The Imagine Podcast · Episode 19
Agency
You can't control what comes. But you haven't lost your capacity to choose how you meet it — even if you can't feel that capacity right now.
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There's a moment many people hit — a period of real difficulty — when the phrase "I've tried everything" appears. Not as a complaint, but as a kind of defeat. Pedro met someone there and recognized something: the problem wasn't that they had run out of options. It was that they had confused agency with control. This episode is about restoring the distinction.
Agency is the capacity to act from your center regardless of what's happening around you. It doesn't mean controlling outcomes. It means remaining a subject rather than an object — someone who chooses, not just someone things happen to. Pedro draws on Epictetus, the Stoic philosopher who made perhaps the sharpest articulation of this: the only thing truly in our power is how we engage with what meets us. Everything else — results, other people's responses, circumstances — is outside it. The training at Imagine Yoga Academy in Geneva has this thread running through it: Kundalini Yoga as a method not for managing life from the outside, but for building inner capacity to meet it from within.
When agency collapses, it usually collapses into one of two places: resignation ("nothing I do matters") or compulsive control ("I need to fix this before I can be okay"). Both are forms of the same thing — the belief that what's outside is the source of what's inside. The episode offers three specific practices to interrupt this: narrowing the field of attention to the next small action only; using Kirtan Kriya to disrupt over-identification with a thought or emotion; and acting without waiting for certainty first — the Ego Eradicator as a practice of willingness before readiness.
None of this is about bypassing difficulty. It's about recovering the part of you that can still move, even when things are hard. Pedro closes with something that lands simply: agency is always available. It's not always comfortable to access. But the capacity itself is never actually gone.
3 Key Takeaways From This Episode
- 01 Agency isn't control — it's the capacity to choose how you respond. This distinction matters enormously. Believing you have no agency because you can't control the outcome means you've misidentified what agency actually is. You can't always determine what happens. You can always determine how you meet it. That's where agency lives.
- 02 Overwhelm is often the result of too large a field. When everything feels impossible at once, the problem is scope — not capacity. Narrowing to a single next action isn't giving up on the larger problem. It's re-establishing contact with the part of you that can move. One step restores momentum. Momentum restores clarity.
- 03 Act without waiting for certainty or readiness. Ego Eradicator — arms at 60 degrees, breath of fire, focus above — is a practice of engagement before resolution. Kundalini Yoga has always known this: certainty follows action, not the other way around. You don't wait until you feel ready. You move, and readiness comes.
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Hi there, I'm Pedro Misle.
I'm the co-founder of Imagine Yoga Academy and a Kundalini Yoga teacher trainer. For over a decade I've been exploring how Kundalini Yoga can ground us in reality — not as an escape from it, but as a way to meet it more fully.
Together with Daniela Troconis, I've had the privilege of training more than 900 teachers across Switzerland, Spain, and online since 2012.
The Imagine Podcast is my way of bringing the conversations from our trainings out into the world — practical, honest, and grounded in real practice for real lives.
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Episode Transcript
Full transcript · Ep. 19 · Agency
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Episode Transcript
Full transcript · Ep. 19 · Agency
What Agency Really Is
When I think of agency, what comes to mind first isn't power in the conventional sense. It isn't the ability to make things go the way you want. Agency, in the way I'm using the word today, is the capacity to act from your center — to remain the subject of your own life — even when things around you are uncertain, difficult, or not at all what you chose. It doesn't mean being able to control outcomes. It means maintaining access to yourself, and from that place, choosing how you engage with what comes.
This distinction matters more than it might seem. Because I think a lot of people lose their sense of agency not because they've actually lost it, but because they've confused it with something else — with control, with certainty, with the ability to get the outcomes they want. And when those things aren't available, it can feel like there's nothing left to do. But that's not what's happened. The capacity to choose how you meet a situation is always there. What gets lost is contact with it.
A Moment of Resignation
Not long ago I had a conversation with someone who was going through a very difficult period. At some point they said: "I've tried everything. Nothing works. There's nothing I can do." And I recognized that place — I think most of us have been there at some point. That feeling where the field of possible action has collapsed to almost nothing. Where effort feels pointless.
What I noticed was that this person hadn't actually run out of things to try. What they had done was fused their capacity to act with the question of whether it would work. And once they started to believe the answer was no, the capacity disappeared with it. This is what resignation does. It doesn't remove agency — it removes access to it.
Stoic and Yogic Grounding
Epictetus, the Stoic philosopher who was a slave before he became one of the most important voices in ancient thought, wrote something that has stayed with me: some things are in our power, and some are not. In our power are our judgments, our intentions, our responses. Not in our power are our bodies, our reputations, our possessions, the actions of others, and ultimately — outcomes. This isn't pessimism. It's clarity. When you know what is and isn't yours to determine, you stop spending your energy trying to control what you can't — and you can put that energy into what you actually can.
Kundalini Yoga works on the same principle, approached differently. The practice isn't about thinking your way to agency. It's about restoring the body and nervous system to a state where the gap between stimulus and response exists again — where you can actually pause before reacting, and choose. That gap is where agency lives.
Three Practices to Reconnect
The first is what I call narrowing the field. When everything feels impossible at once, the scope is too large. Asking "what can I do about this whole situation?" produces paralysis. Asking "what's one thing I can do in the next hour?" produces movement. One step. Not because it solves the problem, but because acting — even on something small — restores the felt sense that you can act.
The second is Kirtan Kriya. When I'm over-identified with an emotion or a thought pattern — when I've become the fear, or the doubt, or the story — a short Kirtan Kriya practice interrupts that identification. Sa Ta Na Ma, the five fingertips touching in sequence, breaks the loop. I don't have to believe it will work. I just do it. And then I'm a little less fused with whatever I was just stuck inside.
The third is acting without waiting for certainty. The Ego Eradicator — arms at 60 degrees, fingers curled, breath of fire, eyes at the brow point — is a practice that asks you to move before you feel ready. This is the key. We often wait for certainty before acting. But certainty, in most meaningful situations, follows action. You don't feel ready and then move. You move, and the readiness comes.
Agency is available. Not comfortable — available. Those are different things. You don't need to feel powerful to act. You just need to act. Sat Nam.
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