ATHA: THE MOMENT YOU BEGIN

As the nights draw in and the year edges toward its close, something familiar creeps into the mind. “I’ll start in January. There’s no point now.” It sounds practical, even sensible, but yoga offers a very different view of this thought. One of the most influential books of yoga, the Sutra of Patanjali, begins with one word. Atha - “Now, the teachings of yoga.”

Atha means now, but not in the rushed everyday sense. It means the auspicious moment, the moment that invites you to begin, the moment that is already full of possibility.

Not when life settles, or when the calendar resets, and not when January arrives. Atha means this breath, right now. We often imagine change as something dramatic, something requiring willpower or a huge fresh start. But your brain doesn’t need a date in the diary. It needs repetition. Small choices and signals of consistency. Every time you act now, instead of postponing, you teach your nervous system something powerful:
“I can begin again in this moment.”

Atha is the antidote to waiting for a perfect future. Here is one gentle experiment for the last stretch of the year. Something small enough to be doable and meaningful enough to shift how you feel.

Reduce processed sugars (in-fact bin them) from Sunday to Friday. That gives you five sugar free days a week. Keep the fruit in, along with natural whole foods and all the good stuff on Gods green Earth, but drop the junk for the weekdays. In a month, that becomes twenty days of steadier energy and calmer biology.

Research is clear that lowering added sugar supports:
• clearer thinking
• more stable mood
• improved sleep
• reduced inflammation
• better long-term health markers

It also gives something less measurable but even more important. A sense of achievement, that you made a choice in alignment with your wellbeing.

Add 10 minutes of strength

Movement communicates confidence to the body. Every time you contract a muscle, your body releases myokines, what researchers call “hope molecules.” They improve mood, calm the nervous system, and support long-term resilience. Here is a small home workout you can repeat four times a week. That’s sixteen sessions in a month, sixteen moments of returning to yourself.

• 20 lunges
• 10 push ups
• 10 slow glute bridges
• 20 seconds of plank
• 20 slow spine rolls

Rinse and repeat as many times as you can for 10 minutes. It doesn’t come with insta-style influencer promises, or "bio-hacker” sales pitches. It’s simple, and it works. I know because I move like this everyday.

Strength work supports:
• metabolic health
• bone density
• nervous system regulation
• better posture
• improved longevity

Consistency changes everything. Not intensity.

How atha transforms the end of your year

Atha reminds us that practice does not begin in January. It begins wherever you decide to place your attention.

It meets you in moments like:
• choosing water instead of another sugary snack
• rolling out a mat for five minutes instead of none
• taking one steady breath before rushing into an email
• walking without headphones so you can actually meet the world around you

These choices build identity. And identity builds momentum. You stop waiting for a perfect version of yourself and start living with the one you have, who is already enough to begin.

Atha is an invitation.
Begin now, gently, honestly, with what is reachable.
Your future self will thank you, but more importantly, your present self will feel it.

Thanks for being here,

Stuart