The loved ones we call the dead
depart from us and for a while
are absent. And then as if
called back by our love, they come
near us again. Then enter our dreams.
We feel they have been near us
when we have not thought of them.
They are simply here, simply waiting
while we are distracted among
our obligations. At last
it comes to us: They live now
in the permanent world.
We are the absent ones.
—”The Loved Ones,” Wendell Berry
We’ve just exited—maybe “been kicked out of” is more like it, given the powerful full moon that opened 2026—a period of time affectionately known as “the in-between.” The week between Christmas and New Year’s has always been marked by a loss of sense of time, and a descent into various vices from cookies to cocktails to couches. And if you’re a child (or work in education or another field that acknowledges the total lack of productivity possible during the last week of December), the in-between is also marked by magic. Whether you believed in the jolly red-suited man who flies through the sky with reindeer to deliver presents, or you wore your PJs inside-out as a ritual prayer to the Gods of Snow, holiday break from school leaves an indelible imprint on our hearts and cells that can’t be wiped away by the responsibility and cynicism of adulthood so easily. In fact, it is the power of that memory that makes the sting of January 1 all the sharper when it rolls, inevitably, around, seemingly faster and faster with each turn we make around the sun. Not only does New Year’s mark a return to homework and schedules, but with adulthood it brings bills and masochistic “resolutions” (marketed as “self-improvement”) and, worst of all, that gross, gray, slushy snow that you either have to trudge through or shovel.
Or, does it? While the calendar might indicate an end to the “in-between,” nature lives outside of such arbitrary boxes. In fact, the moment we call January 1 is very much in-between: just barely two weeks ago (though it feels like two months ago! I guess that’s what a marathon of caffeine and Netflix will do to one’s brain) did we acknowledge the meteorological start of winter, at the winter solstice on December 21. From a (local) Āyurvedic perspective, the macro- and microcosms are firmly in vāta season, the period where air and space elements dominate; when the rhythms of life become most important but hardest to conduct and implement; when our digestive fires can peak, like the bright sun on fresh snow, and wane, like the gray blanket of sky that precedes said snow. Nature, wise mother that she is, always wants the best for us and for us to try our best; but now, her message is clear: you rest, while I get everything prepped to wake you up in a month or so.
Remembering the between-ness of our present moment isn’t just a lesson I wanted to share for January (along with a gentle reminder to hit pause on any significant changes to your life, including diets and fitness regimens, lest you poke the vāta-bear deplete your vital stores of ojas and rasa too early!). It’s a time, and a space, that’s been calling to me for months, a beacon I’ve been longing for and afraid to reach. When I started meditating on what word I would choose as my intention for 2026, I was nearly at my burn-out point with last year’s teachings on the srotāṃsi. The neat twelve-month subtle-body anatomy curriculum I came up with had yielded so many lovely insights and challenges, but by the end—which I’d been looking forward to all year and had spun so many approaches to teaching—I just couldn’t follow through with the plan. The vastness of the manovaha srotas won out, and I found myself needing to simplify my classes and writing in contrast to the rigorous and technical lessons I’d been preparing for ten or so months prior.
I was also nearing the end of my second book, Sense-Care is Self-Care—the part where, when I worked in publishing, I would gleefully send the files over to the production team and say, “Here, it’s yours now! Make this Word document into a book!” But with this one, there was no production team. Or design team. Or marketing and publicity teams. This book has been a one-woman show, and while making it literally from cover to cover has been incredibly rewarding (including sharing it with you soon, on January 23!), at that moment in late fall, I was ready for the end of the journey but still on the third, and worst, leg.
*
My discomfort with being in-between was not new. In almost all areas of my life, I thrive in beginnings and ends; when I was a student, my favorite part of any essay was coming up with the opening “hook” and finding an artful way of circling back to it for the conclusion (a skill I haven’t lost, if you’ve ever read my writing, or just keep reading on here 😉). The writing itself would happen in a kind of fugue state—any notion of an outline would dissolve as ideas flowed from one to the next, my mind somehow finding ways to connect arguments and paragraphs and examples, until suddenly I arrived back at the idea I thought of at the beginning. And then I was done. Reading my writing back for revisions, I’d often surprise myself with what I came up with and how it fit together.
In a way, this experience of in-betweens isn’t so bad—it’s intuitive and exciting and somehow always works out in ways my logical brain can’t plan and predict. Having the structure of those bookends—really a kind of mirror, the original image reflecting back on itself with new eyes—allows the heart of the piece to flow, build, and circulate. It’s an embodiment of healthy vāta: creativity within a steady container. And of yoga: a seat that is stable and easeful, sthiram and sukham.
