Some women find this show because they're tired of doubting themselves, feeling disconnected and are looking for answers.
Some find it because they practice yoga (or want to!) and sense it has so much more to offer than what they've been given.
Some find it because they heard something about yoga philosophy and spirituality and want to know more.
All of them are welcome here.
I'm Keri Marino — Southern girl, feminist, slightly feral mama of three, chef wife and yoga therapist of 17 years.
Yoga saved my life. I mean that literally. And I have spent every year since figuring out how to share what it actually holds with women who are ready to receive it.
This is the podcast version of the conversations I have been having for 17 years — honest, unapologetic, sometimes funny and always going somewhere real.
I profoundly f*cking care that you feel whole, know you are enough and feel deeply resourced.
These are the things you need to hear — and didn't know you needed.
Let's go, love. 💜
New episodes several times per month.
Find more at KeriMarino.com, YouTube at The Nourished Woman or Instagram @The_Nourished_Woman.
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You like yoga. You know it helps. And you cannot seem to make it stick. And honestly — alot of people feel this way. Even yoga teachers and yoga therapists sometimes. 😂
But here's what I want you to know — your on-again off-again relationship with yoga is costing you something.
Not because you're undisciplined. Because you haven't had the right structure or the right understanding of what actually makes a practice last.
In this episode, yoga therapist and yoga teacher Keri Marino gets into the mindset shifts that will help you build a steady long-lasting daily yoga practice — the specific reasons most women lose the thread, the benefits waiting on the other side of consistency and what the yogic tradition actually says about devoted daily practice that nobody ever taught you.
Next steps ⬇️
Grab a free yoga practice to Come Home to Your Body
-> https://kerimarino.eo.page/comehome
Start a consistent daily yoga practice in Daily Devotion - 21 days of 10 minute yoga practices plus email support to keep you on track
Help spread the word. If this episode resonated, share it with a friend and leave a review on Apple Podcasts.
Connect with Keri or learn more about her offerings at www.KeriMarino.com and on instagram @the_nourished_woman
A gentle note: The Nourished Woman Podcast is educational and not a substitute for medical or mental health care. Please listen to your body and consult your provider when needed.
You're Not Alone
What I've Discovered After Doing this Work for 17 years
The Truth You need to Hear about Daily Practice and Yoga as a Practice
The Mindset Shifts that Opens the Door for Consistent Practice
How Much Time You Really Need to Practice in a Way that Counts
What My Students have Taught Me About This
The Support that Will Set You Up for Success
SPEAKER_00
Having an on-again, off-again relationship with yoga
is pretty standard. And I want you to understand that right from the start because it's not a fault of yours. It's not unusual for people, for women to have different seasons when you're practicing yoga more regularly and when you've kind of fallen off of a bandwagon. And what I want you to understand is that a lot of that has to do with the class framework of I go take a yoga class or I do a video that is a certain amount of time and it is accomplishing these specific things for me. And so part of that is how you've been taught to actually think about a yoga practice. And then another part of that is what you've not been taught about what yoga actually is and how to best weave it into your life. Most yoga teachers out there are giving you wonderful opportunities to practice, but they're not actually teaching you how to create a regular yoga practice that is going to meet you in any season of life, no matter what you're going through, and help give you the structure to actually do it on a consistent basis. And so for a little bit of a backstory,
I have been practicing yoga for 20 years. I have been steadfast in that yoga practice because frankly, I've been through enough shit in my life to realize that yoga is immensely healing and absolutely essential for my life. So I'm not one of those people who started and stopped my yoga practice. It's just simply been consistent and it's been multi-dimensional the entire time. I started yoga with chanting and meditation. I didn't even start with physical yoga. That was my introduction to it. And so I made the mistake as a yoga teacher and then yoga therapist in thinking that if I told my students what to practice and I gave them the how to practice, that they could then do the work. And so what I've learned, because I've been doing, I've been running a membership program behind the scenes for two years now. It's called the Nourished Women's Sanctuary. For those of you that have been members, the membership's going to stay open. But I'm no longer giving women public access to that. You can no longer just join the membership because what I have learned is that without learning how to practice consistently, without creating the structures and systems in your life to stay consistent in your practice, without reframing the yoga class, yoga video serves this one purpose in my life thinking, women just aren't able to do it. I've seen so many women who want to practice consistently join my membership and then feel like they can't. And that's in spite of me sending out monthly calendars that tell them exactly what practices to do, that tell you, if you're one of my members, exactly what to do. We just need a lot more help actually building a relationship with yoga that is not on again, off again, that is steady and stable and consistent. And so I want to talk to you a little bit about what actually the big difference makers are. And if you're a yoga teacher or a yoga therapist and you're watching this video and you're wanting to help your students and your clients actually be able to apply the things that you're teaching them, because let's be honest, the yoga only works if you
