By Rachel Hupp Cline | April 22, 2026

So much of yoga, most of yoga actually, is beyond what you actually see. The postures, the meditation, the breathwork. That’s the tip of it. That’s the part that fits inside an hour on Tuesday night, right? The rest of it, the part that actually changes your life, it happens in the quiet, in the spaces between.

In the way you start noticing your own breath when your kid slams the door, or the way you stop apologizing for taking up space at the table. And that is the work that I want to talk about today. The yoga that you can’t see.

Today I’m sharing something about my personal journey, my journey through yoga. One of my favorite sayings is that yoga is the journey of the self through the self to the self. And I’m nearly thirty years into my practice now, and I can tell you from my own personal experience, that has certainly been the case. It’s been building an awareness, first of all, but then peeling back the layers one by one. And that’s why today I wanted to go deeper. Not into a pose, not into a technique, but into the actual heart of our practice.

Today’s episode is for the woman who’s been doing yoga for years maybe, but she feels like there’s something more to it. The woman who feels okay on her mat, but disconnected everywhere else. Or that woman who’s starting to ask, “What about me?” You can watch on YouTube, listen on Spotify, or keep reading below.

Listen on Spotify: Going Deeper: What 30 Years of Practice Taught Me About Coming Home to Myself

What I actually mean when I say going deeper

If you think about the chakra system, there are seven primary chakras, and most of us live in our lower chakras. The chakras run from the base of the spine all the way up to the crown of the head in the context we’re talking about today. If you’re not familiar with them, chakras are considered to be energetic discs, swirling vortices of energy, and they’re part of our subtle body, which means they’re part of the body that we can’t see.

The majority of us tend to spend the majority of our life in those lower chakras. Rooted, stable, safe, belonging, connecting to our sense of personal power. And those places matter for sure. They’re real. But they don’t give us the whole map. They don’t expand into the higher potential. We don’t open the heart. We don’t speak our truths. We don’t know that we’re not separate from each other. Instead, we find ourselves disconnected, right? We start looking for happiness outside of ourselves.

We think that, oh, the next promotion will make me happy. A bigger house will make me happy. And over time, we learn that that’s just not the case. So we have to redirect inward. We have to eventually come back home to ourselves and recognize that unless we are happy on the inside, unless we can connect to that space of contentment within us, nothing outside of us is going to bring us that sense of contentment or joy or fulfillment either.

When we redirect our energy and our attention inward, I’m not talking about more thinking. Instead, it’s about that inner knowing. Your inner voice. That felt sense of being. Your intuition. The voice so many of us have silenced through years of doing, doing, doing, go, go, go, instead of allowing ourselves to just be a human being.

So many of us are humans doing. What we’re going to talk about today is how most of our yoga practice is invisible, how we have silenced our inner voice through years of doing instead of being. But that inner voice, she’s been in us all along. It’s just a matter of learning how to reconnect, how to listen, how to slow down enough to listen.

And I want to talk to you about how I know this because I did not come to this from the outside looking in. What I have found is that we teach what we have most needed to learn, and that has certainly been the truth for me.

How I stumbled into yoga at sixteen

If you’re not familiar with my backstory, I kind of stumbled on yoga as a teenager. I was around sixteen, I think. In my teens and in my early twenties, I really struggled with pretty severe depression. When I found this yoga practice, it was a bonus on a Pilates DVD, and there was just something to it. It gave me a sense of peace that traveled with me for a while after I finished the practice.

So I started doing more yoga. And eventually, I worked up the nerve to go to classes. I was pretty shy and very introverted, and the idea of going to a classroom with people in it made me really want to just shrink and hide. But I did it. I started going to yoga classes. And what I found was that over time, I started noticing more the words my teachers were speaking instead of so much the poses they were guiding us in and out of.

I’ll never forget the very first time I actually came home and wrote it in my journal because it impacted me so greatly, and that theme was from the Yoga Sutras, Sthira Sukham Asanam. The postures should be both comfortable and steady. The way my teacher talked about it was finding this balance between steadiness and ease, strength and grace, on and off our mat. And I wanted that so badly, because I didn’t have it. I didn’t have that balance. That’s when I really started to realize, hmm, there’s more to this. There’s more to this than that. My perspective started to shift.

For many, many years, I thought that I was going to eventually go and get my yoga teacher training. It was difficult because at the time I was working twelve-hour swing shifts, and it was very difficult for me to find a program that fit into my schedule. Once my schedule did shift, and I found myself on daylight, I found a yoga teacher training locally. And I signed up for it.