And yet, even healthy vāta is still vāta, and the feeling of that in-between state is something I’ve never been able to enjoy. Sure, I trust the process and know, intellectually, the outcome will be worth my discomfort. But my feelings resist—every time. It all happens so fast, so unpredictably, that I’ve trained myself to keep my eyes on the end, the other side, not as a goal per se but as an anchor. You’ll get there, and really you’re already there. Channeling a kind of Śakti beyond my comprehension, I’m shot through with restlessness and a kind of blindness that comes from an intensity of light rather than darkness. The Self overwhelms my self, and while that sounds like a great thing to experience for anyone on the path of yoga, it’s more disquieting than enlivening for someone like me, who struggles with boundaries, with defining and protecting the self that lives in this five-elemental world, with keeping my prāṇa inside rather than letting it leak out (or be siphoned off, vampire-style) through my porous energy body.
As you might guess from this description, I was not jazzed at being in and approaching so much between-ness at the end of 2025. I had to come up with a new lens for yoga (and sensed bigger changes for my teaching on the horizon), don all the publishing hats to finish my book (and then send it out into the world all alone, where I could only hope it would actually help people the way I intended), and prepare myself for the emotional ups and downs of the holidays (self-explanatory). The between would never end!
And there it was: the between would never end. In my discomfort was the answer, the bookend that was actually a mirror and could reflect the unknown to and as itself. Looking at my problem straight in the eye, naming and defining it, I felt a palpable sense of relief and release. I’d been moving through the world thinking that these carefully constructed beginnings and ends were the anchors of my life—the things I could be sure of, rely upon, and stake my identity and worth to. But in reality, the only certain, reliable thing in life—and of our identity—was being in-between. I didn’t have to choose to dive into it because I was already there. What I could choose, though, was to fix my attention on that space rather than on finding ways out, and allow the flow of prāṇa that always follows attention to gradually change my relationship with this reality. And since I couldn’t imagine doing it alone, I thought: why not bring all of you with me?
*
In many respects, we as a culture are not blind to the fact that we’re dwelling in a great between. We’re awaiting the collapse of government and takeover of AI; we’re giving our attention to a non-reality (everything on our phones and screens); we’re frightened of, or denying, how nature might die (or take over) under our consumer influence that we are fully aware of but not doing much at all to stop (a classic example of one of the main causes of disease in Āyurveda, prajñāparādha, or “crimes against wisdom). Still, the remedies we largely employ to deal with these liminal states are anything but healthful or supportive. We doom scroll to immerse in the terror of it all; we scroll everywhere else to distract from and numb ourselves to the terror. We throw ourselves into causes and movements both personal and collective; we retreat from engaging because, “what can little ‘I’ do?”
This is not a post about activism (or pacifism); about climate change or capitalism. I am not here to tell you how you, or anyone, can help to solve our myriad, world-altering problems that are killing us softly and loudly, slow-burning and wild-firing us simultaneously. The reason I bring up this macro state is to point out the ways that our attention flies so easily to the edges of things, whether dire or mundane. It is our human nature to want to escape discomfort and experience more pleasure when we’re in the midst of the many shades of these emotions; it is (partly) my life’s work and livelihood to “fix” people’s problems, mostly by telling people they don’t need to be fixed.
The yogis recognized this tendency of the mind to avoid the between and, for the sake of teaching and service, set it on a spectrum of desire: rāga, or attachment, on one end, and dveṣa, or aversion, on the other end. While they can appear harmlessly in everyday life—I desire a second cup of coffee after the buzz of the first starts flowing through my system; I avoid putting my worn clothes away until a pile grows such that I can’t ignore it anymore—rāga and dveṣa have serious consequences when left unchecked. They’re named as two of the five kleśas, or obstacles to enlightenment (aka, the state of union that is Yoga), along with ignorance (avidya), selfishness (asmita), and fear of death (abhiniveśa). All five are facets of the same core problem: becoming separate from the truth of our wholeness by identifying with our temporary, individual self, its likes and dislikes, its existence more broadly. Going further, rāga (which shares the root in Saṁskṛta for “blood” and “red”), is named as the core cause of all disease in Āyurveda. Both systems agree: a divided self—within an individual and from its True Nature as Nature—is sick.
