What If the Poison Is the Point?
There is a Tibetan Buddhist story that has been inspiring me lately: peacocks in a poison grove.
The peacock does not avoid the toxic plants. It eats them, and the poison becomes what gives its feathers their beauty. This is not a metaphor for recklessness. It is a teaching about metabolizing what we have been storing. About trusting that what feels unbearable, when met with the right kind of presence, can become something else entirely.
I recall this whenever I hear terrible news and want to look away.
The Case for Staying With It
We’re taught, subtly, to look away: change the channel, scroll past, stay positive. Sometimes that’s wisdom; other times it’s avoidance disguised as self-care.
Tibetan Buddhism offers another model. The peacock doesn’t become toxic by what it eats; it becomes luminous. The difference lies not in what enters the system but in having the strength to metabolize it. A body trained to process difficulty — through practice, presence, and intentional discomfort — transforms instead of poisoning itself.
Warrior traditions know this: resilience isn’t built through comfort, but by facing hard things with a steady nervous system, letting them move through rather than settle in you.
That is what karate taught me. And it is what Yoga keeps teaching me. Not to absorb everything blindly, but to trust that the capacity to metabolize is something we can actually train.
The Humbling Truth About Being a Beginner
I started Shotokan karate as an adult. If you've never been a white belt later in life, let me paint the picture. You stand in line next to twelve-year-olds who could easily kick your ass. Their bodies move with fluency that yours lacks. You overthink every stance. You forget which hand goes first. You leave class humbled in a way that's almost funny — if your ego weren't too bruised to laugh.
And it is one of the best things I have ever done.
Frustration Is Not a Sign Something Is Wrong
Here is what karate taught me that I did not expect: frustration is not a sign that something is wrong. It is the feeling of a nervous system reorganizing itself. The anger that rises when you cannot get the sequence right, when the twelve-year-old next to you nails it on the first try, when your body refuses to cooperate with what your mind knows it should do. That anger has information in it. It is the poison.
Funakoshi, in Karate-Do: My Way of Life, writes about practice as a path of character rather than achievement. You do not train to become better than someone else. You train to become more honest about yourself. The sparring mat has a way of stripping performance away. You cannot fake presence there. You either show up or you do not.
The Sleep That Follows Is Unlike Anything Else
What I did not anticipate was the sleep. After a genuine karate session, the kind where you have actually worked, where you have met your edge and stayed with it rather than backing away, the sleep that follows is the deepest kind. The body has metabolized something. The nervous system has completed a cycle. The warrior spirit, that part of us that knows how to meet difficulty with steadiness rather than avoidance, has been exercised.
You don’t need to be fearless to start. Just keep showing up until the poison becomes something luminous.
The Same Alchemy Happens on the Yoga Mat
This is what we are doing in yin, too. The body carries suppressed emotions throughout the body that have nowhere to go. In yin, we hold shapes along Meridian lines, and what surfaces is not always comfortable. An edge. Sometimes something without a name yet.
The practice isn’t about making it disappear but staying present long enough for the body to metabolize it. The peacock becomes luminous because of the poison, not in spite of it.
What Are You Storing That Might Be Ready to Move?
Clearing ground is not removing difficulty. It is trusting what difficulty, metabolized, becomes.
Whether on a karate mat, a yin mat, or in quiet daily work, the invitation is the same: stay, feel, let the body do what it knows.
What might be waiting to become luminous in you this April?
