Sidestepping Adversity

By Christina Alexa
Founder of Prema Shala & AYI Institute, RYS
Co-Founder of Enjoy the Journey Retreats, LLC *

“If there was only one horse in the barn, would you feed it?”

It was 1999. I was a new instructor in my first yoga studio in Manchester, NH, back when there were no other studios in the city that I knew of, maybe one other small one. I had been watching the clock before class, wondering whether any students would find their way up to the third floor of the McQuade Building on Elm Street. Three flights, no elevator, down a long hall, around a corner past two bathrooms, and through a door into a small office. Beyond that, two old French doors my fiancé had hung for me, opening into a large studio that had once been a church. The ceilings were high. There was a natural altar space at the far end, where my yoga altar now sat.

I was alone on the new carpeting in candlelight, the church windows looking back at me. Night was falling and the space felt beautiful, secure, sacred. Still, I was not sure anyone would come. Even then I knew better than to stand in the center of fear thoughts. I sat on my mat and closed my eyes. Engaged Ujjayi breath. Settled.

Then the voice. Unexpected, firm, ethereally loud.

“If there was only one horse in the barn, would you feed it?”

My heart swelled, because of course I would feed it. Not only would I feed it, I would nurture and love it, admire it, tell it how beautiful it was. One majestic horse is the entire world.

That question, from my guide, whoever that guide was, has informed my teaching and my practice for decades. The symbolism was not lost on me. Horse medicine represents freedom and personal power, tenacity, stamina, the courage to sprint unrestrained. Horse reminds us that true partnership comes through mutual respect rather than force, and that we must know when to invoke tenderness and when to invoke backbone. But horse also shows us what it looks like to take on too much, to use ourselves unduly, to absorb responsibility beyond what is ours to carry. How sad is it to see a beast of burden, unloved and neglected? How sad is it when we do this to ourselves?

Sometimes I am that majestic horse, fed and nurtured. Sometimes it is the one student on the mat who has answered the call of their own heart, the longing that brings them to a neutral, compassionate – sacred – space.

I remembered this recently, sitting in Prema Shala in Littleton, NH, here in September of 2026. Not my second studio, or my third. I have lost count of how many sacred containers I have stewarded over the years. Wherever I go, it seems, the container calls. Whether I am working full time as a custom cabinetmaker or as a Controller in manufacturing or hospitality, it doesn’t much matter. The need for a safe space in which to practice keeps dawning in my consciousness until I follow the prompting. Sometimes it is a sweat lodge. Sometimes a sacred circle, or a retreat. Often it is four walls and an altar, with a yoga mat at the front of the room.

I feel new to this town, though I have frequented it for four years. Opening a business is different from walking the sidewalks as a visitor. The reception is different. I am still something of a stranger here, getting to know a place on another level.

So it was that last week I caught myself worrying about small class sizes.

An old worry, it was reaching for an old conclusion. Something about whether this is working, whether I am. And then I remembered the horse in the barn.

Effortless Effort

The phrase I hear most often in my own mind, on and off the mat, is effortless effort. Yogi Amrit Desai introduced it to me, and to many others, years ago. When I first heard it I exhaled too fast through my nose, involuntarily. Effortless effort? It sounded like another yogic concept meaningful only to the already liberated. As someone who did not expect to find true freedom in this lifetime, I strived anyway. I opened my mind a bit, and a bit more, until effortless effort took up residence in my consciousness. Effortlessly, as it turns out.

Effortless effort is full presence, complete engagement of awareness without strain. We know it when we find it, that settling into acceptance and flow. We know the difference between a pose we are holding and a pose that is holding us.

The real question is what is happening when a pose is holding us. What is happening when I wonder whether I am all right, whether my classes are too small, whether this work means anything to anyone besides me?

What does it mean to meet adversity fully, without becoming it?

What I Mean by Sidestepping

Let’s be careful with that word. Sidestepping does not mean avoidance. I do not mean spiritual bypass, the bright side found so quickly that nothing is ever actually felt. I mean something closer to what a martial artist does: seeing the force coming, honoring that it is real, and declining to stand directly in its path and absorb it with the body.

Feel it fully. Know it. Notice which button it pressed, and why. Do the work it is asking for. And then refuse to move in, refuse to let it consume your power.