How does “between” fit into this state of wellness or unwellness? The word itself invites us to consider what the spectrum of desire comprises. In English, the etymology of “between” is not terribly exciting. As you might imagine, it is related to the concept of “two” (be = bi). But it does not extend to all multiples; ask any member of the Grammar Police (🙋🏻♀️), and they’ll tell you that “between” is used to refer to two objects/people/etc., whereas “among” is used for groups of more than two (e.g., a hammock is strung between two trees, but a moon circle can happen among the trees in a grove). The word is both a preposition and an adverb, two parts of speech that have transitory and relational qualities with or without a direct object (respectively). It helps us orient to and move within time and space. Its descriptiveness and utility relies on edges within the unbound, potential-filled facet of reality known as space (time being nothing more than an attempt to understand and describe space, as illustrated by Quantum Physics and the last week of December). “Between” sets us up for life in duality—which as we’ve seen, can create all kinds of suffering.
When I widened my search to include Saṁskṛta words that mean “between” (there is no direct translation/shared etymology), I found some interesting alternatives. The two that stood out were madhya and antarā. Madhya roughly translates to “middle,” and has many commonplace uses; I learned about different ghee preparations in Āyurveda school, and madhyama is considered the “just right” consistency suitable for all purposes, including medicated ghee (and other fats; that, compared to slightly undercooked/more water and slightly burned/less water). Hmmm, so “between” can describe a kind of medicine, that which supports the integration of ingredients, of body systems, of the Self? Then, of course, there’s the common description of Āyurveda (and yoga, and Buddhism) as a life on the “middle path”; eschewing extremes, whether of diet or lifestyle or beliefs, one can learn the dharma on oneself and the Self through madhyamāpratipada. It is written in the classics that one who follows such a path will arrive at madhyamā, or attainment of the wisdom of the siddhis: “The ability to make himself atomic, along with the others [of the Yogic powers], will arise. He will take pleasure in the company of siddhas. He will attain the wishes he desires; if he is without desires, he will attain liberation.” Unlike the comparative, transitive connotation of the English word, madhya is clearly a state with fixity and inherent satisfaction and utility; it is what we hope we’ll find when we find ourselves in-between. Its relationship is with the singularity of rightness.
The second word for “between,” antarā, implodes the prepositional duality at yet another level. Its literal meaning is “in the meantime,” but specifically refers to a class of songs played as transitions or “to fill the gap.” It extends to similar contexts both micro and macro—the space between two sounds in language (which, in traditional dēvanāgarī, or the written language of Saṁskṛta, is not marked by a physical space; the characters all run into each other, with the spaces for meaning and breath understood or implied); the “space between heaven and earth” mentioned in epic poems and the secret (echoing the description of the human body in TCM as a conduit between heaven and earth, with the yin meridians moving from bottom to top and the yang meridians moving from top to bottom); and the ultra-potent “inner sacrifice” used to experience/obtain Śakti.
These meanings would be intriguing enough, but there’s more. In the musical context, the melodies of which antarā is a type are called rāgas. Yes—the same word for attraction, passion, the cause of all disease. Rāgas are not only entertainment, but forms of healing in Āyurveda, specifically for afflictions of the mind. Through the carefully constructed tonal patterns and words, vibration helps to bring a mind afflicted by its doṣas, rajas (restlessness) and/or tamas (inertia), back to a place of harmony and truth: sattva.
*
Learning about these “betweens” of Saṁskṛta, I literally paused in awe of how the very first baby steps of my journey into this inquiry had already revealed so much about the root cause and solution to my discomfort. Like rāga itself, between is what brings us into the self defined by duality, away from the Self defined by wholeness—and vice versa. Saṃkhya philosophy, from which Āyurveda derives, says as much in its description of the manifestation of reality from consciousness to matter. It was from the supreme consciousness of Brahman that Puruṣa, or unbound awareness, arose; and from Puruṣa’s desire to know itself that matter, or Prakṛti, came into being as a reflection of consciousness. Their perceived separation causes suffering and delusion—but also informs the entire nature of the universe. Prakṛti is always longing for Puruṣa, forgetting that she is the very consciousness she seeks; Puruṣa is always longing for Prakṛti, forgetting that he already contains all the potential that he thinks needs an external form to be real. Desire is the melody of the song of the cosmos.
