The Path Includes the Obstacle

What if the thing blocking you is exactly where you need to be?

I did not choose this path. The first version of it, anyway.

When I was laid off from Kellogg's, I did what most people do after a major career blow: I looked for the fastest route back to solid ground. Back to familiar. Back to the version of a career that made sense on paper. I landed at American Airlines, and for a while that felt like recovery. But a few years in, something quieter started to surface. Not loud enough to ignore, not loud enough to act on right away. Just a steady knowing that there was another way, and that I was not on it yet.

Eventually that knowing won.

The Leap and What Followed

I left the corporate ladder and started a walking tour company in Napa. It felt like the right path, and for a while it was. Then the pandemic hit, and eighteen months in, I had to close it. Two major obstacles in a handful of years, and both of them looked, from the inside, like failure.

What I know now is that neither of them was.

Marga: The Path Shaped by the Walking

There is a Sanskrit word I have been teaching this month: marga. It means path, but not in the tidy sense. It implies a way shaped by walking, by everything that happens along it, including what blocks you. Looking back, the layoff was not a detour from my marga. The business closing was not a detour either. They were the path doing exactly what a path does.

After the tour company closed, I went back to school for human services. I got my yoga teacher training. Then my Wayfinder life coaching certification. None of it was linear, and none of it was planned, but each step made sense from inside the obstacle that preceded it.

What the Stoics Got Right

That is the thing Ryan Holiday keeps returning to in The Obstacle Is the Way: resistance is not something to get past; it is something to move through. He breaks it down through perception, action, and will. Three disciplines for turning what blocks you into what builds you. I did not have that language when I was standing in the wreckage of a layoff or when I was closing a business I loved. I just kept walking.

The Yamas and Niyamas as a Way Through

That is also what the Yamas and Niyamas eventually gave me. Not a map, but a way of moving. Ahimsa, non-harm, meaning I had to stop treating my own detours as evidence that something was wrong with me. Satya, truthfulness, meaning I had to be honest about what I actually wanted, not what looked right. Santosha, contentment, not as passivity but as the trust that where I was standing was exactly where I needed to be.

What This Has to Do With Embodiment

The work I do now exists because of every obstacle I did not get to walk around. The coaching, the yoga, the way I sit with someone who is stalling in their own waiting room, all of it came from walking through, not past, the hard parts. The body carries that knowledge. It knows the difference between avoiding something and moving through it. Embodiment work is how we learn to listen to that difference.

If something is blocking you right now, I want to offer this: you are not off course. You might be exactly on it.

Let's Build Something Together

You do not have to navigate the obstacle alone. Embodiment coaching can help you get clear on what is actually in the way and what to do about it. If a movement practice is part of that path, private yoga sessions are available in Napa, and online classes are available wherever you are. The practice is here when you are ready. Book a free consultation, and let's find your next step together.