do the yoga. Like we have to actually engage in the philosophy and the practice in a regular and ongoing way. If you look into the lineage of yoga, it was not meant to be like a seasonal work. It was meant to be stuff that we did for a lifetime and we continue to return to. And so what I want to talk to you about is that yoga is actually so much bigger than you probably have any comprehension or understanding around. There are many different systems of yoga. For example, Raja Yoga or Hata Yoga is like the eight-limbed path of yoga. It's about embodiment work, but it's also about philosophy, breath work, meditation, inner awareness. There's so many different aspects just under the helm of Raja Yoga. And what most of you are seeing whenever you're exploring yoga is like the physical asana aspect of the practice. So asana means embodiment, it's the poses, it's the relationship that you have with your body. And so if you're thinking that yoga practice means asana practice, and what happens when you're busy and you don't have time, or what happens when your body changes, or you're going through some kind of health things that change how you feel, safe practicing, or you know, your practice could even exacerbate different things going on with your body. I have literally sat in a room at a yoga teacher training where a woman was just feeling deep emotional experiences about how her body is different now and how she could no longer practice the form of physical yoga that she had loved and felt held by for so long. And so, what I'm trying to say here is that we've got to get out of the thinking that yoga is just physical and it involves your body being able enough, capable enough, in the position to do the physical practice that you have identified that it means. Because yoga is not just asana. Saying that yoga is only like the physical movement part of the equation is kind of like saying that, I don't know, cheese is the only kind of food in the entire world. You're like, no ma'am, there are salads, there are vegetables, there are sweet potatoes, there are like there's everything else out there. And so I want you to be thinking of yoga as like much broader because there's all these different systems of yoga. You've probably been exposed to some of Raja yoga, but maybe not bhakti or karma or nana or tantra. There's all these different systems, y'all. And and the way that yoga was meant to be practiced was in this multidimensional way that incorporated all these different aspects of lifestyle and philosophy and science and mystical tools that you could reach and grab. And so here in the Western world, we've frankly not been viewing yoga through its truest lens of what it actually is. And so, step one to ending this on-again,
off-again yoga practice is to actually see yoga for what it is and also what it can actually do for you, because it can do so many different things for you. How much time do you have? I could go all day and just talk to you about the benefits of your yoga practice. But one that I want to highlight is in terms of what yoga does, they're helping a woman to feel more free, less bound up, more. I hear from women all the time, I want to feel more carefree. I want to enjoy my life more. And yoga can be instrumental in that because yoga is helping us develop our witness consciousness. We are able to observe the thoughts in our mind and understand that we're not those thoughts. We are the witness of the thoughts. We can observe different things going on in relationship and with our body without being so like tangled up and identified with it that we're stuck in our suffering. And so yoga practice can help us to have that witness consciousness. It can also help us to develop a heightened level of intimacy with ourselves. And I don't necessarily mean sensual intimacy or sexual intimacy, although by all means enjoy yourself. I mean the kind of intimacy where you know yourself deeply. Like, for example, yoga practitioners that are devoted yoga practitioners can have a higher kinesthetic intelligence. Like we can be more in tune with our bodies, we can feel the sense of our bodies, we can know what's happening in our bodies, we have a greater understanding of our bodies. But that intimacy isn't just about your physical relationship with yourself. It's about your emotional relationship with yourself, your spiritual relationship with yourself, your energetic relationship with yourself and the subtle body. You know yourself in a way that I kid you not, is the opposite of what trauma and hard things and difficult patterns in relationship does to us. I firmly believe that a very intentional, well-done yoga practice can be tremendously healing for you on so many different levels. And another piece of what yoga can do for you, you you may have noticed I've not at any point said like make you flexible, because hello, that's like not all there is, is it can really be a form of nervous system tending. So every time that you practice with yoga, with the philosophy, with the physical aspects, with the meditation, with the breath work, with the drishti, the perspective with which you're viewing the world and your relationship to your eyes, even in a literal sense, like you are doing nervous system medicine. And when you do this practice on a consistent, ongoing basis, and I don't mean for three hours a week, like it's cool if you have that kind of time. I'm a mom of three kids running a business. My youngest kid is three, my oldest kid is 11. I don't have hours a day to do yoga