While we humans are far down the evolutionary chain from these great energies—we’re made of the humble elements that are the most gross and dense manifestations of Prakṛti, animated by a mind that tends toward identification and self-protection—we carry that original desire in our cells, our vibrations, our auras. To satisfy the desire for union, for oneness, for Self-recognition—essentially erase all betweeness—would indeed be a pretty cool thing. But it would disintegrate the very fabric of our reality; collapse the spiral of our awareness and action that allows us to elevate our spirits through cycles of karma and rebirth. While it is challenging at times (okay, most times) to be trapped in our desires, our awareness and ignorance of them, and our misguided or earnest attempts to satisfy or control them, that is life itself. The act of living, and state of being alive, is moving in between states of consciousness and matter; states of fullness and emptiness; states of integration and separation. Nothing stays as it is, and so our work is not to fix our gaze on that which is not here, where we think we need to get to on the other side of between; but rather to remember we are already, always, there, and here, and between. That between is not a space to traverse or a time to pass or arrive at—it is.
The way to work with the discomfort of in-between is to modify its part of speech from preposition or adverb—relational, transitory—to noun or adjective—a quality or state. To go from being in between—stuck and unsatisfied—to being the between or, even simpler, between.
*
Like with many of my ideas, this understanding of betweenness came upon me like a flash, and it took some time for me to figure out how it could manifest from idea-land to five-element-land, specifically in the relatively niche land of yoga āsana. Soon enough, the answer I was listening for revealed itself in the antarā of my teaching progression from 2025—both in its sounds and its silence. As you’ll recall, we closed last year with the mysterious “+1” srotas, the channel of the mind, which is both distinct from and concurrent with the other 13 gross channels of the body. And, as you’ll recall my confession at the beginning of this piece, I wasn’t really feeling on my A-game when it came to teaching that srotas in December. In a certain way, adjusting my approach was the embodiment of what manovaha srotas is all about: perceiving reality and choosing to honor what you perceive, rather than clinging to an old idea or desire for things to be a certain way. But here was a chance to dive even deeper into the mind, not only in terms of its channel (the edges of the mind, as it were) but in terms of its content. And so here we are, in 2026, following the spiral of Self-inquiry ever deeper into what’s between the channel of the mind, observing it and participating in it but not identifying with it. Forget about handstand and downward dog: is there anything more yogic than that?
1.2: Yoga is the intentional resolution of all self-limiting, self-defeating thoughts, patterns, and tendencies within our personal energy field.
1.3: Then, the seer rests in his or her own true splendor and essence.
1.4: Otherwise, we become enveloped in the distortions of our consciousness and project them onto everyone and everything we come into contact with, bringing ourselves, and those around us, unnecessary pain. This is the definition of disease.
1.16: Development of complete Self-awareness renders the individual imperturbable.
—The Yoga Sūtras of Patañjali, translated by Bhāvani Silvia Maki
To examine the mind as such, will consider it from two perspectives. At the outermost layer, the mind is shaped by the information received by the senses. These portals of awareness and information color the mind with its inherent qualities of rajas (watching Grey’s Anatomy, or something worse, before bed), tamas (consuming stale food that congeals in the stomach like a dirty old sponge), or sattva (starting your day looking out the window at the sky and trees, or gazing into the eyes of your beloved). The senses are the gates in between the external world and our internal world, and through daily sense-care we can shore up the integrity of those gates such that they function optimally in allowing in, or shutting out, healthful stimuli, and helping us digest whatever does come in regardless of its nature.
But the mind is not simply a giant catch-all for the detritus of our senses; it is itself a between, a bridge between the senses (and, by proximity, the external world) and the Self, that is helping us stay on the course of Life amidst all the various distractions and information of our present state. The Bhagavad Gītā, one of the great yogic texts, illustrates this complex as a chariot: the five senses are the horses providing momentum (which, as horses will be, are skittish and easily distracted by all the bright-shinies); the reins of the chariot are the mind (manas, specifically the “feeling mind” more correlated to the nervous system than the higher/conscious mind); and the Buddhi and Ātman (consciousness and soul, respectively), are the riders in the chariot, with Buddhi holding the reins. Here, the mind is the literal between without which the entirety of the chariot (representing the body/self) would fall apart—the horses would run wild, and the Self would be static. Through tension (and attention) in the reins, the horses communicate to Buddhi what’s up on the road, and Buddhi communicates commands about which path to follow. They don’t always work in sync, but when they do we reach our destination safely and in one piece. And by “destination,” I mean not a place that isn’t-here, but the very state of doing, moving, careening through the fields and over bridges in pursuit of desire, all while fulfilling our dharma—that which is already established, which does not need to be found or looked for because it is Known—through chariot-ing.
