The Picture Before the Tears

Just the other day, I got a notice from my yoga studio that my next class would be my 250th class since I started practicing there. I smiled when I saw it.

Last year, I set a goal to take 100 classes in 2025, and I did it, plus a few extra. It felt good to have that marker. Not because I am someone who needs my body to be measured by achievement, but because the consistency meant something. I have been studying and practicing yoga since my mid-twenties, cycling in and out of my practice through different seasons of life, motherhood, work, grief, growth, and all the practical interruptions that come with being a person with a full life.

I know this about myself: the more I practice, the better I am.

Not better in a moral sense. Not better in a polished, optimized, self-improvement kind of way. Better because I am more available to myself. More able to pause. More able to notice when my body is carrying what my mind has not yet named. More able to stay with discomfort without immediately trying to fix, flee, explain, or control it. That particular morning, the morning of my 250th class, had already been a lot.

One of my kids was on the “struggle bus”. I will keep the details private because that story is theirs, not mine. But anyone who has loved a child, teenager or young adult knows the terrain. The intensity can rise quickly. A whole emotional weather system can move through the house before breakfast. And it did this day.

At work in my therapy practice, I talk with clients all the time about approaching parenting through a developmental lens. Children, teenagers, and young adults are supposed to have their seasons. They are supposed to wobble, stretch, protest, collapse, reorganize, and try again. Their nervous systems are still learning. Their identities are still forming. Their executive functioning is still under construction. Their roller coaster is part of growing. The invitation for us, as parents and caregivers, is not to get on the roller coaster with them.

We can stay close without climbing into the front seat. We can be loving without becoming engulfed. We can be available without confusing their storm for our own. We can stand on the side of the track, steady enough to say, “I see you. I am here. I am not going to become the weather with you.”

And because I am a seasoned parent, because I have three children and years of practice behind me, I can often do this. Not perfectly, but often enough. I can usually stay near the edge. I can remind myself that a hard moment is not the whole story. I can remember that growing up is rarely graceful. But this day, I got swept in even before my first cup of coffee was finished.

I did not notice it at first. That is sometimes how it happens. I did not pause and say to myself, “Elizabeth, you are tired. You are pulled. You are not as resourced as you think you are.” I did not do the scan I often encourage my clients to do. I did not check in about sleep, stress, food, connection, movement, nature, play, solitude, or the general state of my nervous system. I did not notice that I had already crossed some invisible threshold inside myself.

I just kept moving.

I got to the studio. I took a picture before class. I was pleased to see one of my favorite teachers there, especially because some of the teachers I have loved have rotated out of the studio over time, and I have felt that loss, sigh… There is something tender about the people who hold space for us regularly, even when we do not know them deeply. Their presence becomes part of the architecture of our lives.

My teacher this day greeted me with a huge smile and a hug. Retrospectively, it felt almost like she knew, though of course she probably did not. I am not always greeted that way, and that morning the warmth of it landed somewhere deeper than I expected.

Literally before I even unrolled my mat, I felt it. The feelings started to rise. I closed my eyes, which I often do in my practice, and felt my chin begin to quiver. Then came the tears streaming down my face. Not a dramatic collapse. Not a single cathartic moment that passed quickly. Just tears. Through the beginning of class, through the movement, the breath and through the shapes my body knew how to make even while another part of me was unraveling- tears fell.

The teacher kept returning to some version of the phrase, “Okay, 2026, show us how good it can get.”

Normally, when I hear something like that, I can nod internally. I can let it be a little spark of possibility. I can breathe it in and think, yes, let’s call in something good. But this day, it did not land as affirmation, it landed as yearning, like a shaky ask. Not a triumphant declaration, but a prayer from the part of me that was tired of holding so much. The part that knows possibility is not always shiny. Sometimes possibility arrives with a trembling chin, wet cheeks, and a body finally telling the truth.

And that is what happened. My body told the truth. The picture I took less than five minutes before the tears says so much to me now. Because in the photo, I look fine. Maybe even happy. Celebratory like “ Here I am, 250 classes in, Here I am, showing up. Here I am, recognizing a milestone”. If I posted only that image, it would be very easy for someone to build a story around it. We do this all the time with pictures, especially on social media.

We see a smile, a milestone, a polished room, a family moment, a professional win, a body in motion, and we make assumptions. We imagine the person inside the frame is having the experience the image appears to suggest. We forget that a photograph is not a whole life. It is a blink. A sliver. A surface with an entire ocean moving underneath it.

The photo did not show the morning. It did not show the parenting moment, or any professional stress. It did not show the dysregulation I had not yet named. It did not show the way my body was already full before I entered the room. It also did not show what the practice would make possible.That is the part I keep coming back to.

Yoga did not fix the morning. It did not solve the parenting challenge or take away the stressors of being an entrepreneur. It did not make me suddenly enlightened or perfectly regulated. It did not turn me into the serene version of myself I sometimes wish I could access on demand. But it held me. The room held me and the teacher held the room. The breath held the movement and the movement held the tears. The repetition of returning to the mat, week after week, year after year, held the part of me that needed to come apart without being alone.

This is why practice matters. Not because we become unshakable, but because we build places where we can shake. Practice doesn’t make us immune to life, but because we create rituals that help us metabolize it. Not because we never get on the roller coaster, but because we begin to know the way back to the ground. I think about this in relation to parenting and in relation to therapy. I think about it in relation to work, caregiving, leadership, partnership, and the everyday labor of being human inside systems that often demand more than our bodies can sustainably give.

We talk so much about coping skills, regulation tools, and self-care, and those things matter. But what I felt in that class was not a tool I pulled out of a drawer. It was a relationship I had built over time. A relationship with practice, with my body, with this yoga community in a room where I did not have to perform being okay. This has so much value especially as a person that leads others.

There are many ways to build that kind of relationship. Yoga is one of mine. For someone else, it might be walking, dancing, swimming, singing, gardening, prayer, therapy, time in the woods, time alone, time with trusted friends, or any practice that allows the body to complete what the mind keeps trying to manage. To me, I think the form matters less than the function.

That day, my 250th class was not the class I would have scripted. I thought I was walking into a small celebration of consistency. Instead, I walked into a release, maybe that was the celebration. Somtething to consider is maybe after all those classes, my body trusted the room enough to let go.

That feels like its own kind of achievement. A quieter one, less marketable one. Not the kind that fits neatly inside a smiling photo or a social media caption. But real. I am grateful for the part of me that kept showing up before I knew why I would need it. I am grateful for the teacher’s smile and hug.

I am grateful for the mat, the breath, the tears, the practice, the community.

The photo before the tears is still a beautiful photo, but now, to me, it means something else. It says: here is a woman celebrating her practice, here is a mother who had a hard morning, here is a body that knew it was safe enough to soften, here is what support can look like when it has been built over time. And maybe it says one more thing, too.

Okay, 2026.

Show us how good it can get.