Dharma is most simply defined as work, and as a Capricorn sun and stellium, I started early.
I presented rousing educational lectures to stuffed animals from the edge of my grandma’s fireplace and hosted weekly lemonade stands each summer. I got Safe Sitter Certified as soon as I turned 11 and acted as the owner-operator of a flip-flop decoration business with my younger neighbors and sister (aka my ops team) when I was 12. We made an 80% profit margin by selling water-balloon-wrapped Old Navy flip-flops purchased in bulk from their $1 annual flip-flop sale, iykyk.
Many years and jobs later, when I was in the midst of applying for Economics PhD programs and finishing up my 200-hour yoga teacher training program in 2018, a friend recommended The Great Work of Your Life, as an attempt to throw a life raft into my chaos.
Though I didn’t read it at the time, luckily, through the yoga I was studying, I lived it.
I got into the WashU Economics PhD program, but instead of looking ahead at my academic coursework or my economics professors at WashU, I started looking for yoga studios and schools in St. Louis. I started planning out how I could do additional yoga training during the summers of my program, how I could teach yoga during my program, and I even fantasized about dropping out of my PhD program to teach yoga instead.
Remember Krishna’s teaching: We cannot be anyone we want to be. We can only authentically be who we are. If you bring forth what is within you, it will save you. If you do not, it will destroy you.
Stephen Cope, The Great Work of Your Life
I had been raised for years to follow the advice of my father – someone who worked at the same company for his entire career and who instilled both a scarcity mindset and a harsh delineation of what constituted a “real” job versus a “fake” one. I wanted to fulfill the dream my papa Murray asked of me to get a PhD in Economics just a few months prior to his death. I was also headstrong, and it was hard for me to turn around on any decision once I had made it.
But I had close confidants in my sister and roommate Griffin who called me back into my real feelings. Also, luckily, I was practicing yoga for many hours per day. I wasn’t just practicing asana, but was deep in learning about pranayama (breathwork), meditation, and all the yoga philosophy, including the Bhagavad Gita’s philosophy on dharma. I believe this nearly-constant barrage of practice is what helped me to realize that the PhD was not my dream, nor my dharma.
Declining that admission at 24 was the first moment I started following my own life’s path.
The story doesn’t end there, and it’s not quite that simple. But it was an intention towards my truth, and thus the first step was made.
Commit Yourself Utterly
Next was step two:
Do it full out! Do it with every fiber of your being. Commit yourself utterly. – The Bhagavad Gita
In a real, grounded sense, in order to do “it” full out and commit myself utterly, I had to shift my entire life in the direction of this work, which took time.
I worked with my therapist to understand my financial security needs and priorities of freedom and dharma over mortgages and car payments. I committed to saving money so I could leave my finance job once I’d established a nest egg.
I met with my yoga teacher, Angela, who advised me to find a place to live that felt like home. She advised, so wisely, to find a place I could sit still in to establish a community and a yoga career. So I took a 5 month unpaid leave from EY to look for a place to live that I loved, and I found my way back to Alabama.
Then I started the work itself. I taught free community classes at Yoga Lab. I taught at the YMCA every Saturday morning. I co-hosted Tea & Yoga pop-ups with Cierra and Cha House (and we all know that turned out well!). I subbed for yoga, stretch, and group exercise classes of all varieties. All while working a full-time job.
I learned how to be ruthless with boundaries. I taught every yoga class I could outside of my work time frames. I had to put down people-pleasing my bosses and set aside going above and beyond for work that wasn’t my dharma, in order to maintain my energy for what was important to me. This was one of the hardest steps.
Then, in January 2025, I quit finance, for the last time. And did it “full out.”
The Emotional Path and the Practice
These steps are practical, earthly. But there was a depth of emotional practice that accompanied me along this practical journey. Every time I shook up my body and breath through yoga or shook up my mind with morning pages, I stayed still afterwards to listen to my inner voice. Then I took that listening and created small action. Rinse, repeat. Gradually, changes occurred. Gradually, I built more trust in my inner self and took more steps towards my calling.
How do you connect with your inner voice? It could be in yoga and meditation practice, but it doesn’t have to be. Some of my favorite ways to connect with myself are ecstatic dance, jamming with friends, and going to outdoor concerts and looking wistfully up at the sky.
Then, how do you give that inner voice teeth? It’s all well and good to connect with your inner voice, but how do you ensure it’s heard and understood? For me, this looks like taking small steps towards the ideas that pop up from this inner voice. If my inner voice tells me to create a new sweeping community project (my inner voice doesn’t really think small), I decide to take, in the next week (to not lose its momentum), that next, smallest step.
This is creativity in motion, and it comes back to hold you.
Recommitment and Letting Go of the Fruits
This year, The Great Work of Your Life came back across my desk, and I’m so grateful it did. I believe it came to me during the most perfect time: while I’m grappling with step 3.
Let go of the fruits. Relinquish the fruits of your actions. Success and failure in the eyes of the world are not your concern. “It is better to fail at your own dharma than to succeed at the dharma of someone else.”
Stephen Cope, The Great Work of Your Life
I had found my dharma, but I kept getting led astray. I was getting caught up in the fruits. Not by getting caught up in success or failure within yoga, but by getting caught in the other, exciting endeavors yoga brought onto my path.
These creative sparks weren’t all bad, and helped me to expand my definition of dharma. It isn’t just a job title of “yoga teacher” I’m after. I’m following the “peculiar and idiosyncratic qualities” of my truest self. I’m learning how to own my voice in all aspects.
But at Kripalu this summer, spending 10 days steeped in yoga, pranayama, dharma, and this book, it was really clear. At my 500-hour graduation, sharing this story from when I was 24, held by the warm wishes and deep breaths of my co-graduates, it was really clear.
Coming Home
Coming back home to Birmingham after the weeks of simply luxuriating in yoga, I felt overwhelmed by all my responsibilities, roles, and commitments. This is, so deeply, and so truly, the work: staying true to my dharma, choosing to align to my heart, to bring forth my imagination of what I believe the world could be. In every moment.
Turn it over to God. All true vocation arises in the stream of love that flows between the individual soul and the divine soul.
The Bhagavad Gita
At 32, I’m grateful to know who I am and how to pursue my dharma. Not perfectly. Not without doubt, which Arjuna understands, but with a commitment, not only made with trust, but with love. Through this stream of love, my dharma is simply inevitable.
We work first because we have to work. Then because we want to work. Then because we love to work. Then the work simply does us. Difficult at the beginning. Inevitable at the end.
Stephen Cope, The Great Work of Your Life
