Yoga Taught Me to Feel Safe Alone. Jiu Jitsu Taught Me to Feel Safe With Others.

When my future husband told me jiu jitsu was just like yoga, I figured he really wanted to get laid.

Turns out he was right. About the yoga.

He said the line. I thought it was a line.

We had just started dating. I invited him over for tea, and he said, “You know, jiu jitsu is a lot like yoga.”

I was a yoga purist, having come up through Iyengar and Ashtanga. I gave him a wide-eyed look. This guy really wants to get into my pants if he’s laying down a line like that.

I remained unconvinced about the jiu jitsu. His pretty blue eyes were another matter. He was leaving for a geology gig in South America, and I told him he could write to me.

Three years and two babies later, I started training.

Nine years of yoga under my white belt

I thought I would have this locked and loaded. Nine years of yoga under my white belt. No worries, right?

What I found was that I was deeply uncomfortable being present.

Come again? I was a meditator and a yogi. Presence was my default, wasn’t it?

Not when someone was standing in front of me, grabbing my wrist.

My presence evaporated as soon as I met resistance. My calm? Chucked out the proverbial window.

In my yoga practice, I could be alone on a mat, telling myself how present and aware and in tune I was while compiling a shopping list between down dog and plank. Jiu jitsu brought another person into that conversation. Another body, another nervous system, someone moving in ways I couldn’t dictate.

I had to learn how to stay with myself while being in contact with them.

That changed everything.

The mat never lies

Culturally, yoga and jiu jitsu can look like opposites. One teaches you to be mindful; the other teaches you to fight. That was certainly my perception before I put a gi on.

I thought jiu jitsu was full of hypermasculine bro-dudes throwing their weight around. And yes, those people exist. So do yoga practitioners who can pretzel their bodies while remaining spectacularly rigid in their thinking. Neither practice makes you wise simply because you show up.

But jiu jitsu helped me heal in ways my yoga practice hadn’t reached. Staying present with another person under pressure asked something new of me. I could feel exactly where I braced, where I resisted, and where I lost contact with myself.

After three decades as a yoga therapist and earning my fifth-degree black belt, I see how both practices have helped me recreate safety within myself. Yoga gave me somewhere to begin. Jiu jitsu asked whether I could find that steadiness when the circumstances changed.

The mat never lies. It shows you what needs practice.

The skill underneath both

The connection became clearer when I started paying attention to what both practices asked of me: notice what is happening in your body, then respond.

That sounds simple until you have to do it.

In yoga, it might mean recognizing that you are forcing a pose because you like being the person who can do it. In jiu jitsu, it might mean noticing pressure early enough to adjust, or tapping instead of trying to prove you can endure more.

The skill is discernment. Learning to distinguish sensation, interpretation, and what the situation actually requires of you.

Sometimes your body asks for a change. Sometimes you need to stop. Sometimes you have room to stay and explore. Learning the difference takes practice, and a willingness to be honest about what you notice.

I could perform a yoga pose while ignoring myself. I could also muscle through a jiu jitsu technique while missing what my partner was communicating. Looking competent wasn’t the same as paying attention.

Both practices taught me that. Contact with another person made it much harder to overlook.

What I was actually after

People come to these practices for all kinds of reasons: strength, stress relief, self-defence, healing. Underneath my own reasons was a desire for connection.

I wanted to feel at home in my body and be able to meet other people from there.

That gets complicated when you have learned to override yourself. Where do you end and someone else begins? What happens to your own needs when another person wants something? Can you feel your hesitation before you explain it away?

These questions follow us well beyond the mat.

Yoga was the first place I felt safe in my body. Jiu jitsu expanded that sense of safety to include another person. Together, they helped me explore nervous system coherence in the middle of an interaction, where I needed it most.

Learning to stay present under pressure

In yoga, I could explore my capacity by staying in a challenging pose, noticing my breath, and deciding whether to continue or adjust. Moving through a familiar sequence gave me opportunities to notice when effort became strain.

In jiu jitsu, pressure arrived through another person. Someone was shifting my balance, applying leverage, or changing the distance between us. I had to include them in my awareness while keeping contact with myself.

Every new partner changed the experience. Different size, different pace, different energy. What worked with one person might need adjusting with the next.

If you have tried partner yoga, you may recognize that shift. Suddenly your practice includes someone else’s timing, weight, and response. You have to listen differently.

With a trustworthy training partner, that contact gave me a place to practise staying present, communicating limits, and discovering that those limits could be respected. I could stop. I could begin again. I could learn without surrendering my say in what happened to me.

That was a kind of safety I needed to experience, repeatedly, before I could believe it.

Be discerning in both

I co-founded Sadohana in 1997 and train in Japanese and Brazilian jiu jitsu. I don’t compete, and our dojo’s focus is self-defence and personal protection.

That context matters. Not all yoga studios are the same. Neither are all dojos or jiu jitsu clubs. The teacher, the culture, and the people you practise with shape what you learn about yourself and what you come to accept.

Pay attention to how a room responds when someone says no. Can you ask questions? Can you decline a partner or modify a practice? Is stopping respected?

Learning to be comfortable in the suck has been part of my training. So has learning when to stop. Enduring something doesn’t automatically make it useful.

I continue to practise both. Yoga keeps my body supple. Jiu jitsu keeps my mind sharp. Each still finds something for me to work on.

Thirty years, two rooms, one lesson

Yoga taught me I could feel safe alone. Jiu jitsu taught me I could feel safe with someone else’s hands on me—and still have a say in what happened next.

Together, they changed how I move through the world.

Underneath both sits the question I ended up writing a whole book about: when your body sends a signal, is that your trauma talking, or your intuition?

The answer isn’t always obvious. I have learned to pay attention to what I feel, what is happening around me, and the patterns that emerge over time. I’m still practising.

You don’t need a black belt to begin. You need somewhere you can listen to yourself and have that listening respected.

For me, it started on one mat. Then I found the other.

That question—trauma or intuition—is the one Gut Punch was written to explore.