To be perfectly honest with you, I thought that I was going to be way too shy to teach. The idea of standing up in front of a room, in front of people and talking, did not sound very appealing. But I knew that I wanted to deepen my own practice either way. And what I realized, first of all, that yoga teacher training was life-changing. If you’re considering it, I highly recommend it. You are going to explore parts of your inner being, your inner landscape, that you didn’t even know how to explore before.

Yoga gives us the tools to go deeper. And the more I learned, the more I realized I couldn’t not share this. Everybody needs yoga. I had an obligation to share it with as many people as I could. And now, many, many years later, well, eleven years later, not that many, I’m running my yoga and wellness business full-time after leaving corporate. This is the life that my path has led me down, the life that I’ve built by listening to my inner voice, by following my intuition, by not necessarily knowing the next steps, but by following my heart, by following that inner guide.

Slowing down, even though I didn’t want to

One of the first things yoga asked of me was to slow down, which let me tell you, I did not want to do.

So I have to tell you, I used to struggle so hard with stillness. My mind would not stop. Shavasana, corpse pose, that we practice at the end of most yoga classes, was the most difficult pose in the entire class for me. At the time, I was drawn more towards the really fluid Vinyasa style classes, the very active classes, the very challenging classes, the ones that kept you moving, go, go, go, go, go. Because I couldn’t get my mind to stop. But if we were moving from one shape into another, into another, my mind had to follow the poses, my mind had to remind me to breathe. That was my moving meditation. Constant thinking, racing thoughts. I literally thought that I was incapable of meditating.

At the time, I was doing distance running, training for marathons. That time was also, for me, a form of moving meditation. Connecting my mind to my body, to my breath. It was so powerful. It gave me a similar sense of peace that my yoga practice gave to me.

Over time, yoga taught me to embrace the discomfort of stillness, to allow myself to sit with discomfort. It’s not easy, right? In our daily lives, we’re often taught to avoid discomfort. We want comfort and ease.

I took a yin yoga teacher training, and I really thought I was going to hate it. I’d never taken a yin yoga class before in my life. And if you’re not familiar with it, yin is a style of yoga where you hold poses for longer periods of time. You get to that first edge of sensation before it gets into discomfort, and you settle into a stretch right at the point where you really feel a sensation, and then you stop there and you sit with it, and you notice what happens. And over time, it shifts. The body starts to soften. We can get into those deeper fascia and connective tissues. The body releases. Our edge shifts.

I thought I was going to hate it because I thought there’s no way I can hold those poses that long. But what I found instead shocked me. It was this curiosity, this fascination with what was happening in my body, right?

I also started leaning more into restorative practices. Particularly, like I mentioned, I was doing distance running. To help me recover from some of those longer runs, I really started embracing those restorative practices where you really just let yourself melt into a shape, maybe with a pillow or a blanket or a bolster or a yoga block, and let yourself be supported. How hard is that for most of us, right? We do it all. We want to do it all. So letting ourselves be held, that’s a lesson in itself.

And eventually, I began to look forward to Shavasana. Many times it was the only time in the day where I really found that space of stillness, and my mind wandered still, sure. But I got better at catching it, noticing it, bringing it back. And that’s the practice, my friend. That’s the practice. As many times as you need to, bring it back again and again and again.

A two-minute meditation practice for a racing mind

All along, well, at least for many, many years, I had this desire to be a person who meditates. You see these people who sit cross-legged, and they just look so serene. And I would sit there, and I would be fidgety and uncomfortable, and I couldn’t relax, and my mind was wandering, and a fly would buzz by, and my cat would meow, and I just couldn’t focus. I’d be thinking about all the things I had to do, all the places that I needed to be. My to-do list wouldn’t stop.

So I was like, “Okay, Rachel, you want to meditate, do it. Do it. Start with just two minutes a day. You can sit for two minutes a day.” That’s what I committed to. That’s what I did. And it worked. It worked.

Now, my mind didn’t calm, no. But I got better at reeling it back in and catching it faster when it drifted off, reeling it back in. I started meditating for two minutes a day. I don’t know how long ago that was now, but now I can hold my meditation practice for twenty, thirty, forty minutes at a time.

Now, my mind still wanders. We’re human. It’s going to wander. So we’re not trying to stop the mind from thinking. That’s what the mind does. Instead, we’re getting better at noticing, getting better at catching it and bringing it back. The goal was never to stop thinking. The goal was always to get better at coming back home to myself.