An Old Text, an Inner Battle

Years ago I wrote a reinterpretation of a passage from the Nag Hammadi library, the Gnostic texts found in Egypt in 1945. The passage comes from the Dialogue of the Savior, and on its face it is pure ancient drama, complete with brimstone frills and the cushion of hellfire. A time of dissolution. Powers of darkness. Governors descending. It was written for a world that understood suffering as something that arrived from outside and took hold.

But in the middle of that dark passage is a line I recognized immediately as true. Fear, it says, is the power.

Not the darkness. Fear itself is where the power lives. The text is specific about the mechanism: if you are afraid of what is coming, it will engulf you. The dread is the doorway. Fear has no hold until you hand it one.

Then comes the second half, equally stunning. Do not expect mercy. There is no negotiating with it, no appeal, no reasoning.

Strip away the cosmology and I recognize this completely. The inner adversary shows no mercy. It does not soften because we had a hard week. It arrives with the same certainty every time: here it is, the thing I always knew was true about me. Meet it with fear and it engulfs us. We spend days inside it.

Ahimsa Begins Inward

Ahimsa, the first yama, is usually translated as doing no harm. But beneath the idea of being kind lies a harder question: what is motivating the judgment in the first place?

Self-judgment is the first violence, and it is the one we practice most. It cannot consume us when it is faced from the warrior’s stance. So it is worth asking plainly: how much power does your self-judgment have? How much have you given it?

When we begin to study the repetitive patterns of thought that belt the beast inwardly, we start to learn how the adversary operates. Its movements. What invokes it. And eventually we can stand and face it head on, conserving power by sidestepping its force, capturing that energy and repurposing it into determination. Not determination to slay the self, but to slay the patterns of thought to which we have given our power for far too long.

When we disown our propensity to feed the inner saboteur, the grief spills over. The sacred container cannot contain the fed densities. The pain turns outward into projection, bickering, blame, conflict. War.

If there was only one horse in the barn, would you feed it?

The Crossing Place

The text describes a crossing place: fearful, impossibly deep, impossibly high. The instruction is not to conquer it, and not to flee it. The instruction is to pass it by, with a single mind.

That is the sidestep. Singleness of mind, and you move through.

Later in the same dialogue, one of the disciples says what we all say eventually: the powers are above us, so surely, they rule us. The answer turns it inside out. You will rule over them.

Power is never where we assume it is. It is inside us, not out in all the places where we have unconsciously handed it over, leaked it in fear and unworthiness. We know better than this. When we heal that tendency, we heal our lineage. We heal our line. We evolve.

The Warrior Who Harms No One

When the disciples ask how to make their work perfect, the answer is to be prepared in the face of everything. The blessed one is described as having neither killed nor been killed, and yet coming forth victorious.

The spiritual warrior is not someone who expects ease. She is someone who lives in readiness. The battle is real; it simply is not with another person. And because it is fought inward, no one else pays for it. Quite the opposite.

This is where inner work stops being self-absorption and becomes service. The person who has faced their own adversary stops handing it to everyone around them. They stop projecting it onto a partner, a coworker, a child. They become steadier, and that steadiness is felt by everyone in the room. By slaying the adversary internally, we become stronger, and by example, we protect the tribe.

You know this feeling. You have been near someone who has done this work, and near someone who has not. Your own nervous system can tell the difference within seconds.

The Energy Underneath

Here is a question for honest reflection. How much energy does it take to bludgeon yourself?

Recall an episode, recent or distant, when you showed yourself no mercy. When you judged yourself so harshly that it colored your whole day. Now recall watching someone else project that same harshness outward, in a bitter conversation or an outright fight. Consider how much energy was expended in each.

Sometimes the battle is overt, sometimes it is buried. Think of the rehearsing, the replaying, the quiet verdicts we deliver against ourselves at three in the morning when we cannot sleep. We tend to call that weakness, then blame ourselves for the blaming. It is not weakness. It is power, aimed backward.

The text makes a striking claim: whoever refuses to know the root of wickedness is no stranger to it.

Pause on that. Read it again, more slowly.

Whoever refuses to know the root of wickedness is no stranger to it.

Refuse to look and stay fused with it. Deny the shadow and the shadow grows.