This year’s exploration of the senses will take a structure that follows this content. While in the past I’ve divided teaching themes by month, the whole between-thing makes me realize even more how arbitrary the calendar is. I was already hesitant about abandoning the manovaha srotas come January, and in considering how to extend that teaching into the new year I remembered that it’s not really the new year . . . yet. At least, not according to Earth. Nature’s calendar, informed by changes in our perception of light on the planet—a kind of duality and relationship unto itself that begs a between-lens—has four distinct punctuation marks: the spring and fall equinoxes, and the summer and winter solstices. These moments of pause—literally, when the sun seems to stand still or become equal with the darkness—determine the kind of momentum we experience between them. Are we waxing or waning? Are we moving toward sameness or toward extreme?
There are even more in-betweens acknowledged by many traditional cultures (Japan marks 72 seasons). The cross-quarter festivals of the Celtic Wheel of the Year honor subtler shifts in light that we very much feel in our spirits—the stirring of our hearts (and the crocuses) from mid-winter’s darkness in early February at Imbolc, the thinning of the veils between the material and spirit realms in early November at Samhain, etc. Roughly six weeks apart, the cross-quarter and quarter festivals establish a rhythm of celebration and reflection that, ironically, our productivity-oriented and mechanized Western calendar doesn’t have; the latter scatters holidays across the year like snowflakes in a squall, leaving many clumped together with huge, agonizing breaks between. The more rhythmic our sense of time is, the more truthful our existence in space becomes. Because the more rhythmic our lives are, the more aligned with are with prāṇa, satisfied from within and connected to our environment.
And so, we’ll move through each sense, from subtle to gross and back to subtle, in these six-week intervals, using the punctuation marks not so much as turning points as invitations to explore the mysterious sixth sense that weaves through it all (you’ll have to wait for the book to find out about that one!); as openings to a portal of betweenness that we might explore, and shape our practices and perceptions to match, with more clarity.
While stemming from different cultures, the Celtic marking of changes in light is not much different from the six seasons described in Āyurveda (which are important to know, especially re classical doṣa theory, but don’t map as neatly onto the meteorological seasons in the U.S.). In the microcosm, though, the connection is one-to-one. As described in Āyurvedic anatomy, between each of the seven dhātus, or tissue layers, is a space called the dhātu dhāra kalā. These membranes are where the digestive fires of the tissues—the dhātvagnis, which possess the intelligence to know what kind of nutrition to hold onto and what to pass on to the next tissue—dwells. In other words, the fire of discernment, of nourishment, of transformation, of the creation of the Self through discrete parts, lives in-between.
This year, then, we’ll be diving into the dhātu dhāra kalās of life through these festivals, illuminating and being illuminated by the spark of the Self that lives in constant anticipation of what may be, but never gets the chance to become it. This may sound like a loss or a failure—what are we if we’re not growing, evolving, becoming? But if we dig into the wise advice of the teacher of Dr. Claudia Welch, “don’t become anything,” we see shades of between-ness. If we spend our lives becoming, we’ll never get the chance to be.
*
In the end, I spent my in-between this holiday season in many fascinating liminal spaces: backstage (and under the stage, in those wild quick-change tunnels!) with Taylor Swift, in the Upside Down with 1980s Harry Potter wannabes, and lost in the snowy scene of a puzzle that I literally thought would never come together (80 percent of the pieces were some version of white with gray or blue squiggles). Best of all, I was being the between of my life—not totally knowing what will be next, and not planning for it either. I was content doing what I need to do to maintain my stamina for the constant flux of beginnings and endings I was already in and knew would keep flowing: dinacaryā, yoga, meals, sleep, laughing, crying, hugging, desiring. It wasn’t super exciting, but it wasn’t suffering.
As we approached December 31, I admit I felt the familiar pang of my past resolution-making self, and wondered if I’d wake up the next morning feeling different in some profound way, inspired or motivated or suddenly repulsed by the taste of gingerbread (nope, I still desire it). Instead, through my pre-glasses morning eyes, I saw a thin blanket of snow on the ground. Snow wasn’t in the forecast, and I wasn’t planning on interrupting my morning routine with shoveling. But the sky was bright, and the snow was there. It was still winter, and I was still a five-elemental being living in a world where water can fall from the sky in delicate frozen crystals. It wasn’t an interruption, but a continuation. It wasn’t super exciting, but it was magic.