If you think you can’t meditate, I invite you to reconsider. Try two minutes, and let that be all you ask of yourself.

Permission at the kitchen table

Now, around the same time, my yoga practice on the mat was deepening as well, and these practices started showing up at my kitchen table too.

Trigger warning if it bothers you, I’m going to be talking about dieting, and so you’re welcome to skip past this section. But in my late teens through my twenties, I felt like I was always on a diet rollercoaster. I probably tried every diet, every cleanse, every detox. I was always trying to shrink myself to minimize the amount of space that I was taking up. I wasn’t comfortable in my body. I wasn’t comfortable in my own skin, and I wanted to be. I wanted to be comfortable in my own skin, and I didn’t want to be constantly restricting, constantly thinking, “Oh, I can’t eat that. I can’t do that.” I thought I had to earn my food. No. We deserve food because we’re human beings, because we’re worthy of eating. We deserve to eat.

In 2018, I got my health coaching certification. Around that time, I started learning clean eating. If you’re unfamiliar with it, clean eating is where you try to minimize or eliminate highly processed foods, like potato chips, like all those freezer meals, fake foods, basically. And try to eat more whole foods, like whole grains, vegetables, fruits. The idea was that if you eat clean about eighty percent of the time, you could pretty much eat whatever you want the other twenty percent of the time.

My focus really was on that clean eating. Eating brown rice instead of white rice and eating the highly nourishing foods. And about that time, I met a local dietician, and we got to collaborate and do some workshops together. And she introduced me to intuitive eating. Now mind you, clean eating was a far cry from all those diets that I’d been on. It gave me so much freedom. But then intuitive eating, mindful eating. Intuitive eating is really about honoring your body’s needs, sensing, listening to your body, sensing when your body is satisfied, when you feel full. What kinds of foods are you craving?

Over time, I shifted away from any kind of restriction or diet whatsoever, and what I have found is that my body craves the foods that nourish it, that energize it, that fill it up. So if I want to have a piece of pie at Thanksgiving or a piece of cake at a friend’s birthday party, I don’t think twice about it. I don’t feel the slightest bit guilty about it. I eat until I’m satisfied, and then I stop. It’s given me so much freedom, and at the same time, I was learning about mindful eating through yoga. This has become a way of life for me. It’s so amazing. I can trust my body to guide me. I haven’t looked at a scale in I can’t tell you how many years.

Nervous system regulation is the foundation

Underneath all of this, both the slowing down and the coming home to my body, there was one foundation I found in hindsight that was holding it all up. I found over time that nervous system regulation is really the foundation.

Now, in corporate, I was stressed out a lot. I didn’t really know how to manage it. What I found was that everyone around me was stressed out, too, to the point where I remember one of my friends saying, like, she was worried that she wasn’t going to be around for her children when they grew up if she didn’t get her stress under control.

Stress is very powerful in my own life as well. My mom was only 49 when she had her first stroke, and I believe, I could be wrong, but I believe that stress was a major contributor to that.

As I was continuing my journey (I’m a lifelong learner), I started being drawn more to classes on mindfulness, on meditation, on stress management. It’s interesting because while I was going down that path in my yogic studies, in health coaching, I was being pulled down a parallel path at the same time: stress relief, nervous system regulation.

Thinking about these two main questions, how are we responding to stress? Do we have a toolkit to help us respond to stress, to manage our stress response? But then on the other side, how are we regulating our nervous system so that we don’t have such a big stress response in the first place, right? Both sides of this matter. We have to regulate the nervous system to feel safe enough to build the life that we actually want.

This is going back to the chakra system, the energetic centers in the body we were talking about earlier. The root chakra, the chakra at the base of our spine, governs our sense of safety and stability. When our nervous system knows that we’re safe, we stop white-knuckling our way through our life. We stop trying to control everything. We stop fighting, performing, fragmenting. We learn to breathe.

The year I started trusting myself

When I dove deeper into this work, when I actually started trusting myself and realizing that my body’s not going to let me down, it’s kind of designed to protect me, my whole life started rearranging itself.

There was a really pivotal year for me, and that was 2016, ten years ago now, and I think of that as the year that I started trusting myself.

I had done everything I thought was right. I went to college. I got a degree. I got a stable job. I bought a house with a yard. And I realized I couldn’t find myself in my own life anymore. I was like, “Whose life is this?” This was never the life that I wanted. It was the life that I thought I was supposed to build.

