Yin yogis sometimes repeat the cliché,’ “the issues are in the tissues.” Yoga reveals that this is not empty talk, and in “The Body That Remembers,” a father, a son, a chainsaw, and a yoga mat come forth in an essay about pain, inheritance, return, and the body’s refusal to forget.
In life, adulthood announces itself through accumulating friction that in time becomes iron in the joints, age in the jaw, and the heavy, yet bearable weight of life and gravity. Fourteen years ago, that friction had me down. I came to yoga to mend a troubling back. Instead, I entered a covenant with yoga’s quiet yoke, a chamber of reckoning. Gravity became my hidden teacher, and through yoga’s steady revelation of self, and then again through fatherhood, I learned a difficult truth: I cannot change the weather of history or force any unbinding.
It was in Upper Michigan, late in the summer, when I met my son. When I arrived, he was covered in dust and wood chips and cutting logs with his big Husqvarna chainsaw. He’s strong, fit, in his 30s. He gave me a twisted smile before pulling the cord and bringing the saw back to life. “Just another five cuts,” he said.
Living alone in a small wilderness cabin in the Great Lakes region, he’s fueled by testosterone and the deep woods. I arrive with an elder’s gravity, and the uneasy knowledge that time has shifted beneath my feet.
He laughs at my clothing and says, “Dad, you gotta get out in the woods and work that pain out of your shoulders.” He believes the cure for pain is hard work and that redemption is hammered out by exertion. I understand him. The body wants proof. The body demands attention and extracts honesty. The body can both create and heal the issues.
And when the body has called for attention long enough, and can wait no more, it might trend toward the great collapse. It’s what I call a reckoning, or what the mystics call the dark night of the soul. It arrives when the scaffolding that holds up the image of who you thought you were finally gives way and can no longer hold the structure. In fatherhood, the dark night is realizing you cannot protect your children from the weather of history or the issues in the tissues.
In the labor of adulthood, and through my sustained yoga practice, I’ve come to understand that life and resilience are formed by tapas and then surrender, not the other way around. Yoga names tapas not as punishment, but as a heat that refines, a pressure that reveals, a burn that carries what is false up and out of the flesh. Yoga can lead us there, to surrender, where we come to know this fact.
I am convinced that the deeper lessons live in the body. Yin yogis say these reside in the fascia, a web of connective tissue in three layers that handles numerous bodily functions. It’s everywhere. Modern attention to pain is increasingly turning to facia as a key in therapy. When we feel tightness in our hips and shoulders, and in places where breath hesitates and memory waits, our story is there in the tissues, and yoga puts the yogi smack dab in it.
It is not a metaphor to say yoga is the door that opens truth. And truth further opens space, breath, and courage. Truth emboldens me to say that my son carries gravity and grief in his chest like a pirate hiding his gold. I carry it in my hips like an unfinished apology or love letter. We share 50 percent of the same DNA, and some of the same pressures, but we translate it differently. He tries to outwork it. I try to get through tapas, to surrender, and then listen to it.
There is much I have redeemed through yoga, but some tensions remain. They accompany me forward into practice. But on the mat, I don’t argue with others and try to stop arguing with myself. Somewhere in the middle of that, redemption starts taking hold through breath, sweat, gravity, and the truth force arising from my tissues.
I didn’t start yoga for enlightenment, but because my back failed and pain cornered me into humility. The entry point was need. The fix was mechanical, and its goal was straightforward. That is how it begins for many, but the fix is never only mechanical.
Within weeks, submerged in heat, kneeling in sweat that felt less like exertion and more like confession, a hot room in Hawaii became a chamber of reckonings. A sign on the wall read like prophecy: “First it will become harder. Then it will become easier. Then it will get different. Then way different.” Was it about yoga or about life?
Yoga, Fatherhood, and the Long Work of Surrender
My emotions surfaced from hiding within to consciousness and memory. It was not just injury, but inheritance. It wasn’t all sorrowful, but some of it was, like alcohol abuse, distance from my children, and the long arc of avoidance disguised as productivity. The midnight hour arrived without asking permission. It came when tapas burned up the oxygen powering illusion and changing bound tissues into unbound tissues.
This unbinding moved in circles that went out and then boomeranged back for months. The circles of gravity were a steady descent to deeper levels of awareness.At the time I was reading B.K.S. Iyengar’s seminal book, Light on Life. He wrote, “Self-cultivation through asana is the broad gateway leading to the inner enclosures we need to explore.” I read this and knew it was my curriculum.
Adulthood means one has the capacity to remain relational when under pressure. It is the yogi’s refusal to outsource conscience – and to stay with themselves when under pressure – that becomes their strength. It is the discipline of staying critical without becoming cruel. Yoga taught me this slowly, one posture at a time; in time, every posture became a way in and out of both falsehoods and truths.
In time, yoga became communal. Not just something I did alone, but something I am with others on the mat, or in conversations held at the edge of fatigue and injury, and in my motorcycling communities where I taught yoga skills to bikers. The balance of yoga became longevity for bikers, and presence in yoga became survival at speed. Yoga was no longer a retreat from danger. It was training to meet danger with survival skills.
Yoga continues in me today as attention practiced in tapas where
every rise returns me to breath
every asana bends me into a necessary discomfort
every collapse teaches me the difference between surrender and disappearance
Every session opens with lessons on how to fall and how to rise, how to be firm yet not rigid.
There is no conquest in yoga, no trophy lifted up in great arenas, no enemy pinned beneath the knee. Only the slow work of returning with trust and without expectation.
A deeper hope belongs to those willing to come back again and again. To sit in the heat. To tell the truth. To feel what we would rather outrun. Redemption is not escapist and does not lift us out of the world, but lowers us closer to collapse, to honesty, to breath, to relationship, and into the unfinished labor of love.
The body always remembers.
Life always presses.
Breath always returns.
Sweat always returns.
Conversation always returns.
Relationships always return.
And in these many returns, the fixes are carried forward by repetition and rhythm, not by a man who has finished anything, but by one who has learned how to keep beginning.
My practice is unfinished, but the breath keeps counting one return at a time, and the steady learning from these movements takes me back to fatherhood, into silence. I cannot force any posture in others or myself, but by following breath by breath, I endure and offer my son and my community a twisted smile of deep knowing, of deeper love.
Sharing is caring… #yogainspirationals, number 106, published by Om Yoga Magazine January, 2026.
Gregory A. Ormson is a writer and long-term yoga practitioner exploring breath, embodiment, memory, and the integration of mind, body, and spirit.
GREGORY ORMSON'S Notes, Articles, Blogs, Vlogs Gregory Ormson writes from the ecotone, the vibrant intersections of landscape, spirituality, and physical presence. His essays and poems have appeared in literary journals, anthologies, and print magazines. Author of *Yoga Song* and other works, Ormson blends lyrical observation with grounded reflection drawn from his Midwestern roots and global travels. He lives in Arizona and Wisconsin, seeking stillness where stories emerge like bears. 
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