How Do I Make Time for Myself? What Kundalini Yoga Taught Me

Surviving instead of living

Kundalini Yoga taught me to stop surviving and start living.

Has it ever happened to you that you buy a plant and then neglect it without even realizing? The plant is still there, it hasn't died, but it's drier, it has less energy. It holds on, but only up to a point. If you water it less than it needs, it will stay like that. Surviving.

I think many of us have gotten used to surviving, and we've forgotten how to really live. We take care of absolutely everything, because we have a thousand things to do, and then, if there's time left, we take care of ourselves.

If there's time, we eat well. If there's time, we move. If there's time, we breathe. Immediacy slipped in as a way of living. Dolce far niente became impossible. Social media, with its 3-2-1 formulas and its 30-second solutions, gave us one more reason to leave ourselves last in our own lives.

And even if we do yoga, even if we breathe, even if we move our bodies, the belief underneath is still there. We go last. Because that's what we practice every day. And we become what we practice.

By the time I got to myself, I was so exhausted that the only thing I had energy for was scrolling social media, or letting the television watch me.

“I don't have time” is a lie

“I don't have time.” I said it for years. And it's a lie. We will never have time if we don't make the time. That perfect moment where everything aligns and magically there's room to prioritize ourselves doesn't come. What I learned is that it works the other way around. I started putting myself in my own calendar, and then there was time for the things that nourish me.

It seems almost absurd that this needs to be said. I'm not talking about making time for a PhD or a new career. Which, by the way, if you decided to, you would make the time. God, I'm talking about making time for ourselves. To see ourselves in depth.

When going last becomes a way of life

Leaving myself last worked as an emergency. It's like a lie, it doesn't have long legs. It got me through a few weeks, maybe a few months, and then it started to fall apart under its own weight, because nobody can run on empty indefinitely and call it being responsible. I knew that even while I was doing it. Knowing it didn't make it easier to stop.

There's another version of this too, quieter, without a crisis to justify it. We tell ourselves we're fine, so someone else should go first. We stay quiet in a conversation because speaking up means more conflict than we have energy for. We take care of everyone because it's easier than finding out what happens if we don't, and also because it keeps us busy. None of that looks like sacrifice from the outside. It just looks like being easy to be around.

That's not the problem. The problem is what happens after. The season ends, the crisis passes, and somehow the sentence stays. I'll take care of myself later. It stops being how we got through something and becomes how we live. Nobody decides that on purpose. Nobody wakes up one day and chooses to disappear from their own life. It happens in a thousand small moments where someone else's need is louder than ours, and ours can wait, because technically, it always can. The body doesn't collapse the first time we skip ourselves. It collapses the four hundredth time.

Selfishness, responsibility and the inhale

Here's something I keep coming back to. Nobody would tell a mother who is breastfeeding, you don't have time to eat, feed the baby. Everyone understands, it's a priority. But we forget this completely when it's about everything else. Energy, patience, attention, presence. Same principle, every time. We can't give from a body we haven't fed.

For a long time I confused taking care of myself with selfishness. Resting before I was forced to, saying no earlier than felt comfortable, it felt indulgent, almost embarrassing, like I was taking something that belonged to someone else. But there's a real difference between selfishness and responsibility. Feeding myself so I can actually show up for the people I love is closer to maintenance than indulgence.

Taking care of ourselves is closer to a responsibility than a reward we earn once in a while, the same way eating and sleeping are. We're the one instrument we play every part of our lives through. And if we don't make space for ourselves somewhere in our actual week, not in theory, in the calendar, nobody else is going to make it for us. That space doesn't appear on its own.

What we give after skipping ourselves for too long isn't really us anyway. It's whatever's left over once everyone else has taken their share. The people we love can feel the difference, even when they can't name it. They get our exhaustion instead of our presence. Patience running on fumes instead of patience we actually have to give.

Maya Angelou said something about this once, simply, the way she said most things. That being good to yourself is what makes it possible to expect anyone else to be good to you. Not a reward you earn after you've taken care of everyone. A condition. Something that has to come first, or the rest doesn't work.

Kundalini Yoga, and yoga philosophy more broadly, has been saying this long before self-care became a word on a mug. Prana, the breath, the life force, moves in two directions. What comes in and what goes out. We can't keep exhaling if we never inhale. A personal practice, even ten quiet minutes of it, isn't an indulgence we fit in once everything else is handled. It's the inhale. Everything we give during the rest of the day is the exhale. Skip the inhale long enough and there's nothing left to breathe out.

What Kundalini Yoga gave back

At some point I had to understand that I'm not here just to be efficient and go through life like a zombie, trying to survive everything that happens to me. None of us are. We're here to live, to feel, to open ourselves to EVERYTHING it means to be human.

Kundalini Yoga gave that back to me. Feeling alive. And I wish I could tell you that one class gave it back to me. But no, it wasn't like that. I had to go deep. I had to take apart beliefs that had taken root without me noticing. And that takes time. I did the first level of the training, and then the second, and then I kept doing the training for three more years.

Because it moved, and it still moves, something in me that makes me want to stay. It gives me a space where I can see myself, where I can feel myself, where I can feel alive.

And now that we're about to start a new year of the YTT, I can't stop thinking about how it touched me, and so many students who have come through the school. How choosing to make space for this in my life took me to live beyond being productive or responsible.

Giving myself this space has allowed me to open up to enjoying life, instead of being constantly lost in a list of things to do. Because even if we got a little distracted…

Apparently, pleasure
is allowed before
we finish
the to-do list.

WHAT A CONCEPT.

What have you been leaving for later?

Maybe you're listening to this and recognizing something. Resentment that shows up for no obvious reason. A tiredness a weekend off doesn't fix. Something you've wanted to do for a while, a class, a training, a trip, a conversation you keep avoiding. Something that's been asking for your attention for months, and you keep telling yourself you'll get to it once things calm down, when there's more time, when everything aligns.

I know that one well. And I'll be honest with you. In my experience, things don't calm down. They shift shape. There's always a reasonable excuse to wait, and after a while the waiting starts to feel like patience. Most of the time it's just a habit, comfortable precisely because it asks nothing of us.

What helped me wasn't a five-step plan. It was one honest look at where I had ended up on my own list, and one small decision to move myself back up, even slightly. Ten minutes in the morning nobody gets to interrupt. Finally saying yes to the thing that had been calling me for months. Small, but real, and mine.

I knew it was working when the resentment started to quiet down, long before any sudden inspiration. That was the first sign, just less of that low simmer underneath everything. Joy came back later, once there was actually a self there to feel it.

Putting ourselves last for a season, out of love, out of necessity, that's not the problem. We all do it, and sometimes we have to. Living there permanently is the problem. And I'd rather notice the difference before the body forces me to, because it will, eventually, one way or another. Better to choose it while we still get to choose.

So maybe this is the question to sit with this week. What have you been leaving for later?

Don't leave yourself for later.

If this landed somewhere in you, send it to the person you know is doing exactly what I just described. Not because they need fixing. Because sometimes we need to hear it from someone who isn't inside our own head.

With love, from here. Sat Nam.