I bought this house that was too big for me. I was living there by myself with three or four dogs and a cat or two, plus foster animals, and it was three-quarters of an acre, which for one person to manage while working, I found to be a lot. I felt like if I was caught up on the yard, I was behind on the house. If I was caught up on the house, I was behind on the yard. But one thing that really bothered me was that I had neighbors on every single side, and I had always envisioned myself kind of living out in the country with no neighbors, like I do now. It was really hard for me. I wanted the privacy. I wanted the space.

I started kind of looking. I’d always thought I would live in a little cabin in the woods. I started kind of looking, wasn’t really ready to buy, but I found this cabin on 11 acres in the woods with no close neighbors, and it was falling apart. It was sliding down the mountain. It was crooked. I said it was a happy house because it was smiling. So many people told me it was a money pit, but I knew in my heart this was my home.

Against all odds, against all advice, I sold my house in my safe little neighborhood, and I moved out to this little cabin in the woods, where, let me just tell you, last winter, my husband and I had to hike in and out for twenty-five days in a row because it’s so steep, we couldn’t get our cars up the driveway, so we had to park at the bottom and hike up the ice and snow for twenty-five days. This is my rugged life that people told me I didn’t want, that I love. I did want it.

There were three things that happened that year. I sold my house, and I bought this cabin. Don’t you know, as soon as I started aligning my life the way that I really wanted, I started dating the man who is now my husband. We’ve been together almost ten years now. And I started my own business.

So why did this matter? Like I said earlier, we teach what we’ve most needed to learn. What I learned was self-trust. I started trusting myself more. I leaned into the heart of who I was, and because of that, I was ready to meet and receive that kind of relationship. Before that, I didn’t really know who I was, right? I was living by somebody else’s standards, somebody else’s timeline, somebody else’s checklist.

And what I found is that if you don’t know who you are, it’s really hard to know what you want. I’m going to say that again because I think it matters. If you don’t know who you are, it’s really hard to know what you want at your core.

Why I built Radiantly Rooted

Starting my business was my soul work, my heart work, me claiming that I was not going to stay in the corporate rat race forever. I’m here for something different. We’re all here for something different, our dharma, our heart’s calling. My heart’s calling is to guide people back to themselves, to that place we’ve lost through the conditioning of all these years.

So much of what I have learned, so much of my evolution started kind of snowballing that year. Everything that I teach probably started there. The choice to listen, the choice to trust. And that’s what this practice is really for, and that’s exactly what I built Radiantly Rooted to guide women through.

Radiantly Rooted is my signature program, and it is yoga as a pathway home to you. We explore this through three different lenses: the chakra system I touched on earlier, the eight limbs of yoga (yoga as a holistic pathway to fulfillment and well-being, to liberation), and then modern psychology, Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Three maps, one territory. It’s a beautiful dance between them that guides you home to yourself.

What I love the most about this work is that it always meets you where you are. When you complete this journey, you’re a different person, and that’s why I like to say there is no end. Alignment is a process, not a destination. If you start again, it meets the new you. That’s the power of it. It’s an always evolving evolution of who you are, identity-level shifts.

If any of what I shared with you today landed for you, if some part of you is saying, “Yes, that’s me. That’s what I’ve been reaching for,” you’re the one I built this program for. It is a guided journey. You get a full year of support and community. And if you’re not sure yet, you can always book a free clarity call with me. We’ll just talk, no pressure, and we’ll figure out together whether this is the right next step for you.

Here’s what I want to leave you with today. The deepest practice, it’s not out there somewhere. It’s not in the next pose, the next program, the next book. She’s been there the whole time. Your work is to get quiet enough to hear her.

One breath, one moment at a time, we return to ourselves.

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About Rachel

I’m Rachel Hupp Cline, a yoga teacher, life coach, and guide for women who want to live with more presence, purpose, and peace. Through yoga, mindfulness, and simple daily rituals, I help you take your practice off the mat and into real life so you can trust yourself, feel grounded, and live in alignment.

Free classes and mindful tools: rachelhupp.com/resources
Grounded guidance each week: rachelhupp.com/newsletter
Radiantly Rooted waitlist: rachelhupp.myflodesk.com/rrwaitlist
Instagram: @radiantlyrootedyoga
Podcast Instagram: @radiantlyrootedwithrachel