Yoga Pathways

I’ve been binge listening to Desert Island Discs again.

The first time I did this was during a very specific season of life — lots of driving, lots of worry, visiting my daughter in a psychiatric ward. Back then, I think I was drawn to stories of resilience. People who kept going. Lives that held hope.

This time, I think it’s something else.

I’m fascinated by how people arrange their lives around music — not chronologically, but instinctively. What they choose to foreground. What they leave unsaid. How carefully — or unconsciously — they shape the way they’re perceived.

Today, I was listening to Dame Floella Benjamin.

She was exactly as I remembered her from Play School — warm, articulate, full of colour and conviction. She knows her story, and she tells it well. There’s a strong sense of authorship about her life.

And then one of her song choices arrived.

Smile though your heart is aching.

I stopped moving.

I hadn’t been reflecting. I wasn’t emotional. I was cleaning the oven, gloves on, mind elsewhere. And then — without warning — a wave of sadness passed through me. Brief. Clean. Unexplained.

The song is tied almost entirely to my dad.

Usually, when I think of him, I feel happy. Grounded. Warm. This wasn’t that. It was something underneath it — something that rarely gets airtime. And before I could make sense of it, it was gone.

Nothing needed analysing.
Nothing needed fixing.

The body recognised something long before the mind arrived to organise it into a story.

This is the part of experience we’re rarely taught to trust.

We’re very good at meaning-making. At reflection. At narrative. But much of what lives in us doesn’t announce itself in words. It arrives as sensation, as pause, as a sudden stillness in the middle of an ordinary task.

Yoga and meditation don’t create these moments.

They teach us not to interrupt them.

Not to rush in with explanation or self-improvement. Not to turn every feeling into a project.

Just to notice — and allow experience to complete itself.

The sadness didn’t ask to be held onto.
It didn’t need to be resolved.
It came, was felt, and passed.

Which, in its own quiet way, felt like practice.

And if I wasn’t already aware of it, I certainly am now —
I miss my dad.