practice. I frankly don't, like in terms of like rolling out my mat or doing meditation. I'm doing it in much smaller chunks. And also a lot of my yoga practice is not whatever happens on a yoga mat. It's how I'm looking at my life and how I'm weaving these tools and techniques and philosophy into my day-to-day experience. And so I want you to know the more often you practice, the more you can integrate yoga into your lived experience, those day-to-day moments of your life, the more you can access those benefits that will transform your life and make it better. So we've got to stop thinking about yoga in such a limited way. We've got to start broadening ourselves up to actually receive the benefits. And so many of you just don't even know how rich these benefits are. And I'm here to tell you that they are magnificent and they are healing and they are life-giving and life-changing, and they can do incredible things in your life. And I only listed a few. So just know, like, boom, boom, boom, there's so much there for you to soak in and benefit. And another thing about yoga, about ending this like on-again, off again relationship with yoga, is about actually having the structure that helps you to practice routinely in place. So we've got to stop believing that you by yourself can do that. And I shared with you earlier that I've realized that my students need me to create that structure
for them. They need me to show them how to practice and give them the exact frameworks and structure to make it possible. Because we just don't genuinely, especially as women, I know men struggle with this too, and non-binary people, everybody on everywhere of the gender spectrum can struggle with taking moments
of introspection and self-care and doing practices that are multidimensional healing on a daily basis without the structure in place, without not just like the resources to practice, because let's be honest, there are like millions of free yoga practices out there. But if millions of free yoga practices were gonna get you to practice consistently, it would have already friggin' worked, right? So we've got to stop thinking as an individual. I alone have everything it takes to have the commitment, to have the steadfastness, to show up again and again no matter what, and that I can do it all on my own. No, you need support. This is why we have yoga teachers that we build relationships, this is why we have yoga therapists that we work with, this is why we have personal trainers, this is why we have doctors and physicians, this is why we have people to help us do the damn work, right? So stop thinking you can do it on your own and start looking for people who are willing to raise their hand and say, like, I gotcha, girl, I have made the how. I have I'm gonna help you with the win. I'm gonna hold you accountable, I am gonna cheerlead for you, I'm gonna help you stay motivated and excited about this stuff. I am gonna help you build a yoga practice that you can sustain in the context of a real practical life and that you can keep returning to, and that you can get something incredibly healing and therapeutic and frankly almost magical out of because I don't know anything quite like yoga in terms of what it can do for you. And so if this is speaking to you and you're like, okay, I am there. I really want to be practicing yoga on a daily basis in a way that works for me. I want to practice in small bite-sized chunks rather than just relying on long chunks of practice here or there. I want a daily relationship with yoga that sustains me. But I also know I need that person who's gonna help me accomplish that, who's gonna cheerlead for me, who's gonna be there offering me tools and resources that work for me. Then I made a program called Daily Devotion. It is a 21-day, 10-minute-a-day instant access course that you can start with today. And what's unique about daily devotion isn't just that it's 21 days of structured support and that you get emails from me along the way to keep you on track and keep you going. But it's also not just asana. It is philosophy, it is swadhyaya, the practice of inner knowing and inner awareness. It is pranayama techniques, which are breath and energy medicine. It incorporates restorative yoga, which is restful and very good for the parasympathetic nervous system. You're getting a wide range of yogic practice all in one umbrella and just 10 minutes a day. If that speaks to you, I'll put the link for daily devotion down in this video. And I want you to know that it's out there and that you can start anytime. And finally, as a takeaway from this video, I want you to ask yourself is yoga something that I feel intuitively offers me value? Is yoga something that is moving me forward in the direction that I want to go? And if the answer to that is yes, then take a moment and ask yourself what you're waiting for because that on and off again relationship with yoga is fine and normal, but it doesn't mean that it actually gets you where you want to go. And so if you honestly are ready for something that is going to help you move in the direction that you want to go and you believe in your heart and in your intuition that yoga is part of that, then what are you waiting for, girl? Let's get to it. Start practicing, whether it be with some yoga teacher that you know and love or a yoga therapist that you admire, whether it be me, what maybe I'm that person for you, just get to it because my goodness, the benefits are immense, and your yoga practice is very generously just waiting for you to get in there and enjoy it. Let me know if there's any particular aspects of this that made you feel seen, that made you feel excited about what yoga can do for you. I'd love to hear from you in the comments. Bye for now.
