Alignment, intention and doing the (inner) work trade first
“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.” – C.G. Jung
So much of life is cyclical and repetitive. Art is stolen, thoughts are borrowed and behavior is influenced. We move through the same patterns wearing different clothes, in different cities, with different people, wondering why the outcome never really changes. It took me living in remote Brazil, learning an entirely different language, to sit with the reality that while evolved in some ways, familiarity always resurfaces. And instead of breaking the mirror in front of me, I’m staring into it. Finally sitting with the question I’d been avoiding: what am I becoming from who I am currently being?
When I found Yoga Trade, I was in an entirely different state. It was 2018. My nonno had died and I’d returned to Toronto to reset after driving across Australia. A friend had recommended the platform when I was teaching in India and Nepal the year before, and I knew it was my way back to the ocean. It took five minutes of exploring the opportunities before I found the one that would decide my life’s trajectory: yoga teacher wanted at a remote surf and permaculture retreat in Indonesia. I might’ve said ‘perfect’ out loud. Nature, surfing, and environmentalism are my green flags. It wasn’t a place you’d find on Trip Advisor. I trusted my gut. The waterman Facetimed me from Hawaii and told me it was super remote, really simple living. Again, perfect. I packed my backpack and went off to Indo. I arrived in the dark, rode in the bed of a pickup through trees and villages on unpaved roads, and met the Sea family sitting for dinner. Wherever it was, it felt like home. I woke to the retreat perched on a cliffside overlooking a rugged landscape and a clear bay with perfect, peeling right-hand waves. I slept and showered outside and forgot the purpose of doors. I learned to surf on empty point breaks, spoke Indonesian, navigated tides and jungle. I developed the confidence in teaching that steered me full circle, back to Australia and eventually to Brazil.
The place found me because I had become someone it could find.
It’s natural to have aspirations. Future goals, dreams, desires. A vision board for an idyllic life. The career, companion, routine and destination; but will without action doesn’t materialize. The principle I keep returning to is: you don’t get what you want. You get who you are.
The person we want to be won’t exist if we don’t live in congruence with them now. But how can we possibly live up to this future construct if we’re constantly distracted by other elements of the present?
This is relevant to platforms like Yoga Trade, travel and teaching in general as a portal to a desired life or lifestyle. The lesson applies everywhere. Intention over location, always. We don’t choose where we’re born, but we determine where we can go. This is an experience, not a rule; and honestly, I don’t always act in alignment with who I claim or want to be. In fact, the opposite. My sister, notorious for her one-liners, says people show you exactly who they are. And while we search for additional context or rationalization, the reality is what and who exists now. How others present themselves and how you present yourself. The question is: are my current behaviors, decisions and intentions aligned with who I say I am, or is it a proclamation of who I desire to be? If the answer is the second, the work is closing the gap.
I wrote that external relocation doesn’t dissolve internal turbulence, and it pretty much always applies. My advice to aspiring yoga teachers or those wanting to do a yoga travel work trade: when selecting your experience, consider who you’re becoming rather than only where you are physically going. As I wrote in this guide, part of intentionally selecting an experience is internal evaluation.
The pattern is the teacher
Yoga teaches us that the body holds memory. The same exists in life. The relationships we continuously choose, how we abandon ourselves to be chosen, giving until depletion and wondering why no one ever fills us back up. Maybe the behaviors associated with the act of seeking, anxious, urgent, distracted, repel the very thing we want. The same wound reopens each time. Maybe we don’t attract what we consciously want but what our unconscious blueprint recognizes as familiar.
Becoming is not a destination
The yoga philosophy concept of svadhyaya, self-study, explores continuous, honest inquiry. Who am I beneath the performance? What do I need versus what have I been conditioned to accept? Where am I still abandoning myself to avoid the discomfort of being fully seen?
How can we expect others to love or know us if we don’t love or know ourselves? And in teaching specifically, how can we expect students to trust us if we don’t trust ourselves?
To sit with these questions honestly, tuning out the influence of others, and answering them without flinching is something I’m still working on.
Who we are matters more than what we know
“Early in the course, my instructor asked us to add to a near-overflowing water bowl without spilling any. How? Well, you can’t. From this, I learned authenticity, vulnerability, and acceptance are the foundation of being a successful teacher, acknowledging imperfections and admitting unknowingness; you can’t fill a full bowl without emptying some first.” – Forgetting yourself to find yourself.
What we offer a room is the quality of our own presence and the transmission of our frequency. Energy doesn’t lie. There is a difference between self-awareness and self-change. I have been chronically self-aware for most of my adult life. I could name my patterns, trace their origin, explain them eloquently and then repeat them anyway. The brain rewires through repeated new behavior; not insight alone, but action. For me, the shift looks like: retreating when I’m overwhelmed, traveling alone when I’m disconnected, writing instead of scrolling, letting someone help me when I instinctively want to handle everything alone, setting a boundary from self-respect, choosing an honest conversation over a clean exit. Consistent new choices become the new default.
The people, places and situations that enter our lives are not random. They match the frequency we’re operating on, consciously or not. The most radical thing any of us can do, more than moving offshore or learning a new language, is to be, genuinely, who we say we want to be. Not in the future or when the conditions are right. Now. Imperfectly, incrementally, with full knowledge that the becoming never actually arrives.
If you’re here wondering which opportunity to choose, start with the internal question before the external one. Not where do I want to go, but who do I want to be when I get there. The opportunity that aligns with that answer is the right one. Yoga Trade will have it. You just have to recognize it. Then begin living as the person who can receive it.
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