing Beginner
2nd Thursdays 7 pm Restorative Yoga and Sound Immersion
Maryland and Healing Storm Holistic Wellness
Wednesdays 1 pm Yoga with Lauren
In these spaces we explore breath, movement, and mindfulness as tools for reconnecting with the body and cultivating steadiness, awareness, and presence — both on and off the mat.
You can also book a private integrative wellbeing session with me for a personalized assessment (request here). Together we can explore where you’ve been on your path , where you hope to go, and how to build a daily practice that supports meaningful shifts toward a more fulfilling and authentic way of living.
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