Everything wants to be heard and understood. That is true of the people around us, and it is true of ourselves. Our wounds also want to be seen. Recognition is what loosens the grip, shifting energy from an unconscious drain into fortitude, refilling the cup, stoking manipura with enough fire to fuel the will. Personal will in partnership with divine will is the win (horse energy). We take the sword back and use it to cut away the old patterns, descended from undone work of our ancestors, the torch we carry. They carried it oh so far, they did so much work. This work, now, is ours.

And this matters, because the adversary is not an invader. It is not even a foe. It is a teacher. The inner adversary is the part of us that learned to strike first, to criticize us before anyone else could, as a form of protection. Slaying it is not killing off a piece of ourselves. It is taking the sword out of its hand.

What remains is energy. Pure, neutral, available. Alchemize it and what is born is determination, the kind of resolve that is unwavering and clean in its truth.

What Density Cannot Survive

There is one more ingredient in the alchemy of adversity, and it is the one thing that cannot be sidestepped. Without it, what we have battled is free to take hold again. This is the smudging once the floors are washed, the step that comes after the work and seals it.

Fight the adversary over and over and we will be fighting forever. Adversarial energy, being energy, does not tire. We do. But density cannot settle in a raised vibration; it has nothing to hold onto. The cleanest way to clear the last tendrils is not to keep swinging at them, it is to become a frequency they cannot thrive within.

This is not the bright side found too quickly. It is nourishment for the spirit, rather than attention paid to what would consume us. And you already know how to do it.

Breath. Chant. Speak gratitude out loud and feel it in your heart. Spend time in practice on the mat, time in nature, hands in the dirt, bare feet on the earth. Share company with people whose presence lifts and be the person who lifts others. Serve, which raises us faster than almost anything. Dwell in sacred silence, when silence is available.

None of these fight anything. They change the conditions. They amplify what is alive in us rather than what weighs us down, and when we rise, what was heavy finds it has nowhere to land.

This is why being positive for the sake of being positive so often fails. It denies what is underneath, still asking to be heard. It places a lid on something that desperately needs release. So be the warrior first. Face what is there, reclaim the power, then rise – the old pattern will lose its grip, not because you defeated it, but because it no longer resonates with the container of you.

Call the adversary fear, if you want a name for it. The heart knows love; the unbridled mind feeds fear. Drop into the heart, into the longing for self-care, the longing to feed the one beautiful horse in the barn who might be starving a little. The tender, brilliant, majestic horse who is you.

Reminding myself of this, as often as needed – as often as my buttons are pressed – creates an immediate shift. I come home to myself and sit in the center of my power in a place that is undisturbed.

Recently, Prema Shala shifted with me. A studio named for unconditional, unwavering love and compassion, it seemed to grow brighter as I settled back into myself. The fleeting inquiry about class size and meaning was just that, a flicker of thought, a recalibration of purpose.

The next class I taught had just a few students. I dropped gratefully into presence and got out of my own way. At the end of savasana, there were tears in the room, a release of old and new pain. Tenderness, process and deep respect. Liberation.

Perhaps because I had remembered to feed my own power, which is love, the container was made stronger. In not fearing our own depth, we are able to hold quiet space for one another, to treasure vulnerability as sacred.

Where the Path Begins

When one of the disciples asks what the beginning of the path is, the answer is startlingly simple: love and goodness. Had either existed among the powers, the text says, wickedness would never have arisen at all.

So the reclaimed energy has somewhere to go.

This is the work we do together, on the yoga mat, in sacred circle, in session, at retreat. We have the courage to stop pretending the crossing place is not fearful. We stop conceptualizing peace, and replace the inner worrier with the inner warrior. We sit in a circle of people who have each faced something, and experience how adversity loses its grip the moment it is spoken aloud and witnessed without judgment. We receive mirrors of our own goodness instead of mirrors of judgment.

So whatever is pressing on you this week, let it be real. Feel it fully. Ask what it is actually pointing to, and do that work. But do not linger there so long that the mind begins to feed the shadow with the fear it hungers for. Instead, with a single mind and a warrior’s heart, pass it by.

You are not required to live inside it.

And here is the rub. As you pass it by, open your warrior’s satchel and gather the energy. Claim it back, in recognition that this was always your own power, projected outward. Repurpose it into determination.

Feed the horse.

In love,
Christina

As we honor oursleves,
We honor one another,
and all of our ancestors
and relations,
And we give thanks.
Blessing.

 
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