Hello!
My name is Gaya — welcome to After Asana.
I started this project during a period of my life that felt like a slow collapse of everything I cared about. At the time, having something to build and nurture gave me a sense of direction when I needed it most.
I was already teaching yoga, but I had started to feel disconnected from the language we often use around healing and suffering. Let it go. Everything happens for a reason. Practice non-attachment. When you’re actually losing things you wanted to keep, those phrases can feel less like wisdom and more like evasion. Coming back to myself was, in truth, an agonisingly slow process. There was rarely the capacity to imagine a way forward, let alone the shape of an entirely different life. Instead, I focused on the next thing in front of me, and then the thing after that. One step, then another.
Modern wellness often rests on the idea that suffering can be solved, that the right practice, routine, philosophy, retreat, or supplement might finally free us from the difficulty of being human. But life doesn't really work like that. Most of us are simply looking for ways to meet our lives as they are.
That’s what After Asana is built around
The idea is simple: what matters happens after the practice is over, whatever that practice may be. Religion or witchcraft, love or solitude, escape or acceptance, yoga or anything else we use to structure meaning. The real work is learning how to exist more honestly inside your own life — with all its uncertainty, contradictions, losses, and stubborn moments of joy.
Weekly Column
After Asana Newsletter
Teaching yoga also made me realise how rarely we know what other people are carrying. Everyone arrives to practice with their own inner world — relationships, grief, uncertainty, loneliness, change, hope, fear, all of it sitting quietly beneath the surface.
The After Asana newsletter grew out of that recognition. Each week, I answer a question sent in by a reader; about relationships, identity, uncertainty, work, loneliness, change, or whatever else they happen to be trying to make sense of at the time. It’s less an advice column and more an ongoing exercise in curiosity, reflection, and trying to understand ourselves a little more honestly.
Read on SubstackRetreats & Events
Experiences in Nature
The retreats are built with the same philosophy. Hiking and yoga retreats in beautiful places, centred around good movement, good people and good food.
No ceremonies, no performances of healing, and no promises of transformation — just space to reconnect with yourself, other people and the outdoors.
Explore retreatsI hope there is something here for you
Whatever season of life you’re in I think there is comfort in remembering that nothing stays fixed forever. Things change. We change too.