The First Time I Learned to Breathe: How Yoga Helped Me Reclaim My Body

My first diet started when I was five years old. It was the cabbage soup diet.  While the rest of my family watched TV, my mother had me doing jumping jacks and sit-ups in the living room. It wasn’t playful. It wasn’t bonding. It was shame disguised as discipline.

 The message was clear: Something is wrong with you, and you need to fix it.

For years, I thought that’s all exercise was supposed to be—punishment for the body I lived in.

I learned to associate movement with humiliation. I was told to run on the treadmill in our dark basement, which terrified me as a kid. It wasn’t just the monsters I imagined lurking down there—it was the monster in my own head. The one that told me my worth was tied to a number. That if I just lost enough weight, maybe I’d be lovable. Maybe I’d be enough.

By the time I graduated college and got my first job, I was almost 200 pounds. Ironically, it wasn’t until I was too poor to eat that I started losing weight. My food budget was ten dollars a week. The rest went to rent, insurance, student loans and all of the bills that were accumulated after college. I didn’t get healthier—I just got hungry. That’s not a transformation story. That’s survival.

The transformation came later. And it came through Groupon.

One day, scrolling through the deals, I found a trial offer for a local yoga studio. At the time, I thought: Sure. It’s cheap. I need to do something.

But I didn’t know what it would awaken in me.

That first hot yoga class changed my life. Not because I nailed a pose or “sweated out toxins” or lost weight. But because, for the first time the teacher wasn’t revolving around losing weight or doing what was good for you, she simply said, this class is about learning your body parts and breathing.

Yoga taught me how to breathe. I don’t mean shallow chest-breathing like we do when we’re anxious. I mean real, deep belly breathing. The kind that slows your heart rate. The kind that makes your nervous system go from fight-or-flight to rest-and-digest. The kind that teaches you how to stay present—even when it’s hard.

That’s what yoga gave me: presence. And then it gave me something even deeper—release.

Through movement, I learned to let go. To quiet the chaos in my mind. 

To feel my hips open and realize—this is where my grief lives. My resentment. My fear. Science may call it somatic tension. But I know it as the unspoken weight I’d been carrying for years.

In yoga, they say trauma lives in the hips. I didn’t know that when I started. But I knew that every time I left class, something heavy inside me felt a little lighter.

Yoga became more than exercise. It became a doorway to freedom.

It taught me that I am not broken. That my body isn’t an enemy. That strength isn’t just physical—it’s showing up on the mat, over and over, and meeting yourself exactly where you are.

Eventually, I became a yoga teacher. Not because I wanted to master the perfect handstand. But because I wanted to help others find the same thing I did— A way back home.

Back to the body.Back to the breath.Back to the self I’d spent years trying to punish into silence.

Yoga didn’t just change how I moved.It changed how I lived.

I used to exercise because I hated my body. Now, I move because I love what it’s carried me through.

And it all started with a Groupon.And a breath I didn’t know I needed.