Kripalu Yoga at Home: Breath and Compassion Practice

A cat's collar bell jingles somewhere off-camera, a neighbor's dog barks through the wall, and a yoga teacher settles cross-legged on her mat to say she has decided not to play any music for this one. It is March 2020, and COVID-19 has just pulled yoga classes off studio floors and into living rooms. Julie Ela Grace, who teaches a style she calls Kripalu yoga, has opened the first of her "Yoga at Home" sessions with a plain, unhurried invitation: sit tall, breathe, and practice with compassion. What follows, across a little more than seventy minutes, is centering breath, shoulder rolls, seated spinal lifts, slow work for the belly and back, and a steady refrain that the practice belongs to whoever is doing it, not to an image of how a body should look. It is a compact lesson in how a teacher who came to yoga through illness understands breath, gratitude and compassion as the substance of practice, and it holds up well for anyone who never presses play.

How did yoga become part of a teacher's life during cancer treatment?

Grace tells the story of her beginning early in the session, and it shapes everything else she teaches. At 19 she had thyroid cancer. She started practicing yoga on a DVD during her treatments, kept going after the summer ended, and found that it became a real part of her life, especially through her twenties.

"I started my yoga practice in a place where I needed healing and yoga brought me so much more than help and physically healing my body it brought me to a place of mental healing emotional healing as well." (Julie Ela Grace, first online session, March 2020, approx. 2:00–3:05)

That distinction between physical healing and the mental and emotional kind matters. Much of modern yoga marketing treats the practice as a body-shaping tool. Grace's account begins somewhere else: with a body that was being treated, and a practice that offered something beyond the physical outcome of the moment. Her teaching keeps returning to that starting point.

What does "union" mean when yoga is about yoking?

Grace points to the word's root, which she gives as "to yoke," and draws a clear meaning from it: "Yoga is about union." In her framing, the practice is about joining the mind, the body and the spirit rather than treating the body as a separate project. The word is doing real work in her teaching. When she asks students to notice their breath, or to draw their attention inward, she is asking them to bring those parts of themselves into the same room.

This is also why she is wary of splitting practice into a physical task and a mental one. In her view, mind-body work is continuous. The breath is the place where that continuity is easiest to notice, which is why so much of this session is spent there before any movement begins.

Why does compassion matter more than getting the pose right?

The most repeated idea in the session is that students should not impose "shoulds" on themselves. Grace names the trap directly: the habit of telling yourself how things should be, how you should be, how you should look, or how someone else should be. Her counter is simple and demanding. If you allow the body to be whatever it is that day, she says, that acceptance can produce real results. She adds, "that can be hard, but that's why it's a practice."

She also builds in permission for limits. Because she cannot see her students through the screen, she repeatedly asks them to listen to their bodies, to take breaks when needed, to honor any injury or illness, and to do only what they can. Her wording is a little looser than a formal rule, but the intent is clear: what you can do is the point, and it is worth being grateful for.

How does practice actually change the nervous system?

Grace's best explanation comes from ordinary human development. A baby does not simply climb out of a crib one day and walk. It spends months learning to move, building neural connections as it does so. Yoga, she argues, works the same way. "We are creating mind-body connections," she says, and the same logic applies to mental practice: "when you start to practice gratitude you get better at gratitude."

This is a useful way to think about any repeated practice. Nothing in the session promises instant transformation. What she describes is accumulation, a skill that deepens because it is revisited. Her closing invitation makes the same point, asking students to practice gratitude for what they can do, and to keep doing so "now and always."

What happens in a session like this one, step by step?

The structure is deliberately basic. She begins with centering and breathing, moves into warm-ups, then core work for the abdomen and back, and sees where the class goes. Her cues are specific enough to follow, even on a small screen:

• Seated posture (around 1:00–2:00): Sit however is comfortable, cross-legged or on a cushion, block or bolster. Ground down through the sit bones and lift through the spine. Hands can rest down for grounding or up for receiving, and she asks students to notice which feels right.
• Shoulder rolls: Inhale to roll the shoulders up, exhale to wind them down and back, then relax them and repeat.
• Breath cycle: A deep inhale through the nose, then a sigh or blow out of the mouth, repeated several times to release stress and tension.
• Natural breath and attention (around 12:50): Let the natural breath take over, notice where it lands in the body, whether high in the chest or lower in the belly.
• Spinal waves and hip circles: Inhale to lift, exhale to round, then move through larger circles of the legs and hips, which she describes as engaging the hips and the obliques together.

Her grounding line during the breath work is among the most quotable in the session. She tells students that "now is now," that "the past is the past, the future is the future," and that they are here in this moment. That is not a slogan so much as an instruction: bring the attention back to the breath when the mind wanders into worry, and begin again.

Where do the pandemic and the "silver linings" fit in?

Grace does not treat the pandemic as an interruption to her teaching. She frames it as a chance for slowing down and for meeting people. Early in the class she argues that there are always silver linings, and offers an example from history: she says that without the two World Wars, the world would not have had antibiotics, or as much of the triage surgery now in use. Her point is less a historical claim than an attitude toward difficulty. The moment can be used.

She also frames the moment as connection. Students are meeting "virtually," she says, but "we're all connected not just technologically but we're all connected." She promises to share playlists and asks viewers to share their own knowledge and skills in return. The message is that a home practice can still be a shared one.

What should a beginner take away from this session?

Grace is careful about safety, and her framing is worth keeping. Props such as bolsters, blocks and straps are optional, and she offers options without them. For sensitive backs, she gives alternatives and asks students to relax when needed. Her video description also makes clear that the guidance is not a replacement for medical advice: check with a doctor or health care professional before beginning any yoga practice, and seek medical advice if you feel unwell or are unsure about any part of the practice.

The most useful takeaway may be her simplest one. Let the practice be what it is. Breathe, notice, adjust, and return.

Where to go from here

If you want the full experience, watch the complete session, paying attention to the breath work early on and the back-sensitivity options near the end (around 1:00:37). Her closing, around 1:08, is a short meditation that ends with a wish for well-being, which makes a good place to pause. From there, Grace has pointed viewers to her website, www.sanctuarygrace.com, for class details, and to her free meditations on Insight Timer. Start small: a few minutes of centering breath, a single shoulder roll, one honest pause to notice where your breath lands. Then return tomorrow and do it again. That repetition, she suggests, is how the practice builds itself.